To propose a model for thinking and talking about Trump-era tariffs that I find clarifying and would like to push into more general use.

To suggest a simple timeline for the changing roles of tariffs in US life. Those changes happened over the span of decades during the US’s early industrial development. Like so much else they are accelerating now, including today.

To offer a “what is to be done?” suggestion, plus links to articles, reports, books, graphs, and other resources with chapter-and-verse background for points in the other two sections.

BARTIROMO: Are we now gonna see egg prices move back higher because of the tariffs?

BROOKE ROLLINS: All to be determined. The president has said that we’ll have a little bit of uncertainty in the coming weeks, perhaps a month or two. I’m not gonna sit here and say everything is gonna be perfect and the prices are gonna come down tomorrow because this is an uncertain time, but that is the president’s genius in all this … God bless him.

Bartiromo, formerly known as “the money honey” knows very well what’s going on. Brooke Rollins is the Secretary of Agriculture.

The markets crashing is all part of Trump’s genius plan. Here’s more of that Wharton School genius:

It didn’t take long before someone cracked the code on how the White House decided to overturn the global trade order.

The White House claimed to base its decision on tariff rates and nontariff barriers, but economic journalist James Surowiecki reckons it was all just a back-of-the-envelope calculation. “Instead, for every country, they just took our trade deficit with that country and divided it by the country’s exports to us,” the former financial columnist for The New Yorker posted on X. “What extraordinary nonsense this is.”

That approach meant Trump and his advisers simply took the U.S. trade deficit with the European Union — $235.6 billion in 2024 — and divided it by the bloc’s exports to the U.S., which totaled $605.8 billion.

The result was 39 percent, which the administration interpreted as the “unfair” trade advantage the EU holds over the U.S. From there, the White House proposed a 20 percent tariff, framing it as a corrective measure to level the playing field.

Trump, speaking in the White House Rose Garden on Wednesday, said he was being “kind” by cutting the tariff rate almost in half.

[…]

The White House responded with a formula featuring Greek letters and six research references to underscore the credibility of its momentous economic decision. Incidentally, that formula describes the same calculation detailed by Surowiecki in his analysis.

Washington claimed its reciprocal tariffs, masterminded by the Council of Economic Advisers, were based on a formula accounting for trade barriers, import elasticities and tariff pass-through rates — aiming to set tariffs high enough to eliminate bilateral trade deficits. It also considered value-added tax as a trade barrier — even though this is paid on products and services sold in a country regardless of where the company selling them is from.

The White House’s calculated figure of 39 percent is more than 10 times higher than the actual average, trade-weighted tariff charged by the EU of 2.7 percent, according to the World Trade Organization.

“Have you ever encountered in the wild,” Hayes began, “out of the mouth of someone at a doorstep or diner, ‘I hate those Canadians who are ripping us off. We gotta get back at them’?”

Walz burst out laughing.

“Never. Never,” Walz replied.

It’s getting a lot of attn today. But even before today most of the country had very little idea of what has happened at NIH or through it the entire ecosystem of biomedical research in the US. Simply put, Musk, Kennedy & Trump exploded a bomb right in the middle of cancer cure research in the US.

On purpose. For many cancers, research has been put back years or decades. Alzheimers treatment and cure research similar story. If you know people who are survivors of these diseases and fear recurrence or have genetic dispositions or are just like everyone else and know they are liable to these and other diseases potential cures are now less likely to be there when you need them. You have to ask: what is the goal when you pull the plug on the whole ecosystem of cancer cure research? What’s the agenda? The answers are so dark and twisted most people struggle to believe it could be real.

But it is real. And it’s happened so quickly, most of the country doesn’t know it yet. Indeed, I got some key indications over the weekend that even people in the biomedical research world outside of NIH don’t get yet what’s happened. So the bomb has gone off but most people don’t realize it yet. It’s like Bobby Kennedy and Elon and Trump just drove a big semi full of fertilizer Tim McVeigh-style up in front of the national labs and detonated it.

The prospect of more life saving cures and treatments already got much bleaker. If you think you or a loved one might one day get one of these cancers, or Alzheimers, or various other dread diseases 10, 20, 30 years from now your chances have already dimmed because of what’s happened just in the last two months.

And now they’ve decided to up the pace and make it far worse because of a mix of difficult to fully comprehend pathological motives tied to political extremism, belief that AI will supplant medical research & that destroying the current research world will add to their wealth and political power and cement their hold over what was the American republic.

It will take a determined, smart, relentless and implacable counterattack to begin to undo the damage.

From Apocalypse Now:

Willard: They told me that you had gone totally insane, and that your methods were unsound.

Kurtz: Are my methods unsound?

Willard: I don’t see any method at all, sir.

. . .

Does he really believe that Canada is a major source of fentanyl? Worse, does he believe that fentanyl smugglers pay tariffs?

But is it all a cover for the real, probably sinister agenda of Trump’s tariff push?

No. There isn’t any secret agenda, devised by people who know that the public story is nonsense. How do I know that? Because who, exactly, do you think is devising this secret agenda?