“It’s not corporate greed that’s driving up the price of beef at the grocery store; it’s the fact that it’s now much more expensive for meat-packers to buy beef from farms. This isn’t due to cattle farmers colluding to raise prices. There are simply fewer cows.
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This decrease is attributable to a combination of weather, disease, and reduced imports. Some factors include persistent drought on American pasture lands and the U.S. halting Mexican cattle imports in July 2025 to stave off the New World screwworm”
“the trade deficit increased—not decreased—by nearly 37 percent in November, the most recent month for which data are available. Through the first 11 months of 2025, the trade deficit was 4 percent higher than it had been in 2024. That is literally the opposite of what Trump is claiming.
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“tariffs led to both rapid and gradual retail price increases.” The study found that “prices began rising within days of the March announcements and continued to increase steadily over subsequent months,” and also that “imported goods rose roughly twice as much as domestic goods relative to pre-tariff trends.”
There is no getting away from this fact: tariffs are pushing prices higher. The Harvard Business School, Trump’s favorite source on the matter, recently noted that prices for imported goods are up 9.7 percent from their pre-tariff trends, while domestic prices are up 4.4 percent. Those increases have added an estimated 1 percentage point to inflation as measured by the consumer price index.
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Trump repeatedly backed down and eased tariff threats in the face of negative shocks from both the stock market and the bond market. The “Liberation Day” tariffs announced on April 2 were postponed a week later after a huge stock market sell-off, and those that were later imposed were at lower rates. A threatened 130 percent tariff on Chinese goods never materialized. No wonder “TACO”—”Trump Always Chickens Out”—entered the political and financial lexicon last year.
As the Yale Budget Lab’s data show, Trump raised the average U.S. tariff rate from less than 3 percent to more than 25 percent with his Liberation Day tariffs and other moves in the first half of 2025. But those rates declined in the second half of the year and settled around 17 percent. That’s still very high, but not as high as it could have been—so it makes sense that the consequences were less severe.”
Inflation is still at 3%. The goal is 2%. The official numbers are 2.7%, but they just assume steady prices on objects they don’t have data on due to the government shutdown. Other experts who don’t just assume steady prices, estimate three percent.
If Trump successfully abuses the rule of law and uses lawfare to gain control over the Fed, inflation will likely go higher.
Before Trump’s new tariffs, inflation was getting close to 2%.
Global warming is a contributor to increased electricity prices, then politicians use high electricity prices to argue that we need more fossil fuel based electricity, which drives global warming higher.
Private electricity companies are supposed to have their prices managed by governments because they form natural monopolies, but they make tons of money because they capture the government and screw over the electricity user.
“Affordability “doesn’t mean anything to anybody,” said President Donald Trump during a Tuesday Cabinet meeting at the White House, saying it’s a “fake narrative” and “con job” that Democrats manufactured to hoodwink the public.
“They just say the word,” Trump added. “It doesn’t mean anything to anybody. They just say it—affordability. I inherited the worst inflation in history. There was no affordability. Nobody could afford anything.”
In classic Trump fashion, this is an about-face. Just a few days prior, he declared on Truth Social, “I AM THE AFFORDABILITY PRESIDENT” when touting falling drug prices.”
“The word affordability is a Democrat scam,” he said. “They say it, and then they go on to the next subject. And everyone thinks, ‘Oh, they had lower prices.'”
Estimates on who is paying for tariffs so far break down like this: 4% paid for by foreigners; 70% paid for by importing companies; 26% paid for by American consumers.
“Retail giants have proven more adept than expected at cushioning the blow of President Donald Trump’s steep tariff hikes over the spring and summer, keeping prices for consumer goods from surging this year by as much as many economists anticipated. But business executives and corporate analysts are warning they can’t do that forever.
“In the first half of next year, we are concerned that consumers are going to start to see the price increases become a little more broad based, and there may not be all the [holiday sales] promotion to help clear through some of that,” Joseph Feldman, a senior managing director at Telsey Advisory Group, who focuses on the retail sector, said in an interview. “So that could be a little bit of a sticker shock for some people.”
That could come as soon as January, according to economists, as holiday discounts come to a close and retailers run low on inventory they secured at pre-tariff prices.”