Tariffs as Class Warfare Social Weapon

Biden delivered a recovery from COVID the conservative “Economist” magazine dubbed “The Envy of the World.” The 1% agreed. Which is why it must be stopped.

You can’t “take back” real wage gains, by the average Joe. You can, however, render them meaningless.

Welcome to Tariffs, as a social weapon of the 1%’s class warfare.

History Repeats Itself

There is a direct 1:1 correlation between the politics of “overturning” the New Deal, that began in earnest, in the 1970s, and the return to the Guilded Age wage disparities of the 1920s, in the 2020’s.

• In 1929, the top 0.1% of families held more wealth than the bottom 42% combined.

• In 2023, the top 1% of households held approximately 31–34% of total U.S. wealth.

Maintaining the Wealth Gap

It is maintaining this wealth gap, not trade, that is important to the 1%. They are expecting a need for a massive downsizing of the human population, that the global warming that they unleashed on the world is bringing upon us faster than conceived.

This is why our current generation of Mellon-manufactured Republicans have been busy at work on ways to make the general public economically and physically vulnerable, with things like tariffs.

Don’t know who the Mellon family is? They’ve been terraforming the United States, with a bit of help from alliances of common interest, in the oil producing world, for a century. Musk, and the “tech bros.” are newcomers to the party. Meet the Mellons, my multipart series, breaks down their inter-generational ‘contributions’ to the regression of the United States, economically, and culturally, to where we are today.

Liberalism’s Historic Bubble

What most Americans have been raised on, the idea of liberal democracy being a permanent change in the economic, and social liberalization of the United States, is really more of a bubble.

The second World War, along with the New Deal, pulled us out of the economic shattering that the excesses of greed, and wealth inequality caused to America, in the Great Crash that led to the Great depression.

• 1950s–1970s: Broad-based gains. Wages rose with productivity. The middle class expanded, unionization was high, and social mobility improved.

• 1980s–present: Wages stagnated for the bottom 60%, while high earners captured a growing share of national income.

  • Since 1980, real wages for typical workers have grown ~17%, while productivity rose over 70%.

  • The top 1% has captured more than half of all new income growth since 2000.

Inequality and Job Quality

• Deindustrialization (starting in the late 1970s) led to:

  • Loss of high-wage union manufacturing jobs.

  • Rise in lower-wage, less stable service-sector jobs (especially retail, food service, and gig work).

• Wealth inequality has returned to Gilded Age levels by some measures.

  • In 2023, the top 10% own ~70% of U.S. wealth, while the bottom 50% hold ~2.5%.

The current Industrialist order has made trillions, and produced huge shareholder value, which has, in turn, increased the wealth gap between the haves, and have-nots, almost to pre-Great Depression levels.

Popping the Poor’s Post-Pandemic Prosperity Possibilities

We’re told, very regularly, that Tariffs are a tax. They are. Individual Americans pay them, not foreign companies, or governments. They’re something more though…

Tariffs are also a leash, and a collar, to remove the effect of the gains that America made coming out of the pandemic.

They aren’t just regressive, in that the burden of them is born as another tax on Americans.

Tariffs are a means of erasing any real gains that Americans, especially more economically vulnerable Americans made, under the Biden Administration, coming out of the pandemic.

The Economist called America’s successful rise out of the COVID Pandemic the “envy of the world.”

Wages rose.

Spending power rose.

Money, injected to stabilize an economy, that was ground to a halt by COVID’s social distancing requirements, started to hyper-inflate the country. In 2023-2024, though, the Federal Reserve found a relatively soft landing, curbing inflation.

If Trump had not been elected, we would have continued to build on that stability, in that rapidly recovering global community.

If you’re of a mind to make sure that the poor stay poor, as the 1%, under Mellon Social Darwinist theology of over a century dictates, you need instability.

They needed a giant monkey wrench dropped into the global system. Trump, and his general erratic insanity can be curbed, by other world leaders. They learned that in his first presidency.

Tariffs, though, grind the gears of global commerce. They break the global economic system, to the point of increasing the world’s most vulnerable populations’ demise.

Tariffs, then, are a part of the democide that is, to the .1%, necessary to bring the expected resources of the planet, affected by the global warming, the byproduct of their fossil fuels businesses, and the population, into balance.

Tariffs, broadly applied, would reintroduce inflationary pressure. They would erode real wages again, especially in sectors like food, clothing, and consumer electronics.

No country makes everything that they need.

Tariffs raise the prices of imported goods. Lower-income households spend a greater share of their income on them, especially things like electronics, clothing, appliances.

The relative burden, then, beccomes heavier on them, than on wealthier households.

A 2019 study by economists Amiti, Redding, and Weinstein found that the full cost of Trump-era tariffs was borne almost entirely by U.S. importers and consumers, not foreign exporters.

Tariffs act like a giant pumping of the brakes on the economy.

By creating fear of tariffs, you don’t even need the tariffs to really be applied, to damage the global economic flow.

Businesses try to insulate themselves, from the financial effects.

Tariffs create uncertainty for them, especially those with global supply chains. When tariff policy is used as a political lever (e.g., the first Trump China-U.S. trade war of 2018-2019), it prompts companies to:

• Stockpile goods in anticipation of price increases;

• Delay hiring or investment;

• Quickly pass on costs to consumers.

These reactions cumulatively slow down growth. The 2018–2019 tariffs reduced GDP growth by about 0.3% annually, according to the Tax Foundation and IMF estimated.

Real costs quickly rise. They wipe away any gains that people, who live more paycheck to paycheck, received from raises in the minimum wage, or the lowest unemployment in history.

You Don’t Have to Have Actual Tariffs to Create Chaos

Businesses act on expected costs, not just actual ones. Trump’s threats of tariffs, and wildly erratic application of them, affects purchasing decisions, contracts, investment in automation. It even complicates reshoring efforts for companies bringing work back to the United States.

Even if tariffs are never enacted, the market reaction can preemptively raise prices, which creates disorder, and inefficiencies.

Tariffs Disproportionately Hurt Real Economic Gains of Low-Income Workers

Low-income workers benefited from minimum wage increases, at the state-level. Coming out of COVID, they also commanded stronger earnings, from a tight labor market. This empowered better bargaining, with employers.

Tariffs knock back the purchasing power of those higher wages, through price inflation.

The BudgetLab at Yale University reports, in April of 2025:

“Current Tariff Rate: Consumers face an overall average effective tariff rate of 17.8%, the highest since 1934.”

Even when there was a TACO moment, and shifts in buying, both by companies and consumers, the taxation rate of the tariffs remained brutal:

The reduction since the April 15 report is almost entirely due to the lower rates on Chinese imports—the US-UK trade deal has minimal effects on average tariff rates. Even after consumption shifts, the average tariff rate will be 16.4%, the highest since 1937.”

Authors keep mentioning the 1930s for a reason. The Treasury Secretary, under Herbert Hoover, Andrew Mellon, and his GOP cronies, were the last idiots to push broad tariffs. These ill-fated protections, of the 1%’s massive wealth maldistribution, of course, led to the Great Depression.

Surgical Tariffs Can Serve a Purpose. Broad Tariffs Only Crush the Poor and Businesses alike.

Tariffs are not sometimes purely used for economic gain. They can serve as geopolitical tools, like putting pressure, on China, to stop Internet theft.

Trump’s 2025 tariffs were tragi-comically ridiculous. They were so broad, that we were imposing tariffs on barren sub-Antarctic territories, like Heard, and McDonald Islands.

It was a “nowhere on Earth is safe” action.

The only purpose of such overkill? Make sure that the terror of American tariffs is global. That it shatters the flow of goods that have generally helped the world to prosper.

Economically Fragile Suffer

The most economically vulnerable are then put into greater struggle. The most impacted may simply die.

Businesses Suffer

Broad tariffs also crush American businesses. In 2018, the U.S. imposed tariffs, under Section 232, for national security, on steel, and aluminum. While Chinese steel was the primary concern, the tariffs hit major trading partners, and allies, that were not engaged in dumping allies like Canada, the EU, and South Korea. This weakened alliances. It domestically raised costs. All without materially addressing the Chinese steel dumping.

The Peterson Institute for International Economics found that these tariffs reduced U.S. manufacturing output, in sectors reliant on imported steel, like auto parts, more than they helped domestic steel producers.

Reduce the materials? Curb their consumption. Which means the bottom of the economic ladder doesn’t get that refrigerator that keeps their food at a safe, proper food temperature. A car, for work, out of reach, means more difficulty in seeking work, or educational opportunity.

The study found that each steel job saved generated roughly $270,000 in extra industry profits. At the same time, though, it inflicted approximately $650,000 in annual costs on U.S. industries that used steel, such as auto parts manufacturers.¹

Tariffs as Class Warfare

If you read my article “Republicans Defy. You Die. But Why?” You’ll see the connectivity between Democide, a eugenic cleansing of the lower-tier classes of the world, and the Second Industrial Age.

AI, and machines, including robots will continue to make a lot of humanity irrelevant.

It’s all about the Useless, and the UBI

The ultra rich do not see the purpose, then, of keeping us alive, with something like Universal Basic Income (UBI), if we serve no purpose to making money for them.

They’re well aware of the damages that they have wrought to the environment, and how it will limit the “usable” parts of the globe. They deem themselves the winners.

Therefore, you must go.

So tariffs, along with cutting social programs, and social safety nets, are another way of quietly accelerating the demise of those who can least afford to live.

They are a stealth socioeconomic weapon, that only has to upend/disrupt the positive global flow of capital long enough to send the costs of everything to levels that make things unaffordable, and a struggle, once again, for hundreds of millions of people around the planet.

They’re not just an annoying tax. For the most financially fragile, whether they are imposed, or just used as a terror tool, they will be a death sentence.

---

1. https://www.piie.com/blogs/realtime-economics/2025/trumps-tariffs-enrich-steel-barons-high-cost-us-manufacturers-and?utm_source=demodirge.substack.com