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- There is nothing they won't do in exchange for a tax cut
There is nothing they won't do in exchange for a tax cut
Kay W.
May 16, 2025
Most of media are singing happy days are here again now that Trump has mitigated some of the damage that Trump caused, but the WSJ has dark clouds on the economic horizon:
President Trump’s trade war has yet to make a real dent in the American economy. That is about to change.
On Thursday, the retail giant Walmart said that the cost of tariffs was forcing the company’s hand, and that it would hike prices on all sorts of goods later this month and into the summer.
So far, Trump’s tariffs have had a muted effect on inflation. Walmart’s announcement suggests that a dam is breaking and that a flood of higher prices could soon follow.
“If Walmart is doing it, everybody else is probably going to be doing it—if not already, they will be in the future,” said Alan Detmeister, an economist at UBS.
“Retail is incredibly low-margin,” said Jason Furman, a Harvard economics professor who was an adviser to President Barack Obama. “This isn’t Walmart taking advantage of this global situation. This is Walmart having no choice but to raise prices.”
Furman said he found it noteworthy that the company explicitly tied price increases to tariffs despite possible blowback from the White House. “That tells me that they are more afraid of their own customers and their reactions than they are of Donald Trump and his reaction,” he said
I agree about low margin retail - especially true for supermarkets. This isn’t a plot to raise prices. It’s a real response to Trump’s idiotic policy choices.
However. One must never forget how incredibly good Donald Trump is for multimillionaires and billionaires. The Trump tax cuts were a huge windfall for the wealthiest people in the country and they will destroy this entire country if they have to in pursuit of making those cuts permanent.
Never forget- it’s always, always about the money and the more America’s .01% and their media enablers screech that it isn’t about the money the more you know it is.
A bonanza for the top 1%: Those numbers translate into an average tax cut of more than $32,000 for the top 1% of earners and more than $314,000 for the top 0.1% compared to an average cut of $6 for the bottom 10% of earners.
Open thread.
*I’m traveling to NY grandchildren again - MM is also on the road
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