Penguin taxes, the Whiskey Rebellion, and the end of Elon.
or how April Fool's Day went into overtime.
President Donald Trump put tariffs on the world on April 2nd and the Dow Jones, NASDAQ, and S&P 500 all tanked.
Badly. Roughly 8% of the market disappeared in 2 days.
Who’s paying for this…a lot of countries and territories.
Heard Island, which is an Australian territory near Antarctica, is facing a punitive tariff. Fortunately, no U.S. no company is doing business with the island’s fishing industry there. Mostly because it’s just penguins.
But that’s nothing. Donald Trump also put a tariff on an island in the Indian Ocean that produces nothing. It’s a joint U.S.-U.K navy and air base. Nothing is produced there and thus it amounts to a tax on the military and their families.
As comic as this all is, the tariffs and the data supporting it has come under scrutiny. Mostly because the data to support the tariffs is simply wrong1 and the tariff calculations are mathematically puzzling.2
By the way, Corporate Media (aka Legacy Media) has been reporting the expected negative GDP quarter (read recessionary) with the underreported add-on…before this first bad quarter of 2025 (Trump), there were 9 consecutive positive quarters preceding that under President Biden.
Put another way, from October 2022 to December 2024 things were going well but it made sense to report Trumps assertions about a bad economy and skipped the fact Trump made the COVID global recession far worse in the U.S., that Trump’s business record was not successful, and that his business model was deemed to be a $464 million fraud.3
Meanwhile the Senate pushed backed on on Trump’s double secret probation tariffs on Canada. Trump was using a thin argument that Canada is a major source of fentanyl which opened the opportunity for the Democrats.
In a vote forced by Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA), Trump’s lock on the Senate’s GOP cause sprung two expected leaks, Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Senator Susan Collins (R-ME), and two predictable anti-screw Canada votes, Senator Rand Paul (R) and Mitch McConnell (R) of Kentucky.
One of the things I learned living in Minnesota was that Canadian deplored the fact that a “26-er” of Canadian Whisky in the U.S. was cheaper than in the Great White North. That said, outside of the home product, Canadian liquor stores import a lot of booze from the U.S. of which the bourbon industry, which comes Kentucky.
Kentucky needs Canada. It cannot afford Trump’s tariffs.
Had Trump been pragmatic (and as a proud “chaos guy”, Trump isn’t), he would have carved out some economic protections for the states that border Canada (Alaska, Washington, Idaho, North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine) or he could have counted, realized that he was putting 10 Republican Senators in a huge bind politically, and just walked this idiocy back.
So much for realism.
Of course, the person he should have been listening to is the most libertarian member of the Senate GOP caucus, Rand Raul. Rand Paul is reminding his fellow Nihilists of the electoral damage that will come with GOP led tariffs.
On April Fool’s Day, Elon Musk’s effort to buy a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court failed miserably.
While it won’t end Elon’s White House job immediately; given the continuous outcry, fall-out, and “here’s what blew up toady” news regarding what the totally illegal Department of Government Efficiency is going, Musk’s demise is within sight.
https://www.facebook.com/reel/688881100442563
From BBC radio https://www.facebook.com/reel/676115468699053
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_business_fraud_lawsuit_against_the_Trump_Organization