February 7, 2025
Ok well we are now several weeks into our national nightmare, otherwise known as Elon goes to Washington while Donald blames all the world’s ills on DEI and continues the Imperial America tour. Let’s hit a few highlights:
- Lowering the price of groceries
- Threatened Columbia with a tariff which would have raised the price of coffee and bananas; waived it after they agreed to take deportation flights. Betting long term those prices go up due to both residual anger at being threatened and the ongoing coffee production shortfall worldwide.
- Egg prices are completely out of control, as is the cost of chicken itself. Avian flu continues to surge now infecting dairy cattle in Nevada this past week. Chicken culling is failing to control this but don’t worry you can just drink raw milk and forget about it. Notice how the White House press secretary doesn’t want to discuss eggs. Wonder where the government funding to address this will land in the axe chopping exercise?
- Orange juice price continues to go up, because of a specific disease called “citrus greening” which is devastating U.S. groves in Florida and elsewhere. An increasing percentage of orange juice is now imported and that will only increase with time. There is no cure at present for this disease, and since that would require “science” to be involved, don’t hold your breath on anything happening soon.
- Is it just me or does it seem like food recalls have done nothing but increase the last several years. This week it’s Broccoli florets from Marketside at Walmart. Romaine lettuce, onions, chocolate, numerous items from Trader Joes, various raw meat products, deli meat from Boars Head, cinnamon, Kroger salad bowls, Johnsonville Polish kielbasa, the listvgoes on and on. Hard to be convinced the food supply is truly safe. Of course that requires pesky things like regulations and inspectors and we hate those.
- The cost of eating out has just gotten ridiculous. Spent close to $100 this week simply ordering five deli sandwiches and kids portion spaghetti from a local NC Door Dash vendor.
- Let’s see how long it takes before the deportation program starts to impact all the imported food, especially from Mexico.
- Mass deportation
- The photo-op show continues for DHS as they continue to raid locations (notice how these seem to be blue state dominated). Unfortunately it doesn’t seem like all of the targets are illegal immigrants that committed serious crimes. Imagine that. Who would have guessed that such caring people like Stephen Miller and Tom Homan would encourage racial profiling? We’ve managed to snag any number of U.S. citizens in these raids and of particular interest has been the immigrants here legally, such as through the BP-1 app or the Temporary Protected Status program that have been rounded up after declaring all those programs invalid. Sorry Venezuelans in South Florida, you really thought you weren’t going to get caught up in this? Welcome to 2025 where the goal is to meet quotas and produce photo ops, not truly eliminate the “criminal” elements. I thought we had all these exhaustive lists of criminals, knew right where they were and would sweep them out the door in no time flat. So is the issue we don’t know who they are, where they are or are there just not an endless supply of illegal immigrant criminals to begin with? Oh and sorry subcontinent Indians; you thought it was just for Hispanic and African immigrants? Guess again.
- The New American Empire
- Well we of course have already explained why Canada should be a state (they don’t want to be), threatened war on the drug cartels in Mexico (a sure recipe for assignation squads from the best funded terrorists in the world), threatened to seize the Panama Canal back, offered to buy or seize Greenland (not clear which one really is preferred) and threatened Columbia. My favorite however is this week’s development- ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza, so that either Jared Kushner’s fund can develop beachfront property or the Israeli’s can expand the illegal settlements. In a stunning development, we learned that the Arab world doesn’t support this (none of them want the Palestinians) and that the U.S. will somehow take over the zone without any troops being involved. Of course. It’s been such a calm, low terrorist activity area for so long, what could possibly go wrong with that? I’m sure the billionaires supporting Trump will be the first to rush in and invest their money in Gaza. Maybe a new Tesla battery plant!
- Fiscal Sanity
- Well we are apparently on a Friday countdown for the Senate to begin work on their budget resolution as they have zero faith in Mike Johnson’s ability to do anything in the House. Between an endless array of new spending ideas from Donald (sovereign wealth funds, decontaminating/rebuilding Gaza, tax cuts for everyone, building massive deportation hold centers just to name a few), backtracking on tariffs after Canada and Mexico did either what they already had in progress or have done before and the massive layoff of Federal workers planned (which of course will be free) why worry? In one of America’s greatest ironies, our fiscal future depends on the always rational members of the House Freedom Caucus to continue to hold their breath and turn blue unless the budget deficit actually goes down. No pressure. The debt limit is within sight, a budget reconciliation bill hasn’t even been put to paper yet and the Oligarchs want to know where their tax cuts are! No one debates the need to get federal spending under control, but is the only reason for doing that to be able to give the rich another tax cut? after all, which group came out of the pandemic with the greatest increase in wealth? Oh that’s right- billionaires. Take from the poor (here it comes Medicaid, food stamps, Medicare, etc) and give to the rich.
- Right sizing of the government
- The Elon Musk “slash and burn” tour continues. We’ve focused on the truly big hitters like foreign aid and education. Going to be entertaining when all the recipients of education dept. funding (biased toward red states) don’t get their $ and get to raise state taxes. But don’t worry, we have a crack team of 19-26 year olds rewiring the government in clear violation of the separation of powers concept in the Constitution. Why be alarmed if one of the two key individuals accessing the Treasury Payment system resigned because the WSJ asked if “I was a racist before it was cool” was really appropriate? Who would have thought that anyone associated with South Africa or Elon Musk (the far right German political party aficionado) could possibly be racist?