Don’t Cry for Wall Street: Tariffs Boost Middle Class in the Long Run

Stock market worshippers freaking out over tariffs: quit your bitching. This is a modest-in-the-grand-scheme-of-things decline off of all-time highs:

You will live. And even if it gets worse (which it will), you will still live.

For five decades, financial elites have been riding a gravy train fueled by cheap overseas labor, globalization, and policies that hollowed out domestic manufacturing — all while pocketing record profits and juicing their portfolios to the gills.

Now that Trump throws a wrench in their Big Scam — to protect strategic industries, re-shore production, and reduce dependency on geopolitical rivals like China — they act like it’s the apocalypse. God forbid American workers get a little leverage back, or a long-term industrial base gets rebuilt.

Trump, without having to worry about reelection, is in DGAF mode. This is literally the first time in most of our lifetimes that a President has chosen the real economy over Wall Street and kicking the can down the road.

Tariffs aren’t always perfect policy, but the knee-jerk Wall Street reaction is always short-termism: “Margins down 5%? End of days!” It’s performative panic by people who are addicted to low-wage imports, zero interest rates, and stock buybacks.

More to the point, they have grown accustomed and addicted to the idea that the stock market should never under any circumstances be allowed to fall, and when it does, it requires full-scale government intervention and bailouts. This has created a grotesque sense of entitlement and the mother of all asset bubbles.

They say tariffs distort the market — as if currency manipulation, corporate lobbying, ZIRP, QE and foreign slave-labor supply chains weren’t already distorting it.

The market will fall. Boo hoo. It’s the most richly-valued stock market in a generation and more overpriced than any point other than the peak of the tech bubble in 1999:

Here’s another thing: What Wall Street and their shills in the media don’t realize is that these tariffs are the warning shot, not the real crisis.

The real threat isn’t a 10% dip in the S&P 500. It’s the collapse of the petrodollar system — for 50 years the backbone of America’s ability to print unlimited money, run massive trade deficits, and maintain global dominance without producing much of anything. That system is fracturing right now as multipolar power rises (China, BRICS, Gulf states de-dollarizing), and once it breaks, America won’t be able to just export inflation to the rest of the world anymore.

That’s when the bill comes due for:

• $36 trillion in national debt
• $175 trillion in unfunded liabilities (Social Security, Medicare, etc.)
• Decades of offshoring, deindustrialization, and financialization

We’ve been living off the fumes of 50 years of dollar hegemony. In a post-petrodollar world, if we don’t make things again — energy, semiconductors, steel, food, defense tech — we’re utterly cooked. You can’t import your way out of a sovereign debt crisis when no one wants your currency.

That’s when the real market crash will happen, and at that point, there will be no bailout for Wall Street. In fact, there can be no bailout for Wall Street because the money printer is wholly reliant on the petrodollar system and bottomless demand for US dollars.

Trump’s tariffs aren’t a silver bullet, but they’re a signal that we need to re-shore industry, rebuild supply chains, and prepare for a world where dollar privilege ends.

If the Wall Streeters bitching now get their way, then when the day comes that global dollar demand dries up (it’s a matter of when, not if), then we will be in freefall with no parachute. They’ll be lucky if the market only plummets 60% like it did in 2008.

Another point: the stock market is not the real economy.

It’s not even close. It’s a casino for capital, rigged for decades to benefit a narrow slice of the population — mostly boomer elites, and foreign investors.

• The top 10% of Americans own 89% of all stocks.
• Boomers, who came of age during the greatest asset bubble in history (thanks to globalization, offshoring, deregulation, and the Fed printing press), own the lion’s share. They spent decades accumulating wealth while wages stagnated and jobs disappeared for everyone else.
• Meanwhile, foreign entities own over 30% of U.S. equities — meaning over a third of “our” stock market isn’t even ours. Forgive me if I do not weep for them.

When the stock market goes up, the average American feels nothing. No wealth effect. No wage boost. No benefit. But when it crashes? Suddenly it’s our problem. Suddenly we need bailouts. Socialism for the rich, capitalism for everyone else.

The stock market loves job cuts, offshoring of industry, union busting, automation, and stock buybacks over increased wages and R&D spending.

Why? Because these all boost short-term profits, which push stock prices higher. These people literally do not have the capacity to think further than 3 months ahead, and it’s been this way for nearly 50 years.

But all the things they love that make stocks go up in reality devastate the real economy — the economy where actual humans work, spend, and live.

The Fed and government have conditioned the market to expect free money every time there’s turbulence. ZIRP (zero interest rate policy), QE (quantitative easing), and the “Fed put” are all designed to protect asset prices, not people.

And every time there’s a downturn, Wall Street screams: “Do something!” They don’t mean create jobs. They mean: Protect my portfolio. Bail out my bag.

60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. Household debt is at record highs. Millennials and Gen Z are screwed on housing, retirement, and savings.

The U.S. can’t build basic infrastructure without Chinese steel and imported semiconductors. But hey — Apple’s stock is up 5%! So everything must be fine, right?

So no — when the stock market dips because of tariffs or reshoring efforts, it’s not the economy suffering. It’s the parasite getting hungry because the host is finally fighting back.

Anyone panicking over these tariffs while claiming to be “America First” is exposing themselves.

If you’re against tariffs that are meant to rebuild domestic industry, protect national security, and restore middle-class jobs, then you are not pro-America — you’re:

• Wall Street First
• Corporate Profits First
• Cheap foreign labor First
• American Middle Class Last

These people say they care about the real economy but melt down the second a policy even slightly disrupts: their global supply chain of slave-wage labor, their quarterly earnings calls, their inflated, Fed-fueled portfolios, and their ability to run a debt-based consumption system that requires importing everything and making nothing.

They’re fine with $36 trillion in debt. They’re fine with shipping jobs to China. They’re fine with Main Street getting obliterated, as long as the S&P doesn’t flinch.

But a tariff? A minor speed bump on the globalist gravy train?

Suddenly it’s “economic suicide!”

No.

What we’ve had for the last 50 years was economic suicide.

It was parasite capitalism — where the financial sector and multinational elites looted the real Main Street economy, obliterated out the working class, and liquidated America piece-by-piece in exchange for inflated asset prices and imported plastic.

NAFTA shipped your job overseas.

The petrodollar let the U.S. government run insane deficits without discipline.

Money printing and Fed bailouts pumped up Wall Street while leaving wages flat.

You can see the precise moment where productivity and wages decoupled in America: right around 1971 when the petrodollar system was created:

Free trade wasn’t “free” — it was a wrecking ball to America’s industrial base.

If you oppose these tariffs out of some economic principle, but said nothing when the U.S. was bailing out banks, printing trillions, or making itself totally dependent on China — you’re not a capitalist, you’re a collaborator.

This moment is a line in the sand: Either you’re for the real American economy — the one that makes things, employs people, and builds national strength— or you’re with the parasite class. There is no middle ground anymore.

Everything these short-sighted Wall Street parasites have led us to believe about “free trade” our whole lives is a lie.

It was never about efficiency, prosperity, or lifting up the global south/developing world. It was about bleeding America dry — hollowing out our industrial base, exporting middle-class jobs, and making the economy dependent on cheap foreign labor and imported junk so Wall Street could boost its margins and multinational corporations could rig the global chessboard in their favor.

“Free trade” wasn’t free. It came at the cost of:

• Entire towns—entire regions of the country—gutted by outsourcing
• Critical strategic industries handed over to China (hence Trump’s current obsession with rare earth materials)
• A generation of workers turned into DoorDashers and Amazon warehouse temps
• A trade deficit that’s a ticking time bomb
• Dependency on rivals for everything from medicine to microchips

While they told you cheaper TVs were a sign of “progress,” they were sacrificing national industry and self-reliance for short-term quarterly profits. The cheap TVs, by the way, were by design—immerse yourself in Netflix while society crumbles.

Now the bill is coming due. And they’re throwing a temper tantrum like babies.

In a world where the dollar no longer guarantees global obedience, all the free-trade fairy tales collapse under the weight of reality.

Tariffs? Industrial policy? Strategic re-shoring? These aren’t protectionist “mistakes.” They’re the first steps toward national survival in a post-dollar world where sovereignty has to be earned, not borrowed.

The “free trade” fantasy is dead. The empire of debt is crumbling. Tariffs are not a choice, they are a necessity. Otherwise, we will be completely caught with our pants down once the dollar loses its global supremacy.

What is the root of this widespread belief that tariffs are un-American and destined to destroy the American economy?

In school, many of us learned about the Smoot Hawley tariffs that supposedly caused the Great Depression, and that’s why we’re never supposed to enact tariffs again.

The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 raised U.S. tariffs on over 20,000 imported goods to historically high levels. It was passed in the early stages of the Great Depression.

Economists, professors, and corporate lobbyists have since turned it into a bogeyman:

“Remember Smoot-Hawley? Tariffs = depression!”

But that’s not what happened.

The Great Depression was already in full swing before the tariff passed. The stock market crashed in October 1929. Smoot-Hawley wasn’t signed into law until June 1930 — 9 months later.

By then, the global economy was already spiraling due to massive speculative bubbles on Wall Street, bank failures, gold standard rigidity (which prevented flexible monetary policy), tight money from the Federal Reserve in the early 1930s.

So blaming Smoot-Hawley for the Great Depression is a convenient and provable lie weaponized decades later to condition the public to never question “free trade.” Thus, though people could sense something was deeply wrong with the economy, never until now did they consider questioning our trade policy. “Things certainly aren’t great right now, but tariffs are still out of the question! Smoot-Hawley, Great Depression!”

What about the global fallout after Smoot Hawley, though?

Yes, other countries retaliated with their own tariffs — but that was part of a larger collapse of global cooperation that was already unraveling after World War I, the Versailles Treaty, and war debt/loan imbalances. The world economy was fragile.

• Germany was saddled with impossible reparations.
• France and Britain were economically strained.
• The U.S. demanded repayment of war loans while draining gold reserves from Europe. This probably further compelled foreign countries to slap reciprocal tariffs on us post Smoot-Hawley.

So even without Smoot-Hawley, the global system was on life support.

World trade in the 1930s collapsed more because of falling demand, shrinking credit, and collapsing commodity prices, not because of tariffs. Protectionism wasn’t the spark — it was a reaction to a world economy in flames.

And even then, the scale was exaggerated. Exports were a small share of U.S. GDP at the time—about 5%—and the domestic economy largely didn’t depend on global trade.

The Smoot-Hawley myth has been used for decades to:

• Shut down any conversation about reindustrialization
• Protect multinational corporations’ supply chains and profit margins
• Keep America dependent on cheap foreign labor
• Convince generations of students and policymakers that sovereignty = stupidity

Not anymore. Don’t fall for it.

The U.S. had significant tariffs well into the 20th century. Tariffs were a cornerstone of U.S. economic policy for most of our history. Even before Smoot Hawley, US tariff rates were far higher than they have been the past 50 years.

The U.S. became the world’s dominant industrial power under high tariffs in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Even post-WWII, industries like steel, autos, and semiconductors were heavily protected or subsidized.

Tariffs didn’t kill growth — they often enabled it, especially when used strategically to develop key sectors.

The U.S. thrived under protectionist policies for over a century — and we absolutely had tariffs long after the 1930s.

After WWII, the U.S. dominated global manufacturing. We had tariffs, but we also used subsidies, import quotas, “Buy American” policies, unionized labor, and fixed exchange rates under Bretton Woods.

Trade was managed. We allowed some allies (like Japan and West Germany) to export to us more than we exported to them as part of Cold War alliance-building, but we still protected key industries. We weren’t “free trade” fanatics. We were “America First”—before that ever became a “divisive” label.

The real turning point was in 1971, when Nixon ended Bretton Woods by ending dollar-gold convertibility. This broke the fixed exchange rate system, unleashing currency volatility and financialization.

This was the beginning of the petrodollar era, where America starts running permanent trade deficits in exchange for dollar dominance.

Starting around this time, corporations started relocating production to Mexico, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, etc., chasing cheap labor and lax regulations. The U.S. began deindustrializing under the guise of “efficiency.”

In the 1980s, Reagan slashed taxes and began the Wall Street takeover. Reagan’s policies were great for the economy in the short term, but long-term they were disastrous. Heavy industries went into decline while finance boomed and swallowed up everything in sight.

This was when protectionism became a dirty word in elite circles. Milton Friedman and the neoliberalism school of economics were dominant.

The real death blow to tariffs and protectionism—which, to be clear, were the trade policies under which the US had built itself into the economic powerhouse of the planet— happened in the 1990s, though.

The combined efforts of George Bush Sr. and Bill Clinton gave us the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) which opened the floodgates to offshoring to Mexico. Bush Sr. and Clinton didn’t agree on much, but they did agree on NAFTA!

American manufacturing jobs were gutted in the ensuing years— especially in the Midwest. The promised “job growth” never comes. Instead, we get wage stagnation, factory towns gutted, and Wall Street cashing in.

1995: Creation of the WTO (World Trade Organization)

This effectively enshrined “free trade” ideology on a global scale, but only in theory for everyone else. The purpose was for America to surrender massive sovereignty over its own trade decisions, under the guise of a one world, kumbaya “global institution.”

The final nail in the coffin was China joining the WTO in 2001.

Just take a look at American manufacturing since then:

You can see how it happened. Manufacturing plateaued and stagnated starting in the early 1970s, drifted lower over the next three decades, and then absolutely fell off a cliff starting in 2001 when China joined the WTO.

American corporate elites rushed to China for cheap labor. Over 3 million manufacturing jobs lost in the U.S. in under a decade.

China played hardball, using currency manipulation, state subsidies, IP theft, and tariffs — while the U.S. played by imaginary “free market” rules.

This is the moment the “one-way street” went into overdrive — America opens up, while foreign competitors play dirty and U.S. workers get crushed.

Between 1993 (NAFTA) and 2001 (China WTO), the U.S. fully abandoned the protectionist playbook and surrendered to Wall Street globalism.

It was a rigged game that transferred jobs from the middle class to China and Mexico, wealth from labor to capital, power from citizens to corporations, and control from the U.S. government to transnational institutions

They told us tariffs = poverty. They told us free trade = prosperity.

But in reality, all we got was: cheap Chinese crap, permanently depressed wages, asset bubbles (we’re on our third since the 90s!) dependency on foreign rivals, and younger generations that can’t afford housing, families, or saving for retirement.

And this, in turn, necessitates infinite immigration from the third world—because the elites are not just satisfied with decimating the manufacturing sector. Now they want to decimate the service sector and even white collar jobs, too.

Do not let them lie to you about tariffs. Tariffs are America First. They are pro-middle class and pro-worker.

Now, does that mean the economic turbulence ahead from the tariffs won’t affect the middle class at all? No, that is not what I’m saying.

What I’m saying is:

1. These tariffs are not a choice—they are a necessity. Outsourcing everything to juice corporate profit margins is not a sustainable model for a country. It’s only been sustainable the past 25-30 years because of the lasting hegemony of the petrodollar. But that’s going away very soon.
2. As such, it is a necessity to re-shore jobs and reindustrialize America. We have to become self-sufficient again. It is not an option. The end of the petrodollar system will change absolutely everything.
3. There will be pain from the tariffs. Prices will increase, foreign countries will retaliate because they depend on a certain level of demand from the American consumer. We may even go into recession.
4. The pain of the tariffs is ultimately because over the past 25-30 years we oriented the American economy towards a completely unsustainable model. It assumed the petrodollar system would never end, and that we would never again need to have a “real economy” with domestic manufacturing and domestic production of goods.
5. The economy won’t be fixed overnight. Reorienting the American economy towards self-sustainability, domestic supply chains, manufacturing and “real things” will be a lengthy process, and it will not happen smoothly. But it has to happen. Again—it’s not an option.

Think of the economic pain the tariffs will cause as a hangover. Hangovers are necessary and balancing in nature—you party hard, you pay the price. Of course, most of us were not the ones doing the partying—Wall Street and Big Business were—yet we will still have to endure the hangover. Such is life.

Make no mistake, though: the people who made these tariffs and the pain they will inevitably cause necessary are the ones who spent the last 30+ years outsourcing American jobs and offshoring American supply chains in the name of quarterly capitalism and short-term profitmaxxing.

That’s the sickness.

Tariffs are the medicine. Medicine doesn’t always taste good, but it’s necessary if you want to survive.

Source

Featured image source, Trump: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/wall-street-hates-trumps-tariff-threats-should-the-rest-of-us/2018/03/22/d1482e7c-2df6-11e8-b0b0-f706877db618_story.html

Featured image source, Clinton & Bush Sr.: https://www.today.com/news/george-h-w-bush-remembered-bill-clinton-washington-post-op-t144250

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