96% of Trump tariffs are being paid by us

“Us” meaning U.S. importers and consumers. I’ve seen where even some progressive commenters have questioned how much damage the Trump tariffs are actually doing, because overall inflation hasn’t spiked. They may have overlooked how even small individual hits add up. There are also indications that importers are no longer in a position to absorb a substantial share of the tariff hits, and that an inflation spike for consumers is on its way. We'll see.

President Donald Trump has long insisted, in the face of decades of research by economists, that foreign producers are the only ones who are paying for his tariffs on imported goods.

However, a major new study released Monday by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, an economic think tank based in Germany, shows that US businesses and consumers are shouldering the burden for the vast majority of Trump’s tariffs.

After examining more than 25 million shipment records of goods imported to the US last year, the institute found that foreign exporters only absorbed 4% of the $200 billion in tariff payments, with the remaining 96% being passed on to US importers and consumers. - Common Dreams

This year's Social Security bump won't come close to cutting it

Yet far too many seniors impacted by all this will remain part of the Trump cult. But we don’t need all that many to just stay home, to help contribute to a couple of blue wave elections along the lines of 2006 and 2008.

The Social Security Administration on Friday announced a 2.8% cost-of-living adjustment for beneficiaries, a small increase that advocates said would be mostly or entirely offset by surging healthcare premiums and other price hikes fueled by President Donald Trump’s erratic tariff policies and Republican legislation passed earlier this year.

The 2.8% raise—the second-smallest since 2021—will amount to just over $50 extra per month for the average Social Security recipient. The projected 11.6% increase in Medicare Part B premiums next year would wipe out around 40% of the COLA increase for seniors…

“ACA premiums are projected to skyrocket next year, with those over 50 hit hardest,” (Nancy Altman, president of the progressive advocacy group Social Security Works) said. “For many of these beneficiaries, the COLA increase won’t come close to covering their increased healthcare premiums.”

Another factor that could eat into the Social Security COLA is the impact of Trump’s tariffs on prescription drug prices, which are already far higher in the US than in other wealthy nations. - Common Dreams

Profiteering is indeed a big part of inflation

Actually, you'd have had to be awfully gullible to ever believe that it was all about "market forces."

A new report from progressive UK.-based think-tanks IPPR and Common Wealth says profiteering played a major role in jacking up prices far above the rise in costs, reinforcing a previous but narrower study showing such an impact. Among other things, the researchers called for a global corporation tax to curtail unrestrained profits...

Giant energy companies, mining companies, and monopolistic food companies all saw their profits leap ahead of inflation after the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. The report noted, “Because energy and food prices feed so significantly into costs across all sectors of the wider economy, this exacerbated the initial price shock—contributing to inflation peaking higher and lasting longer than had there been less market power.”

Technology companies, telecommunications, and banking also raised their profit margins with big price hikes. “Such companies have been able to protect their profit margins or even increase them, generating excess profits through a combination of high market power and global market dynamics,” the report said. - Daily Kos

Corporate bosses basically admit to massive price-fixing

Legally, price "gouging" refers to taking advantage of disasters like hurricanes, epidemics, etc., to run prices way up on items people have no choice but to buy. Which is the only reason that I'm not using "gouging," here.

An analysis released Tuesday shows that executives at some of the top publicly traded companies in the United States aren't exactly being coy about using their pricing power to hike costs for consumers and boost revenues and profits—which are then dished out to wealthy shareholders.

The progressive watchdog group Accountable.US noted in its new report that "some of the largest general consumer S&P 500 companies have admitted to benefiting from increased prices as their net profits increased year-over-year and they rewarded shareholders with billions in handouts."

The report quotes directly from the executives of Kimberly-Clark, PepsiCo, General Mills, Tyson Foods, and other major U.S. companies. - Common Dreams

The evidence for criminal levels of profiteering is conclusive

Something serious needs to be done about this. And the public will certainly respond positively, if that happens.

Progressive demands for congressional action to curb corporate monopoly power were renewed Friday after federal data confirmed that certain heavily consolidated industries are continuing to rake in massive profits while working households struggle under the weight of high prices.

The latest figures from the Bureau for Economic Analysis show that the profits of the U.S. coal and oil industry increased 340% between the first and second quarters of 2022. Companies selling petroleum and coal products made an estimated $49.7 billion in profits from April to June, compared with $11.3 billion from January to March.

Meanwhile, executives in the nation's transportation and warehousing sector enjoyed a nearly 40% increase in profits during the same time period, pocketing $124.4 billion in the second quarter after taking home $89.4 billion over the first three months of the year.

"We've heard directly from executives in the sectors that families depend on—from oil, to auto shops, to airlines—that inflation has been good for business," Rakeen Mabud, chief economist and managing director of policy and research at the Groundwork Collaborative, said in a statement.

"The latest corporate profit data shows their price strategies are bearing fruit," she added. - Common Dreams

Getting it together on inflation

This is really good, from a progressive perspective, on where the issue is at. My only quibble with it is, the first thing I'd like to see is the most egregious corporate players brought up on criminal charges (collusion, market manipulation).

It's worth watching, right now, as to whether Big Oil tries to use the pending hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico to run up gas prices in order to, along with shameless greedhead profiteering, influence the upcoming election.

Yet conservative economic theory, like that trumpeted by Friedman, still drives the story we hear repeated ad nauseam in mainstream discussions of inflation: increased wages and government spending are to blame. Only the Federal Reserve can beat inflation by ​“cooling” the economy. The government’s only role is to refrain from substantive spending.

Biden could have invoked executive powers to institute targeted price controls and invest in production, but he didn’t. Instead, the Federal Reserve is hiking interest rates, and the administration’s landmark social spending bill, Build Back Better, got whittled down and reframed into the Inflation Reduction Act, which includes some positive gains (like corporate taxes and reduced drug prices) but operates within the confines of conservative monetary justifications.

To articulate and fight for an alternative solution to inflation, we need to radically shift the economic discourse to the left. - In These Times

Facts about the food price crisis

This explains it, succinctly yet thoroughly, as well as anything I've seen does.

At the center of this crisis is the fact that the production of the world’s staple crops destined for export is concentrated in a small number of countries, and they are shipped around the world by a handful of trading firms. Much of this globally traded food is grown from a narrow range of seed varieties, using uniform industrial agricultural methods.

So, is it any wonder that a war involving two countries that specialize in producing two of these staples should spark a major global food crisis?

As we detail in the latest report from the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food), the world’s food security is built on a house of cards—the whole edifice can tumble when one card falls. The concentrated nature of the global food system creates vulnerabilities, which can have cascading consequences when there are disruptions to any part of it. These economies of scale might be designed for profitable efficiency, when things operate according to plan. But they’re neither stable, resilient, nor dependable in the face of risks, especially for vulnerable people.

Add to this concentrated global food system the financial markets, which can further exaggerate the effects of price shocks. - Civil Eats

An excess profits tax would be a good deal

Trying for it would be good politics, too.

So COVID has been a grotesque bonanza for America’s most concentrated industries. The long-term cure for the supply crunch is drastic re-regulation of the global logistics system, as well as rebuilding domestic manufacturing and supply. The Biden administration’s antitrust crackdown will also help reduce pricing power.

In the meantime, we need an excess profits tax, to tax away the opportunistic price hikes, just as we did in World War II. Profits that exceeded a normal rate of return, based on several pre-pandemic years, would be subject to a much higher rate of tax.

This idea will both spotlight the real source of the inflation and help pay for the domestic industrial policy that we need to prevent future supply shocks. Even if it’s not enacted, Biden should propose it. - The American Prospect