Trump's Deportations Of Migrants And His Tariffs Will Trigger Massive Inflation

The Eyeless King

If Trump’s migrant round-up includes agricultural workers, food prices are going to sky-rocket. After anti-immigration laws led to a decline in migrant workers in Georgia, in 2011, farmers reported over $140 million in losses from unharvested crops, particularly peaches and onions and prices for some produce rose by 30%-40% in affected regions. California, Texas and Florida, which rely heavily on migrant labor for fruits, vegetables and nuts will see catastrophic disruptions.

Prices will go up especially high for strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, oranges, lemons, grapefruits, apples, grapes (and wine), pears, peaches, plums, nectarines, cherries, tomatoes, lettuce, spinach, kale, bell peppers, onions, cucumbers, asparagus, broccoli, cauliflower, zucchini, squash, almonds, walnuts, pistachios, watermelon, cantaloupe, honeydew, avocados, potatoes, sweet potatoes, hops (beer), pumpkins, cranberries, dairy.

What will the inflation in food looks like? Well, suppose you pay $4.00 for a gallon for milk. The price will almost immediately go up towards $5.00. Lettuce will rise from $1.50 to $2.25, avocados from $2.50 to $4.00, strawberries from $3.50 to to $5.60, apples from $1.80 to $250. You get the point. This doesn’t impact rich people who aren’t going to even notice that almonds that cost $5.00 now go up to $7.25. But working class families? No more almonds.

And don’t expect any relief from wealthy wingnut Brooke Rollins, who Trump just named Secretary of Agriculture for some reason that no one is aware of, other than a friendship with Jared Kushner and that she had once been the Queen of the Cotton Bowl Classic.

And food inflation is just the tip of the iceberg. The real problem will be Trump’s tariffs, in effect, a gigantic tax on working families. Yesterday, Christiaan Hetzner reported that Walmart’s CFO warned their customers to expect steep price increases— and that it won’t be China paying for them. Trump voters who imagined that “living costs would return to the halcyon days before the pandemic may be in for a shock.” Walmart’s CFO, John David Rainey told Fox News viewers that Señor T’s “plans to hike import duties across the board will be felt by everyday consumers. ‘Tariffs are going to be inflationary, there’s no disputing that,’ he said on Thursday.”

That’s not the message the Trump campaign took to the nation during the 2024 election race, however. During the campaign, the former president asked whether voters were better off than they were a little under five years ago, when the seeds of inflation were sown with the outbreak of the COVID virus. 

The resounding answer was no, as two-thirds of the population were dissatisfied with the state of the economy. Coast to coast, Americans felt a deep-seated resentment at spiraling prices on everything from gasoline to groceries and restaurant visits. 

In came the Trump campaign, which repeatedly portrayed tariffs as a panacea. They would fill the nation’s coffers, reduce the deficit, bring back manufacturing jobs— and might even eliminate the need for income taxes. And the costs? Well, those would be borne by others— chiefly U.S. strategic rival China, which could face duties as high as 60% on goods it exported. 

“A tariff is a tax on a foreign country, that’s the way it is whether you like it or not,” Trump promised supporters at an August rally in the key battleground state of Pennsylvania. “It’s a tax on a country that’s ripping us off and stealing our jobs.”

The National Retail Federation, however, begged to disagree. Unless exporters are both willing and able to drop their factory gate prices in order to maintain volumes, the costs will entirely be borne by Americans— either directly in the form of import duties, indirectly through higher prices passed on to the customer, or some mix thereof.

“A tariff is a tax paid by the U.S. importer, not a foreign country or the exporter,” NRF vice president Jonathan Gold said in a statement published one day prior to the November elections. 

Lowe’s had the same message for its customers.The company’s CFO, Brandon Sink, said that “Roughly 40% of our cost of goods sold are sourced outside of the U.S., and that includes both direct imports and national brands through our vendor partners. And as we look at potential impact, certainly would add product costs, but timing and details remain uncertain at this point.”

On Thursday, Ana Swanson, reporting for the NY Times, wrote that Señor T had referred to tariffs as “the most beautiful word in the dictionary” and “has talked about them again and again as a fix for America’s economic relationship with the rest of the world.”

She wrote that “Tariffs can also backfire by hurting U.S. manufacturers. American factories use a lot of foreign parts and materials, and tariffs make it more expensive to get these. Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs, for instance, got U.S. firms to make more metals— but because the price rose, other companies that use metals to make things, like industrial machinery and auto parts, ended up manufacturing less. Imposing tariffs on foreign countries also encourages them to do the same thing to the United States. Suddenly, American exporters lose markets abroad. That costs jobs.”

Would tariffs help or hurt the economy? It really depends on their size, and other countries’ reactions. Dani Rodrik, a Harvard University economist who has written about the harms of globalization, said that if tariffs were low, maybe 10 percent, Americans might just pay a bit more for their imports— not a huge deal. But if tariffs increase significantly beyond that, he said, it could lead to a 1930s-style trade war, in which countries keep retaliating against one another with higher and higher levies. The price of goods could rise quickly.

In that scenario, Trump’s tariffs would likely hurt rather than help American workers.

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