The Tariff Elephant in the Living Room that NOBODY Talks About

It's not complicated, just not what our billionaire rulers want people to talk about

Is it just me noticing this, or is NOBODY in the mainstream press talking about the obvious elephant in the living room? Here’s one article that illustrates what I’m talking about:

This article purports to give a shrewd analysis of the latest spitting match between Walmart and Trump over “who’s going to eat the cost of the tariffs?”—the consumer or big corporations such as Walmart. Notice what it does NOT talk about: the elephant in the living room.

The elephant in the living room

Here’s the elephant in the living room that NOBODY talks about. The U.S. government could give the tariff tax revenue to the American working class tax-payers/consumer. So why doesn’t it do this to help Americans deal with the rising prices caused by the tariffs?

To be clear…

The tariff tax revenue is the money that the foreign producers of stuff have to pay the U.S. government before they can off-load their merchandise into the United States when they sell it to corporations such as Walmart. This money now goes into the U.S. treasury where billionaires get to play with it. But it could go to the American consumers instead. Why not?

Think about it. Say Chinese-located corporation, ChinaX (which could, you know, be owned by Americans like Elon Musk by the way), sends a shipping container with ten thousand goodies from China to the port in San Francisco to be off-loaded there and sold to Walmart. Upon arrival, the U.S. government tells ChinaX, “Wait! Before you can off-load those goodies you have to pay Uncle Sam the tariff tax, which comes to $1 million (which is $100 per goodie.) So ChinaX pays the $1 million to Uncle Sam. Now ChinaX says to Walmart, “Sorry, but the price for each goodie is $100 more than before the tariff.” Walmart says, “OK, we’ll buy the goodies at the higher price and just raise the price $100 for each goodie in our store.”

Now what?

What nobody is talking about is that Uncle Sam could send that $1 million dollars to American consumers (there are lots of ways this could be done, from tax reductions to checks in the mail like those Covid checks, or “stimulus checks” or whatever.) If that happened, then Americans who want to buy goodies could, if they wished, pay Walmart its current $100 higher price per goodie. But alternatively they might find a Made-In-the-USA company selling goodies for less than Walmart’s now very high price, and they might buy the Made-In-the-USA goodies instead of the ones at Walmart. This is, after all, EXACTLY what the official purpose of the tariff is—to enable Made-In-the-USA companies finally to be able to compete with the Chinese-located companies and thus provide jobs to Americans that otherwise would not exist. Right?

My point is that if Uncle Sam gave the tariff tax revenue to the American consumers it would not only ease the burden on them of the high Walmart prices but it would also continue to enable the tariffs to do what is supposedly their purpose—to shift production from China to the USA. It would be a win-win for both American consumers and American manufacturers.

But NOBODY in the mainstream media even hints at the possibility of this win-win option. Why not?

Could it be that this win-win option is a losing option for the people with the real power in the United States? Could it be that the ruling billionaire plutocracy wants those tariff tax revenue dollars to go into the U.S. treasury where billionaires such as Elon and Jeff will control them and benefit from them, while American consumers are left holding the dirty end of the stick? Inquiring minds would certainly like to know.

Just in case you are so-inclined, read here how you can help build the egalitarian revolutionary movement to remove the rich from power and make a good, just world based on mutual aid in which tariffs would not even be thing.

Come to think of it, there are quite a few other elephants in the living room that the mass media ignore:

#1. The fact that Israeli violence against Palestinians has never been for the purpose of making Israeli Jews safe but on the contrary for enabling the billionaire rulers of Israel to get rich by severely economically oppressing the Israeli JEWISH working class (as I prove here.)

#2. The fact that racial discrimination against non-whites has never been for the purpose of making life better for white working class people but on the contrary for enabling the rich upper class to get rich by oppressing ALL races of working class people including white workin class people, (as I prove here.)

#3. The fact that our billionaire rulers (using both major parties) have for decades done things south of the border and in Haiti deliberately to force poor people there to have to illegally immigrate to the Unites States just in order to survive (as I prove here and here.)

One day these elephants may (figuratively speaking, of course) trample the billionaire class that tries to hide their existence from us.