New WaylandMany electrons have been inconvenienced over this topic, and most have been in vain. I’ve wondered all week whether I had anything meaningful to add. However, a few points that have emerged in discussions are worth highlighting....
So imminently employers of millions of illegals are gonna be submitting their FICA tax reports containing those now DOGE deleted 9M SSNs and IRS is gonna immediately flip that information over to ICE for immigration raids probably to the largest offenders first…
Could be a mass firing event which probably won’t show up in UE claims because the current employees are illegal… maybe job openings will spike up … while UE rate appears constant…
So Art degree Fed morons will interpret that as “inflationary!” and will be EVEN LESS inclined to reduce the policy rate for Trump…
I’m more worried about this whole thing than the whole “tariff!” BS…
You may want to load up on some frozen chicken beef or pork products this week just in case..
IRS has agreed to share migrants’ tax information with ICE, to help find immigrants they are trying to deport, per NYT
— unusual_whales (@unusual_whales) April 8, 2025
I am a bit late with this. I have been jammed this week and just got to. It's an explanation of the Trump tariffs.
It's the brain child of Stephen Miran, chair of the Council of Economic Advisors. Miran lays it out in A User’s Guide to Restructuring the Global Trading System. Simplicius summarizes it briefly.
Bill Mitchell deals with this from the MMT point of view in today's post, which I linked to earlier.
Simplicius the ThinkerLast week, the US President honoured his election promise, indeed his long-held commitment, to increase tariffs on imported goods and services to the US. The formula they came up to differentiate between countries was bizarre but I don’t intend commenting on that here, except to say, the imposition of tariffs on the – Heard Island and McDonald Islands – which are an ‘Australian external territory’ that is a ‘a volcanic group of mostly barren Antarctic islands, about two-thirds of the way from Madagascar to Antarctica’ (where penguins live) ranked up there with their Signal chaos. These guys have access to the ‘red button’ after all. That’s the scary thing. Anyway I was sent a document that seemingly is the theoretical rationalisation for the tariff decision (thanks Mahaish, appreciated) and so I thought I would give it some time...
