Forward Into The Past

 Are tariffs impacting my life? 

The fact that someone would ask me in this the year of our lord 2025 I suppose I would have to answer in the affirmative. 

To be completely honest, as you know I endeavor to do at all times, I cannot distinguish prices from COVID from Joe Biden's inflation to the current regimes sacrifices to make America what it once was. Not that what it once was could best be described as "great."

I learned about tariffs starting way back in another century. I was in fifth grade and our teacher, Robert Conklin, had us all pair off to create our own lumber companies. My partner and I went so far as to build a Lego replica of our sawmill, complete with bottle caps as the tiny spinning saw blades. This was exciting enough, but along with the machinery of cutting wood into usable pieces of timber came the inevitable business side. We were tasked with making a profit on the two by fours we were making. 

Mister Conklin was a history buff, and he liked to insert as much social studies into our malleable little brains as he could along with the standard fifth grade curriculum. He gets points for directing me to the truth about Anne Frank as well as the Massacre at Sand Creek.  He was also the first person to introduce me to the concept of tariffs. 

On lumber. 

Once we got rolling with our sawmills, we needed to fins ways to sell our cut wood to bigger and better markets. It was at this point that wily old Mister Conklin dropped the tariff bomb on us. Foreign governments, we were told, might put a tax on our wood to make them more expensive. As producers, we had a few choices. One of them was to stop sending our product to those countries. This would drive up the demand and get consumers excited about buying our imported two by fours. We could also cut our price, limiting our profit to try and undercut the tariff imposed on our planks. Mostly I remember thinking that the whole tariff thing was an unfair complication to throw at a bunch of fifth grade entrepreneurs. 

Then, in sixth grade, I stopped thinking about tariffs because they were an olden days thing that existed primarily in history books and by the 1970's we were buying tape decks from Japan and cars from Germany so it seemed like that whole trade problem was pretty much solved by World War II. Which, as it happens, was also the time in which we discovered that Nazis are bad. 

Now, fifty years later, it turns out that bad ideas never die, they just get recycled in the minds of stupid people. Tariffs. Nazis. 

Sheesh.