A Simple Economic Prepper’s Guide

What appears to be coming, and what to do about it.

Yesterday, Dear Leader made his big “liberation day” announcement on tariffs, in his zeal to control the entire global economy—with the United States leading the way.

Unfortunately, Trump has no idea what he’s doing, and the sycophants he hired and the cowardly or greedy congressional partisans who support him either can’t, or won’t, explain it to him—at least not in a way that actually penetrates his thick skull.

The chart he used to explain why American tariffs were necessary was flatly incorrect, even bordering on the insane. Nobody knows where he got the numbers he presented to the American people as the “existing tariffs on US imports” presently being charged to us by foreign corporations.

Wrong. They were just plain wrong. As in, “Did he just pull those numbers straight out of his ass?” level of wrong.

But his followers will share his pretty, colorful chart with each other and crow about how we are “sticking it” to all those other nations who have screwed us for all of these years, because “sticking it to” others excites the professionally victimized base he’s been cultivating. They’re now absolutely convinced by Trump that they’ve been screwed nine ways from Sunday, by everyone but him. They’re not entirely wrong there; we’ve all been screwed a good nine ways from Sunday. But that screwing isn’t coming from where Trump now points.

MAGA apparently still has no idea just how big of a stick they’re already sitting on, or even who put it up there, but we are ALL about to find out what this fuckery brings.

In any case, one economist surmised that the “tariffs” Trump was falsely accusing other nations of attaching to the American-made products they import may have been arrived at by looking at our trade deficit numbers ( how much we net import from each nation in relationship to how much we export) and then deciding how high to tariff each country’s imports based on how wide our trade imbalance with them is. So the nations we rely on most for consumer goods will now be punished the most for daring to meet our needs and wants in the most affordable ways.

Which has zippo to do with tariffs they are being falsely accused of imposing on us (and which tend to be highly selective by nation, as well as relating to specific internal industries each nation is either developing actively, or wants to protect from excessive (not all) foreign competition, because they’re vital national industries.

What Trump has done here is not “temporary tariff protectionism from foreign competition.” It’s an attempt to use American violence and threats to completely rearrange global trade, by sharply curtailing all American purchasing of most foreign goods, period. He believes (or he says he believes, but with him, who really knows?) that taxing virtually all foreign imports entering the US will incentivize Americans to buy more American-made goods. He assumes incorrectly that comparable American goods will soon seem more affordable, as compared to now-overpriced imports. He asserts that this buying spree of American products will stimulate manufacturing here in the US, and businesses will suddenly experience a growth boom here at home, because everything we use will soon be “made in America” again.

The trouble with this kind of transactional thinking, which does not apply any significant whole-systems analysis to the question, lies in how very, very much it needs to leave OUT just to make any sense. Which, in this case, is one helluva lot of vital information.

For starters, tariffs are charged to the American importers of these goods, not the manufacturing exporters, even though Dear Leader keeps saying foreign nations will pay the tariffs. Because while importers can and are pleading, begging, and even threatening the loss of import sales unless their foreign importers lower their wholesale prices and help American retailers absorb the high cost of these tariffs, that strategy only works if American importers have leverage.

Leverage only exists if foreign exporters have no other sales options for their goods, or if they want to maintain a strong trading relationship with a particular American company because it’s still profitable to do so despite higher tariffs. And massive price reductions on top of increasing shipping and transport costs are not exactly profitable for most foreign exporters. They’re better off reducing manufacturing and laying off their own workers while rebalancing their trade partnerships than selling those goods at a loss. They can always just say no—thereby creating mass shortages of goods here on American shelves. And what will American retailers do when they have too few goods to satisfy too many buyers who want them?

So yes, Virginia, your prices at the retail level are about to go up, and bigly—which is why American Consumer confidence is registering today at a forty year low. And unless we consumers spend all of our “excess” money in support of this bullshit, to beef up American retail’s bottom line so they can afford to expand at-home manufacturing at our expense, retailers are about to go into an economic downward profit spiral and the entire American economy is about to hit the skids.

No, foreign manufacturers are NOT about to lower their wholesale prices dramatically, just so American businesses can pay the new import tariffs without raising consumer prices on the shelf. Sure, some foreign businesses will likely absorb some part of these costs to maintain their international trading relationships, but certainly not all will. Or even most. Why not?

First, because we are behaving like total assholes, and nobody wants to enable assholes to keep on behaving like assholes—let alone reward them for it. Second, we are not the only available international trading partner in the entire world; we just happen to love consuming whatever goods our extreme marketing and advertising campaigns insist that we all now need. We are deeply conditioned consumers, which feeds our entire economy and keeps corporate profits afloat worldwide. That’s why real economists pay attention to the consumer price index and to consumer confidence. When Americans lose confidence in their own future economic prospects (as is occurring right now) we sharply curtail our own spending. And that hurts all of our corporate bottom lines.

And when the consumer price index rises, as is happening already (reversing sharply the gradual downward pricing trend that the Biden administration had patiently generated, and all without triggering a national or global recession) then the volume of goods we all buy will shrink to fit our less flexible family budgets. For example, if inflation rises 5% and my $500 a month grocery budget suddenly sees what I regularly buy spike to $525, I may opt buy fewer food items, or less expensive items, to avoid having to find an extra $25 a month to buy food.

Now, budgeting is not a RPP (rich person’s problem) so we can forgive our billionaire ruling class for not realizing, or even much caring, that budgets exist for the rest of us. But that lack of awareness or concern doesn’t make the need to budget go away for the rest of us who aren’t already RP. We still have to make hard decisions whenever our prices go up; we can’t afford to indulge the Trumpian fantasy of everything we buy being magically made in America in “the future”, someday when our retail shelves will be bursting with high quality US goods of every kind. No, we still have to live within our means, right here and now. And with borrowing costs high, rental rates sky high, mortgage interest rates high, and prices now soaring higher, those means are already stretched near to the breaking for far too many.

“But,” the MAGA crowd argues, “pretty soon American companies will see an opening to fill those unmet needs, and will start building new plants right here in the USA! Then they can make all the goods we used to import, employ only Americans to do those jobs, and we can all get back to a 1950’s kind of roaring economy!” (Never mind that the 1950’s economy was great because we were still standing and could rebuild a ravaged world after WWII; that was a one-off moment in global history, and not meant to be the way things would be under capitalism in the United States, forevermore.)

Ah, my fellow Americans. We really ought to teach our children global economics and world history at something a bit above a fifth grade level, and unpropagandized. And we really need to teach critical, whole-systems thinking, remedially.

How would one even go about starting a new business to build American-made widgets of any kind? Usually, this sort of enterprise involves borrowing a bunch of money, just to get started—at least unless your RP daddy can cut you a check for millions to get you started. And at today’s higher interest rates, that’s now a much bigger risk to Average Joe’s personal well-being then it was a year or two ago, but let’s just say you’re the intrepid entrepreneurial type and you really want in on this “made in America” action. So you borrow some money on your credit card, or as a personal collateralized bank loan against your home or other hard asserts, just to get yourself started. Because unlike the existing billionaires and their kids, you have to put it all at risk to even begin to try at compete at an RP level of capital investment.

But let’s say you do. Now, you have to build a factory somewhere in the US. Which means buying land, engaging with regulatory agencies, attending to environmental challenges, etc. And yes, Dear Leader promises to make it easier and cheaper for you to pollute and degrade the environment for profit, but you still have to decide how much environmental harm and future human harm you are willing to do to earn a bunch of money. But let’s assume here that this Administration won’t block or delay you, and you don’t care about saving or honoring the environment, just to keep things simpler.

The next issue becomes, from where will you get all the raw goods and materials you will need to construct a factory? You guessed it—many, like lumber, steel, prefabricated industrial parts and base machinery currently come from overseas, so they too will be way more expensive for you to import and to buy. Your factory construction costs are going to be through the roof, and will consume much of your startup capital even before you acquire the raw materials you will need to start making your product.

And guess where many of the raw materials you will need to make product are going to be coming from?

Yep, the US has 4% of the world’s population living on 7% of the world’s available land, but we consume 16% of the world’s energy and 15% of its raw materials and manufactured goods. So you tell me: how are we as a nation going to keep up that rate of planetary consumption without continually importing a helluva lot of stuff at higher prices, since they truly must come to us from “elsewhere?”

The notion that we can extract that same quantity of raw resources (or even greater!) from our own existing lands is absurd; we’ve been over-extracting our own resources for well over a century already to feed the profit-making machinery of unfettered capitalism. (And maybe that’s why Dear Leader seems so hellbent on us annexing Canada and Greenland, whatever it takes?)

But let’s say you can cut enough deals and corners to build your new factory anyhow, and you make enough good deals with enough importers to get the ingredients you need to make your new widgets, and all with only slightly higher costs accruing to you than what foreign manufacturers have long been spending to make their own version of widgets. So now you will need to hire some workers to man your new factory. But at what wages?

All the noncitizen immigrant labor you might have turned to earlier, just to get yourself started more cheaply, is being summarily deported. So you will have to hire “American born” instead. But American born workers are going to be looking at the gas pumps, the grocery shelves, their rental or mortgage rates, their student loan payments, childcare costs, health care costs, and their car payments to determine how high of a salary they need earn just to keep paying all those bills; they won’t be “taking one for team MAGA” by accepting an unlivable wage for their family so they can work hard just to go deeper into debt than they currently are. Humans aren’t commodities, like excess TVs we can warehouse in boxes until we can afford to pay for them what they are actually worth. They breathe, eat, sleep, and have daily needs, so they won’t sit idly by while RP capitalists starve then for the “good of the American economy.”

Assuming you do solve your wage problem successfully, to further complicate things you now need to realize that any international exporting of your widgets will have to take place in a hostile global economic environment, in which our nation’s former trading partners have been finding new grooves with one another, to replace our former business. They aren’t sitting idly by while we rebuild our former “greatness” at their expense! And they won’t be exactly eager to reengage with untrustworthy and greedy American trading partners anymore. So the odds of you exporting your higher-priced widgets to countries that were already making those same widgets more cheaply than you can will be slim, or none.

An isolated and mistrusted America is not a healthy nation, a robustly profitable nation, or even a safe nation in which to live. But that’s what happens with malevolent, abusive narcissists. People with any level of wisdom will avoid dealing with them altogether, or at least will stop enabling them, because nobody enjoys being abused, taken advantage of, or gaslit about who’s to blame for the narcissist’s problems.

Therefore, once we play out these potentially cascading effects in even this simple example, the net result seems to be that we may see a few (not many) new businesses emerge to find healthy niches in our national economy, because existing RPs can indeed afford the capital investment required to build new plants. Some resources they will need will be available in the States, and in some places labor costs won’t exceed the potential profits. However, since even RP-funded factories can’t spring up successfully overnight, none of this projected economic goodness will even begin to appear and alleviate product shortage pressures for at least a year to eighteen months. And whatever goes on before that will help determine the feasibility of any new businesses even being able to spring up successfully.

So what I expect to see this next year is something more akin to stagflation, rather than some big, retro US industrial boom. Watch the quarterly data released at the end of June; enough time will have passed by then for the first shockwave impacts of this terrible policy to have begun to filter through the national economy. July will likely be emotionally reactive; August will likely be when the harsh reality of it truly starts to hit home, right where we all live.

Prices will rise; consumer purchasing will plummet. But because businesses can’t lower their prices without sacrificing profits, due to tariffs rendering them less downwardly price flexible, they will likely reduce more flexible labor costs instead. That means mass, cost-cutting layoffs, right into an economy experiencing spiraling prices. We won’t even get into outright corporate bankruptcies, but those are also very likely to spike.

Mass private enterprise layoffs will add heft to the labor market overhang being created right now by DOGE’s “government efficiency” layoffs, as Dear Leader’s economic policies drive everything to the private, for-profit sector and away from the federal “for social benefit” sector of our economy. Which means the social safety net once provided by the government will not be very helpful for most Americans caught in an economic downturn. Expect no government responsiveness to your temporary financial distress or rising unemployment. The RPs will just insist that the “meritorious” will land on their feet as it should be, and that this hardship will weed out and punish only the laziest moochers among us.

That means lots of Americans will be reduced to accepting jobs at low or problematic (net negative) wages, just to keep from losing their fragile foothold in the economic, power/dominator pyramid. Others will keep downsizing until they hit some new bottom, where they can at least still manage to get by.

Of course, Trump himself will have no real issues with the mess he’s currently making. He has already filed to liquidate $2.5 billion in Truth Social stock, likely by selling it to the many MAGA fools who still think he’s a genius instead of a criminal. They will buy up his worthless shares to show their emotional support for his mad genius. By the time Truth Social goes bankrupt because he’s milked it for billions in unwarranted wealth, and because its future is deeply bleak and its book value doesn’t begin to support the emotional value it’s being given by his truest believers, Trump will have already pocketed billions from the hard-earned cash of his most ardent supporters. They however, will be left holding his worthless stock, while working harder for less money if they’re lucky—or they’ll be out on the streets if they’re not—and they will still be confronting stubbornly higher prices.

But hey, at least all those foreign devils won’t be taking advantage of Average Joe American anymore! And at least we won’t have Sleepy Joe nodding off at the National helm—because who wants an economy that’s the envy of the world when we can have a leader who envies the entire world, and who covets it all?

Of course, I could be wrong. I’ve been wrong before, and I will be again. So feel free to ignore all of this and remain firmly on Team Trump, if that floats your boat.

I’m not here to save anybody from themselves! I gave that up last November, and I’m sticking to it.

For anyone else, here’s some general financial advice:

1) stop borrowing, if at all possible. Do not take out any more debt than your current salary can comfortably handle. You do not want to get caught in an inflationary cycle with interest rates on credit card debt already spiking.

2) reduce all discretionary spending. That means restaurants, getaways, vacations, lavish gifts, new cars, or expensive home improvements. Now is NOT the time to be extravagant; this is a time for fiscal sobriety if ever one has existed in my lifetime.

3) if you have savings, a 401k retirement account, or an IRA, consider repositioning yourself away from any aggressive investment assets you own and move toward more defensive investments, because they are more likely to maintain, or lose less, value in an economic downturn. And make sure you’re diversified, because once the dominoes start falling it’ll be hard to know which ones will be still be standing a year from now.

4) any leveraged real estate investments you might have, like an air BnB or a vacation home, consider liquidating if you’re currently paying a mortgage or high taxes and insurance to maintain them. Air BnBs are great if you can rent them out for higher than your mortgage and carrying costs; they suck when people stop traveling or taking vacations, and you suddenly have to pay a mortgage on a non-income producing property—whose value may also drop if interest rates rise much higher, and if the US economy takes the massive dump I’m expecting it to at this time.

Best I can do to offer reasonable financial advice. In times like these, nothing truly seems safe for the people who aren’t already RPs and can’t afford to draw down from their millions while ”waiting it out.”

We are all going to be on our own as this financial debacle unfolds; please don’t expect honest, integrity, backtracking, or even remorse or acknowledgement from Trumpworld as all this now plays out. The hallmark of malignant narcissism is never taking accountability for anything.

So do not expect to hear willing or honest accountability; assume Dear Leader will blame the whole world for not meekly abiding by his “very genius plan.”

Do be kind to one another. For in times of deepest trouble we discover the reservoir of empathy and natural wisdom within that isn’t dependent on what the economy opts to do. We rediscover the value of trust, of love, and of interdependent relationships.

And that may be the singular good that emerges from the ashes of this Trumpster fire.