Anand Giridharadas

Trump tariffs could cost the average American family $2,000

by

Big Thought, Small Step, Deep Breath — for March 5, 2025

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

Welcome to the Trump economy. No matter how much President Trump tried to hype the economy last night, the numbers don’t lie. Your stock portfolio and/or retirement account is shriveling, business leaders are panicking, and today we are reporting that the new Trump tariffs could cost the average American family $2,000 this year.

To put that sum in context, it is enough money to buy three pairs of Trump’s official victory sneakers, plus 100 dozen eggs.

Anand Giridharadas 
Anand Giridharadas

Welcome to the Resistance, everyone who didn’t think that Trump is dangerous but did think he would be good for business.

After a month of gamesboyship, the Trump tariffs finally went into effect on Monday: new 25 percent levies on imports from Canada and Mexico; plus another 10 percent on Chinese imports, on top of the 10 percent imposed in February. All three countries — America’s biggest trading partners — are retaliating with tariffs on U.S. exports. As predicted, the stock market’s nosedive intensified as investors sold off stocks, anticipating a further slowdown in consumer spending.

The tariffs imposed during the first Trump administration were relatively inconsequential, but this time they’re likely to have a much bigger impact: the world economy is more fragile, the tariffs themselves are broader in scope, and there is nobody within the administration to put the brakes on. There is less that lawmakers could do even if they were motivated to push back, since Trump has invoked emergency powers — supposedly to address the threat of fentanyl trafficking — to conduct his chaotic and manic trade war.

Today’s Big Thought is about how this affects you — and, frankly, how it affects Trump supporters (current ones, at least) whom you might know and talk to.

A tariff is a tax on imports. Despite what Trump thinks, that tax gets paid not by China or Mexico or Canada, but by whoever imports goods into the country. And those importers face a choice — they can keep prices the same and make less money once they sell those goods in the U.S., or they can pass the costs along to consumers.

What do you think they tend to do?

Ding ding ding! They pass it on. So the tariff very quickly becomes a tax — on you.

Since tariffs are collected on everything from finished goods and food to raw materials like lumber and consumables like oil, they can affect almost everything you buy. That means higher prices — inflation, as economists call it. Remember it?

You’re going to pay more for stuff. And how much more will this Trump tax cost you?

The Budget Lab at Yale has just crunched the numbers, and what they found is damning. American households can expect to lose an average of $2,002 in real income this year, assuming that America’s trading partners-turned-adversaries retaliate in full, which is likely. So that is a $2,000 tax hike on every American household.

Every single Democratic Party official needs to be chanting this phrase nonstop from now on: the $2,000 Trump tax. Forward this item to your most Trump-loving friends and relatives. (Hi, newcomers! Welcome to The Ink. Hope you have $2,000 saved!)

Source: The Ink

Home of the Brave. Really?

by

Who will stand up for democracy?

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

From the beginning, the idea has been to overwhelm you. To flood the zone, as Steve Bannon promised, Only in the song does the one automatically follow the other. In real life, you don’t get to be “the land of the free” if you are not also “the home of the brave.”

Anand Giridharadas 
ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

As I write this, there are scattered and inspiring examples of bravery all around us — prosecutors, judges, even the occasional lawmaker. But in the main, we are proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that we are not the home of the brave. We are a country full of people smilingly capitulating to a tyrant.

Here in this city is a mayor who just went ahead and said it: “I’m collaborating.” A word more well chosen than he knew.

Collaborating. Yes, collaborating. That is exactly what he was doing. When he all but invited Donald Trump’s immigration raids into this city forged of the world in exchange for his own narrow freedom.

Collaborating. Exactly that. It is fashionable now. Bravery, less so.

It’s the media owners who are rejecting advertisements from the pro-democracy movement and letting go of cartoonists who challenge power and settling bogus lawsuits to protect their wider commercial interests, and trying to position themselves in the Dear Leader’s good graces. Why do they even own newspapers? Maybe they would be better off owning banks. Do they know what newspapers are for?

Collaborating.

It is the astonishing number of Democratic legislators and leaders who have no lack of courage when asking you for $5 via text message, but who ghost harder than single men in their 20s when the time comes for us to reap our investment in them. They say some big things, but they refuse to put a blanket hold on nominees or otherwise shut down the business of government until the coup that is plainly occurring is stopped. Turns out you should always get your spinal surgery before an authoritarian takeover.

Collaborating.

Then there are the CEOs, who, five years ago, proudly positioned themselves as avatars of a new future of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and now purge those programs from their own companies. They have more power with the resources at their command than most people who have ever lived, but it is not enough to give them courage. They would sell out their own colleagues, make them feel less part of the team, in order to please a Dear Leader who would sell them out in a Wall Street second.

Collaborating.

It’s the liberal and progressive nonprofits and foundations that we learn are pulling back from supporting the vital work of organizing for democracy, at kind of the exact moment when you would want to be organizing for democracy. They have chosen the wrong time to collapse. In the good times, they boast to the world of their missions to advance justice and freedom and equality. And then when an actual fascist takes the American presidency, suddenly they’re pulling back, they’re protecting their assets, they’re going safe.

Collaborating.

It is the university leaders who, instead of defending their faculty — one of the only bastions of protected thinkers who can actually tell the truth without fear because of tenure — are bending over backwards to please the wannabe autocrat. Campuses are now full of fear of a new McCarthyism. How does it feel to work for leaders who do not have your back?

Collaborating.

We are learning about ourselves as a country. We are learning who among us and around us is brave. Apparently, you don’t even need all of your fingers and toes.

Maybe it was always a mistake to count on these big institutions to protect us. They haven’t been for some time now. Yes, there are a handful of brave lawmakers, brave judges, brave media voices, brave others. But in general, it is now very clear after this first month that no one is coming to save us.

It’s time to take back our country. Not only from this authoritarian nightmare, but also from the collaborators too insipid and weak and chickenshit — too skinless and boneless — to stand up for us.

It is becoming time to be the home of the brave, if we wish to be the land of the free.

Source: The Ink

Nevermind the flood zone, focus on the coup

by

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

From the beginning, the idea has been to overwhelm you. To flood the zone, as Steve Bannon promised, with so much stuff that the media would not be able to process it in time—like a butcher saddled with too much meat for the throughput of a single grinder.

Some of this flooding was to occur at levels of highly emotive, if actually less substantive, things, in the hope of distracting you from truly substantive things that had, for the flooders, the added benefit of being boring and obscure.

Anand Giridharadas 
ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

Well, indeed, they are flooding the zone. The water levels of tyranny are rising over a country that once called itself the land of the free and the home of the brave. Even, we should note, as millions thirst for actual solutions to their actual problems. It can sometimes happen like that: a terrible flood, yet still great thirst.

But you do not have to consent to being flooded. Do not participate in the fragmenting of your attention so far and so wide that you cannot prioritize, you cannot see bigger patterns, you cannot identify the merely unwise policies from the flagrantly illegal and unconstitutional ones.

From the beginning, the idea has been to overwhelm you. To flood the zone, as Steve Bannon promised, with so much stuff that the media would not be able to process it in time—like a butcher saddled with too much meat for the throughput of a single grinder.

Some of this flooding was to occur at levels of highly emotive, if actually less substantive, things, in the hope of distracting you from truly substantive things that had, for the flooders, the added benefit of being boring and obscure.

Well, indeed, they are flooding the zone. The water levels of tyranny are rising over a country that once called itself the land of the free and the home of the brave. Even, we should note, as millions thirst for actual solutions to their actual problems. It can sometimes happen like that: a terrible flood, yet still great thirst.

But you do not have to consent to being flooded. Do not participate in the fragmenting of your attention so far and so wide that you cannot prioritize, you cannot see bigger patterns, you cannot identify the merely unwise policies from the flagrantly illegal and unconstitutional ones.

Read more

We are witnessing the inauguration of us

by

Who we are is a matter of our own choosing

Anand Giridharadas 

By Anand Giridharadas

It has always been tempting to think of Donald Trump as an infection. A rare bacterial strain that emerged out of nowhere (or Queens) and began to sicken the American body politic. To turn us meaner and nastier, to corrupt our institutions, to rig our systems, to divide us, to inflame our hatreds, to delude us, to engross us with lies, to make enemies of friends, to neglect, to grift, to leech a nation for profit.

The alien-invader thesis could be soothing when so little else was. He was a gift from Russia, a Manchurian candidate, a plant, a puppet dangled by shadowy possessors of kompromat. Or: He was not a real Republican. He was a thrice-married, pro-choice New York Democrat who had infected the Republican Party and colonized it. “This is not who we are,” you used to hear. People really seemed to believe that for a while.

Read more