America’s tariff war has produced its first success, clamping down on dangerous contraband smuggled across the border into the US.
The War on Drugs gets all the press.
It’s glitzy and prestigious. It appeals to news journalists who publish glamour shots of expensive piles of cocaine, methamphetamine or ecstasy, or scare readers with sensational pictures of heroin spoons, crack pipes, burnt fentanyl foils and necrotic track marks.
With between one quarter and one half of America’s massive prison population being incarcerated for drug offences – most of them for personal possession – almost everyone knows someone who’s been done for drugs.
Most of those potheads are in private prisons, so the War on Drugs sustains an all-American industry and honest working-class jobs.
Thrilling action movies and award-winning TV series are made about the black-market trade in illicit self-medication. Drugs are a Hollywood mainstay, just as backwoods distilling and moonshine runners with their souped-up cars and Tommy guns were a recurring theme in films during the Prohibition era (and for much the same reasons).
Smuggling
Tax, tariff or outlaw something, and what you get is black markets, smuggling and crime syndicates. And nobody wants those, except in the movies.
Trump has vowed to punish neighbouring countries heavily over their porous borders. He blames Canada and Mexico for letting all sorts of nefarious goods and people cross into the Great United States. Keeping them out is surely an unreasonable burden to place on the hardworking employees of the US Customs and Border Protection.
Machinations
Trump publicly targeted dangerous foreign football fans and la drogue du jour, fentanyl. Still, we must always remember that Trump plays 4D chess, and his public weave, which to the uninitiated look like the dark ramblings of a senescent narcissist, veils machinations that lesser mortals cannot apprehend.
All this time, he was really going after another insidious item of contraband, especially on the US border with that nation of lawless bandits to the north. Canadian brigands brazenly produce more of these dangerous products, millions of which end up being consumed by unwitting Americans – and even by children!
As long as ordinary Americans are the victims of callous Canadian greed, America cannot in good conscience call itself great again. That is why all decent people will cheer that Trump’s tariff threats are already achieving tremendous success.
Seizures
Even the communist, state-sponsored Canadian Broadcasting Corporation admits: “Officials made 3 254 egg-related seizures in January and February 2025, according to new data released by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). That’s a 116 per cent increase in egg seizures compared to the 1 508 events the same two months a year ago.”
The dreadful impact of this black-market egg supply can clearly be seen in the data. While egg prices continued to rise by 25% since Trump’s inauguration, to peak at an all-time high of $8.17 (about R150) per dozen in early March, prices have fallen sharply since, to a mere $3.26 (R60) when last checked.
Thankfully, this is still well above the $1 (R18) lows of the liberal egg-pushing Biden era. In previous times, the woke elites just didn’t care that children throughout America were scoffing down eggs like candy. They recklessly allowed cheap eggs from international poultry cartels to flood the US market. No true patriot will stand for this.
Fake news
Prior to Trump’s election, the media reported on Trump supporters who complained about high egg prices, but they were obviously woke leftist plants who wanted to normalise the supply of cut-price nutritious protein bombs to children.
They also reported that Trump promised to bring prices down “starting on day one”, when he was elected, but that was fake news from the notoriously failing fake news channel, CNN.
“Eggs should be rare, safe and legal,” announced a White House fluff head in a press briefing to hand-picked right-wing media puppets who ask nice, planted questions and never probe Trump’s latest golf championship victories.
Stagflation
Broader consumer price inflation in the US stayed surprisingly low in February, depressed as it is by the dangerous decline in egg prices. (I kid. The real reason inflation remains subdued is cheaper airline fares, because nobody wants to fly to the US anymore, and neither the government nor US businesses are spending much on air travel lately.)
Low inflation won’t last. US consumers’ one-year inflation expectations have almost doubled since November 2024. Their five-year inflation expectation rose to the highest level since the early 1990s.
Despite this, the Federal Reserve held rates steady last week, and signaled at least two more rate cuts before the end of the year, in deference to earlier demands by Trump, who is by his own account a master of monetary policy,
The Fed also announced lower economic growth expectation, at 1.7% for 2025: 0.4 points down from the projection in December 2024.
What is a little 1970s-style stagflation when it keeps cheap Canadian eggs out of the clutches of innocent American children this Easter, right?
[IMAGE: Smuggler’s Cave, a digital painting by TomPrante at Deviant Art. Used under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.]
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