The ridiculous trade war started by the Trump administration appears to be a federalized version of the contortions that New Hampshire goes through all the time in its efforts to fund government functions while raising revenue from anything but an income or sales tax.
While I love the simplicity of paying the ticketed price for an item with no mental calculation of the additional tax amount, and enjoy a slightly simpler tax season because I don't have to compile a state return on top of a federal one, I also have to put up with the absurdly high property tax rates.
Tax rates vary from town to town based on what the real estate is worth, with poor towns often paying disproportionately higher mil rates because the property itself is not as desirable as in a more posh town. Because all funding -- more or less -- comes from property taxes, state aid to education, for instance, still comes out of your own local tax bill.
Education in particular is chronically underfunded. Federal money is welcomed to help smooth out the shortfalls in multiple areas of state funding. But hey: "live free or die," we don't have broad-based taxes. It's a bit like a rich kid sponging off of their parents while bragging about their wildly successful independent lifestyle.
Desperately seeking to offset the disastrous consequences of his handout to the rich in the form of existing and proposed tax cuts, Trump is engaged in the same withdrawal of services to ordinary citizens while seeking alternative funding. It's appropriate that in so doing he will withdraw some of the federal funding that New Hampshire has used to make its policies look successful for decades, but that's no comfort. By devastating our country's trade relationships and raising costs to consumers and producers alike, Trump is going to screw up the economy bigly, like no one else has ever screwed it up before. Tariffs are paid by consumers.
We the people are the power in the economy and in politics. Most of us are too numb to realize it and take part. I count myself in the numb category for many years. My excuse is that I was gaining life experience and observations in order to decide where I wanted to put my support. I was too numb to figure out that I needed to be supporting the lesser of two evils -- usually clearly identifiable -- to slow the progress of the forces that were bent on eroding democracy as far back as 1980. Their camouflage was much better back then. And their marketing has been powerful all along. I was deeply afraid of turning out to support the wrong side. What if the party that I had a visceral repulsion from turned out to be right?
Decades later it's obvious how wrong they were. But their propaganda machine has gone from effective to ubiquitous. They get considerable help from semi-smart people who roam the Internet, most of them too young to have lived through the process of degeneration. Their sense of the good old days was already a lot worse than my base line from decades earlier. I got to see it unfold. Younger people have to get it from history. That history comes with the storyteller's bias.
The current regime seeks to make the very rich even richer, while going through motions that it hopes will convince its base that the regime is making calculated, good faith efforts to control the deficit. Those tariffs are going to bring back American manufacturing, by golly. A lot of poor and elderly people are going to die miserable deaths as a result of the destruction of social services, but no one needs those losers. It's a much deadlier analog to New Hampshire starving its public schools as it turns to vouchers, tuition systems, and homeschooling. Doll it up as "choice" and "liberty."
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