Cost

 Shortly after the smoke from the election began to clear, my son announced that he was going out to buy himself a new television. As mentioned her on several occasions, he is a clever lad, and he is capable of seeing the forest for the trees. In this particular version of that metaphor, the forest was the tariffs proposed by the "president" elect, and the trees were televisions. Made in China. My son understood the basic economic principle that tariffs would cause consumer prices to rise, since the taxes levied on imported goods would be passed along to consumers. And if you know anything about my son, it's that he is a good little consumer. 

I'm writing this in case you were one of those folks who heard that Felonious Monk and his gang of MAGAts were going to use tariffs on foreign made products and you figured he must know what he's doing. 

Spoiler alert: He doesn't.

But that didn't stop him from promoting this like it was some newfangled notion that will solve our trade deficit. 

Spoiler alert: It won't.

So much so that Walmart's Chief Financial Officer, John David Rainey, announced that once these tariffs go into effect prices on "certain items" might go up. "We never want to raise prices. Our model is everyday low prices. But there probably will be cases where prices will go up for consumers." Sorry folks, but the Walton family needs new shoes too, and they don't do all their shopping at Walmart. They've got to put bread on the table, and neither the table nor the bread is coming from Sam's Club. If you're paying a little extra to keep the Waltons on the Forbes 400 list, well I guess that's just part of doing business in the dystopian hellscape into which we are about to plunge. 

And it's probably only an odd coincidence that in that same announcement, Walmart is now rolling back DEI policies like they used to do with prices. I guess that's just the price of doing business in Felonious Monk's Amerika.