“President Donald Trump’s tariff regime is making everything from American-made steel weights, imported yarn, and Amazon’s “everyday essentials” more expensive while his immigration crackdown is causing worker shortages in key industries. These policies will work in tandem to slow down already expensive deliveries of your favorite goods.
“”Does ‘for cause’ require something more substantial than a mere allegation of wrongdoing, such as a formal charge, or a conviction, or even something else?” asks Reason’s Damon Root in a great piece on the precedent the Supreme Court might lean on (Namely Humphrey’s Executor v. United States (1935) and Seila Law v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (2020)). “Here’s another question to ask: Is the mortgage fraud allegation that’s been leveled against Cook merely a pretext designed to cover the fact that Trump is actually firing Cook for illegal political reasons?””
“Denver’s high minimum wage, especially its low tip credit, has unintentionally undermined the financial viability of full-service, labor-intensive restaurants. As costs outpace revenue and margins evaporate, once-thriving independent establishments are closing in droves, eroding the city’s cultural fabric and economic diversity.
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Restaurant operators and advocacy groups agree that Covid sparked the decline, but rising costs since have continued to cripple the industry. Property taxes, utilities, insurance, food and drink prices, rent, and one of the highest minimum wages in the country — higher than in Los Angeles or New York — are straining already razor-thin margins.
The city’s low tip credit, which results in a high minimum wage for tipped workers, is a particular pain point.
Denver City Council unanimously passed a minimum wage increase in November 2019 — just four months before the pandemic hit — and it was fully implemented citywide by 2022. Today, the base minimum wage is $18.81 an hour and the tipped wage is $15.79 — increases of about 70 percent and 95 percent, respectively.
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Per 2019 legislation, wage increases are uncapped and rise annually with the Consumer Price Index. In 2026, the base wage will be $19.29. For operators like Ms. Tronco and Mr. Seidel, who said that labor now consumes more than half his revenue, the math no longer works.
“When you force an operator to give raises every January 1 to the group of people who’s already making the most money, it chokes our ability to give a salaried person or an hourly cook a raise,”
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To keep her business alive, Ms. Tronco has cut the hosts and bussers she hired when opening and reduced weeknight server shifts. She raises her menu prices every six months to keep up with costs. Her numbers have taken a hit: Sales are down an average of 10 percent this year.
“It just feels like whack-a-mole,” Ms. Tronco said. “Inflation has affected everyone … Now we’ve got a tariff situation and all my wine importers are telling me that everything is going to go up $3, $4 a bottle.”
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Mr. Padró said the small tip credit is the industry’s biggest burden. He supports a higher base wage, even up to $25, because most of his employees already earn above that. He said that his servers and bartenders average $38 and $44, respectively. Expanding the tip credit would alleviate some of the burden faced by operators.
“I have 17-year-old kids pouring coffee for their teachers, making more than them,” he said.”
“Senate Republicans have already said they plan to move quickly to confirm Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers Chair Stephen Miran to fill one current vacancy. If Cook loses a pending legal challenge and is dismissed — and her replacement is confirmed by the GOP-controlled Senate —Trump-appointed Fed governors would hold four of the seven seats on the central bank’s board.
That majority, in turn, would be enough to control the reappointment of the 12 regional bank presidents throughout the country who also have a say on rates and whose five-year terms are scheduled to expire in February.
And that, in effect, could give Trump control of the Fed’s policy-making Federal Open Market Committee, whose refusal to lower interest rates throughout his second term has put the president on the warpath with Fed Chair Jerome Powell. Any exertion of White House control over the reappointment process for regional bank presidents would represent an extraordinary break in precedent.”
“Overall, the producer price index (PPI), which measures the prices paid to domestic producers for their output, climbed by 0.9 percent last month (well above expectations) and 3.3 percent on an annualized basis. A few categories saw particularly large increases. Wholesale prices for food, for example, rose by 1.4 percent, while wholesale prices for consumer electronics increased by over 3 percent.
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Lots of domestic products rely on imports of raw materials and intermediate goods. You can’t make a chocolate bar without cocoa beans, for example, and over half of all imports are things that domestic businesses use as inputs.
Economists have warned that tariffs would increase the cost of importing component parts and force domestic firms to increase the prices they charge for their outputs. That seems to be exactly what today’s PPI report shows.
Second, the PPI is often seen as an advance warning system for higher inflation at the consumer level—because higher prices at the wholesale level will likely be passed along at the retail level.”
“Even as some Republicans mocked economists for predicting prices would rise as a result of tariffs, there was a whistling-past-the-graveyard quality to the snickering. Yes, tariffs that had been threatened, delayed, and only partially implemented hadn’t yet much increased costs for consumers, but there were clear signs that importers were rushing to beat high customs duties, and that trouble was on the way. Now we’ve had a weak jobs report and a higher-than-expected producer price index (PPI), and it’s clear that tariffs perform just as we were warned: They raise prices for domestic businesses and consumers.”
“The Trump administration’s 50 percent tariffs on imported steel and aluminum were expanded this week to cover hundreds of imports that plainly are not steel or aluminum. Among the items targeted by the new tariffs: dairy products like milk and cream, as well as gasoline and other fuels, fire extinguishers, baby strollers, furniture, engines, and motorcycles. In short, anything that contains steel or aluminum or that is (as with dairy products) transported or stored in steel or aluminum containers could now be subject to those massive import taxes.”
Trump’s Federal police action in DC is costing one million dollars a day.
Right wing media uses a deadly car accident where an illegal immigrant with a driver’s license made a driving mistake and people died…as evidence of illegals killing people. JD Vance refers to this deadly car accident as murder.
“The world’s supply of chocolate depends on the global trade of cocoa beans, which are grown exclusively in equatorial climates across Latin America, Africa, and Asia. The United States produces more chocolate than any other country in the world, but there would be no American chocolate-making businesses, large or small, without imports.
A lot of American manufacturing is like that too: U.S.-based businesses rely on imported raw materials when making everything from candy bars to new cars. Policies that make those inputs more expensive or difficult to obtain—policies such as the Trump administration’s tariffs—are leaving a bitter taste.
Chocolatiers, in particular, say trade barriers are a recipe for higher prices, lower quality, less innovation, and smaller profits. Doesn’t sound very sweet, does it?”