An incident occurred on April 29 that Robert Reich called on his Saturday morning Coffee Klatch “This is one of the worst examples of how consumers are being screwed by Trump and by big business … ”
Amazon was planning to display the amount of the price
of items that was due to the tariffs. The White House got wind of this and promptly
responded.
White House press secretary called it “a hostile and political act.” She then
asked “Why didn’t Amazon do this when the
Biden administration hiked inflation to the highest level in 40 years?”
President Trump phoned Jeff Bezos that morning after
which Amazon quickly announced that this was just an idea floated by marketing
and was never a serious plan.
Referring to the phone call Trump said “Jeff Bezos was very nice. He solved the
problem very quickly and he did the right thing”.
Let’s unpack a few things here.
First, being transparent about the costs of tariffs
isn’t a problem for anyone except Donald Trump. It’s a problem for him because
it exposes his lies that tariffs are paid by the exporting country not by American
consumers.
Did Bezos do the right thing? It was right for Trump
and in the short term for Amazon (we don’t know what Trump threatened to do if
they proceeded). But it certainly wasn’t the right thing for Amazon’s customers.
Was displaying the cost of tariffs hostile and political?
Hostile? hardly. It only becomes political if one of the political parties is
lying about who pays for tariffs. And do you really believe that backing off
from the proposed pricing was NOT political?
Actually Leavitt’s idea of posting the contributing
causes of inflation during the Biden years would have been a good thing. It would
show that the greatest part of inflation was due to Covid related production
and supply chain disruptions and very little to the stimulus packages that
helped America recover so quickly from the pandemic.
Back to Reich: “This
is a microcosm of everything that Trump represents and also the corruption of
Trumpism. This is a microcosm of big
business kissing his tuchus.”
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/where-will-we-go-from-here-the-coffee [22.20]
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