All right. Tariffs, native jobs, and crippling Putin. That’s the subject of the riff. Kind of a Pope Pare tonight. You know something’s working when the front of the Wall Street Journal reads, and I’ll quote, “The tariff effect. Billions in revenue, but no economic earthquake.” So, there’s no tariff recession, no tariff inflation, and no tariff retaliation war. Meanwhile, imports from China have fallen off a cliff below 2002 levels. And meanwhile, the US trade deficit is a 2-year low. Just saying.
And in other news, a great piece by the brilliant Larry Lindesay called Border Enforcement and the labor force. Listen to this. Since January, foreign born employment has fallen by 1 million. Native workers have skyrocketed to 2.5 million. The border is closed thankfully. It’s a major success story by President Trump, but it has not crippled the labor market as many Wall Strewers said. And while this is happening, Hispanic employment continues to rise under Mr. Trump. But that’s because a majority of Hispanics in America are native.
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And I will add, Mr. Trump did especially well with this demographic in the last election, didn’t he? And as for the Russian story, we’ll get an update from Secretary of State Marco Rubio in just a little while. As always, there are pluses and minuses in that story, but President Trump has already slapped a 25% tariff on India because they keep buying oil from Russia despite the fact that Trump has asked him not to any number of times. I certainly hope India is not going to become some kind of rogue nation. But now they’re facing a 50% tariff, 25% baseline, 25% Russian punishment.
And despite occasional positive rhetoric from Prime Minister Modi, no real trade and tariff progress was ever made with India. But more on Russia. Even if secondary sanctions are slapped on countries like China and India or whoever keeps doing business with Russia or buying their oil, that still leaves the issue of Russia’s fleet of covert tankers that have gotten around any number of sanctions and tariffs down through the years. Question now is what does Miss Trump want to do about their covert tanker fleet?
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If you cut off Russian oil sales, well, the whole country is going to implode and they’ll never have the financial means to keep fighting Ukraine or anybody else. Why not maximum sanctions on all their businesses? And then remember this, the US and the EU have all the Russian central bank reserves. It’s about $300 billion. Now, America only controls five billion. The rest is in the EU. The reserves are dollars and other currencies and gold and bonds. You want to really Putin, confiscate Russia’s financial crown jewels.
