🚀 go-pugleaf

The economic effects of new trade wars could be hard to dodge even if talks
yield new deals soon.

By David J. Lynch and Jeff Stein
April 27, 2025 at 7:05 a.m. EDT

With 14 months remaining before the United States’ 250th birthday on July 4,
2026, Stacy Blake should be placing big orders with the Chinese factories that
supply her fireworks company in St. Joseph, Missouri. But she’s not. And she
blames President Donald Trump’s tariffs.

The same president who’s making plans for a “grand celebration” of this national
milestone has imposed sky-high import duties that will make that star-spangled
festival tough to pull off.

With the trade war causing U.S. orders to dry up, Chinese fireworks factories
have begun shutting down. That threatens to disrupt the industry’s production
schedule, leading to serious shortages, said Blake, co-owner of Schneitter
Fireworks & Importing.

The fireworks disruption looms even though the president spent much of last week
softening his tariff rhetoric. He said that “a fair deal” with China was
possible and insisted that he had spoken with Chinese President Xi Jinping
“numerous times,” which the Chinese government denied. Trade talks with dozens
of other countries “are going very well,” Trump said, adding that he was “very
close to a deal” with Japan.

Yet even as Trump signaled a willingness to ease his steepest tariffs, there
were signs that his change of tone came too late: The economy has been damaged.
And as the threat to America’s birthday celebration next year shows, it could
take some time to learn precisely what effect the experiment with import taxes
has had.

“You can’t put the toothpaste back into the tube — once you squeeze it, it’s
out,” said Constance Hunter, chief economist at the Economist Intelligence Unit,
a research firm.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/04/27/trump-tariffs-us-economy/

Trump is destroying the economy, for nothing. There will *not* be a return of
manufacturing to the U.S.

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Every Republiscum/QAnon accusation is, in fact, a confession