Trump 2025 - Resuming The National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity (Part 2)

In even simpler terms, declared customs value (what they measured) does not equal the actual purchase price. It sometimes can, but often doesn’t. The classic example would be discounts, which work the same basic way they do at the grocery store. You can buy a pound of hamburger with a price of $4.99 (declared value) but only pay $4.49 after a 10 percent discount is applied on the final invoice. Sellers can offer discounts to offset the tarrifs while the buyer is still formally responsible for import duty payment, with the declared customs value is still the same or perhaps slightly higher.

This should usually be reflected on the commercial invoice, but sometimes won’t show up until the final invoice is settled. There are a LOT of ways that it can differ in reality, and you can bet that plenty of agreements are being made to react to tarrifs that don’t necessarily show up in customs data but still keep the company in compliance.

These scenarios would only be observable to researchers if they had access to the final invoice, not simply what’s captured on customs documentation.

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Out of curiosity, do you have any studies that indicate the opposite of the one I posted?

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I just caught the video of people distrupting a church service in St Paul. Makes my blood boil. Lawless heathens. I cant help but put myself in the shoes of the worshippers and my God I would not have the restraint they had. Hands would fly. It’s exactly the reason I started carrying at mass.

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I’ve been boiling about that too. I don’t mind mutual combat, but they fucked up. The congregation was minding their own business and peacefully worshiping.

Its time to start hitting back.

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Congratulations on citing something that is actually publicly perceived to be unbiased, and not your usual lefty echo chamber. I will say this -it’s German so obviously any non US country will be, shall we say incentivised, to say that the US raising tariffs is bad for the US and not bad for the country paying the tariffs; we all know, based on the real time actions of the countries that cave in real time to a lot of Orange demands, that that is simply not clear cut, unlike the conclusion of this study; finally, my admittedly personal bias is that any organization that has partnered with the Gates Foundation…can it truly be “neutral”…?

WRT the study, the sample size used is from January 2024 to November 2025. Trump’s tariffs did not even start until February 2025 LOL. I smell an EAGERNESS here to crank out something that paints the desired conclusion.

Finally, at the end of the day this study is an ivory tower conclusion. Real time US inflation data does not reflect an increase in inflation. Let’s wait and see.

Same question for you - do you have any studies that seem to indicate the opposite? I’ve changed my mind in this thread before, so it’s not a gotcha question.

Pretty much sums up all these “peaceful” demonstrators.

I’m not even religious and I’m appalled by the lack of basic human civility here. If I was religious…

^^ I would totally not do that, because I’d do a Jonathan Ross.

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It’s way too early to do a study. In addition to the lack of time/data size, the tariffs have fluctuated wildly based on inter-country policy reactions, which further increase the need to wait until the percentages stabilize.

Real time inflation data seem

that so far the suppliers have chosen to mostly “eat” the tariffs.

Personally, I still have not seen the price of broccoli from China at Walmart increase one penny. Lol.

So, just trust Trump and carry on?

Trust what you see and experience. Never trust the “experts”.

Four years after this dude moved to Florida, CA is hoping this guy didn’t keep his receipts so that they can keep taxing him LOLLL. Gavin Newscum, the failed Governor of this failing state, is the current leading Democrat for 2028 President. JFC.

Good!

Reflexively, I agree.

But I have too much faith…(LOL) in the human race.

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Another question - who is it on the Republican side?

Vance. But Trump has yet to officially endorse him.

Personally, I prefer Rubio given what he’s doing as Secretary of State. Rubio has said he endorses Vance. Imo some combo of Vance/Rubio is ideal.

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No, just my observation that 96 percent can’t possibly be an accurate number. This is mostly because the declared value on customs paperwork does not reliably equal the actual purchase price.

BTW, I’m working on reading LOTR for the first time in over a decade. J.R.R. Tolkien clearly states in Concerning Hobbits that Hobbit society was very limited in their self-governance. Such a society is entirely incompatible with modern “woke” ideas. Here’s a chart of the actual “woke” ideas that would completely re-shape Hobbit society, as Tolkien described it.

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I can’t find the quote, but I remember him saying that Hobbit society was best understood as philosophy perfect anarchy. I’ll look for it.

But that would mean that “wokeism” would be pretty freely rampant, just with social pressures instead of legal ones. Although as a monoethnic society they found other ways to quabble.

I’ll re-read it with you if you want to start that Tolkien thread.

Woke wants government enforcement of their idea of “equity”.

That would be antithetical to actual anarchy, wouldn’t it?

Like in the Squire, the woke hobbit would just be emotionally unstable and delusional with no governmental recourse or ability to enforce their emotional problems.

Actually your China comments weren’t completely off the charts. Canada has done new deals with China, EU is doing a Mercosur -deal with South America now (it would make the worlds biggest free market zone).

European leaders are still careful, abd how they crawl in front of Trump is pitiful. But there are more and more voices that demand less trade, less political connections and less military co-operation with US.

Some say NATO is dead from the US part (I kinda agree), so Europe needs finally to step up the defences. Also, strong trade relations can’t go on with unreliable partner. There was interesting article about how interconnected the US-Eur. economies are, and how either side could completely shatter ones economy if it would not mind the collateral damage. This is a situation thst has been developing at least 70 years, but it needs to go.

Anecdote: Finland just bought new fighter jets from US. More and more people do say now it was a massive mistake. It was deal worth of billions, I doubt the next deal will be done with US though. Most think it would be incredibly dumb move to trust USA at this point.

I’m curious. How ready US citizens are to give up their strongest allies? Do you think US is stronger alone? (I honestly don’t).

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I’m completely ready to give up our strongest allies if keeping them means rejecting Trump’s domestic policies and reverting to the internationalist order that has bled the USA so dry that home ownership and basic security for Americans has grown more out-of-reach than ever.

The internal strife we’re experiencing over deportations and Trump himself is the culmination of decades of diametrically opposed worldviews coming to a head. Everything I write about in Lewiston is happening at scale all over the country and especially in Democrat-governed jurisdictions. Its the same script they are running across the western world.

What is the script? It’s becoming increasingly clear that it is probably the most sophisticated wealth extraction scam in history. It is the importation of a new voting bloc with vast amounts of public resources redistributed through open channels (nonprofits, social welfare) and by allowing the right groups of people to simply plunder the public treasury by billing the government and having that bill paid with no scrutiny whatsoever, also known as “fraud”.

As far as our allies go, had we not course-corrected with Trump, we would no longer be a good ally in the coming decades. We’d be a broken nation with increasingly less capability (and willingness) to project power worldwide. Fortunately, we got Trump, we got Musk to purchase X, we got DOGE, we got ICE, and we have a path to actually exposing and defeating the absolutely mind-bogglingly audacious plan to import new voters to usher in Democratic Socialism, which is really just gay race communism.

At the end of the day, non-communist aligned countries are going to want to do business with us, especially if Trump’s plan actually works and we strengthen our position as an economic powerhouse. We’re a massive market. They’re going to want to cooperate with us militarily because the world just saw us render Chinese and Russian air defense systems useless while we abducted a communist drug cartel leader from his home with no casualties.

The mainstream press in both the USA and the world has been desperate to paint Trump as a fascist dictator-in-waiting for over a decade now, precisely because he posed an existential threat to their scam to import a new voting bloc to secure power in order to extract mind-boggling sums of wealth from the population. It is why he’s the most viciously hated and smeared US President since Abraham Lincoln. He’s taking a wrecking ball to the wealth extraction scam.

Here in Maine (and Minnesota), we’re watching the entire narrative of the last 10 years or so crumble from the weight of its own contradictions and all of the brazen fraud that is finally being uncovered. Many are still in the denial phase where they can’t wrap their heads around the fact that the feel-good narratives of DEI and Democratic Socialist ideology more broadly have been a massive con. Many well-educated people will simply never accept the notion that they were grievously wrong about geopolitics after all that NPR, all those Economist articles, all those New York Time editorials, and all of their high-minded friends and colleagues agreeing with their progressive takes. They will never admit that their plumbers and mechanics had the right instincts the entire time.

That’s okay. We don’t need them to. They can just cope in their own way as the situation continues to unfold and every day brings new news of yet another audacious scam that’s been hidden in plain sight for years.

You’ll all thank us in 20 years when we finally have to liberate Europe from the gay race communists. If Trump’s tariffs and bombastic rhetoric worry the world, wait until the UK becomes a nuclear-armed Muslim majority nation. They’re already quite fascist with their speech controls, and the boot keeps pressing down harder on the population. Same thing in Germany, where they are still talking about banning the opposition party. They need a Trump of their own, but I’m not sure that’s even possible anymore.

In summary, we’re in the process of rejecting the rotten European ideas about government and embracing American ideas, which is going to shake things up a bit, but shouldn’t be any cause for alarm unless you’re a communist.

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