I have a trade deficit with my neighborhood grocery store.

Every week, I drive to the grocery store. I fill my cart. I pay for my groceries. Does the grocery store ever buy anything from me? 

Absolutely not. They’ve never even asked. This is clearly a bad deal.

So here’s what I’m going to do about it — I’m going to charge myself and my family a 50 percent tariff on our groceries every time we buy them from the grocery store and use that tariff to pay that trade deficit back. Since I don’t have a trade deficit with the other grocery store near my home, however, I’m only going to charge my family a 10 percent tariff on the groceries we buy from there.

Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it?

How would charging yourself more for groceries pay anything back? Why wouldn’t your family just buy groceries from one of the stores you’re not applying a tariff against? What is even the purpose of this tariff scheme?

Ah — the family could produce its own groceries.

Can your family really produce all of its own groceries? Does your family have the land, the soil, the water, the sunlight, the climate — forget know-how, we’ll come back to that — to grow every conceivable crop your family consumes? Can you really grow coffee, bananas, vanilla, chocolate and everything else your family eats? Your grocery store has fresh tomatoes in stock while there’s still snow on Peavine — how is that possible?

Even if your family somehow can produce all of its own food, should it? Don’t most members of your family have other, better paying jobs than what they might earn from subsidence farming and tariff-backed subsidies?

They might, but look — you’re running this family like a business. You’re losing money right and left on bad trade deals. You give money to the grocery store but what do you get in return? Stuff? Things? Necessities? That all sounds like waste and fraud.

Hey, wait. Why is everyone packing their bags? What do you mean you’re never coming back, honey? You’ll see me in court? No, hey — don’t use that tone of voice on me, young man — and the horse I rode in on? Who taught you to use such language?

***

According to the Governor’s Office of Economic Development’s Nevada Overview Report, the top grossing and employing sector of Nevada’s economy is “accommodation and food services.” 

It’s not a surprise and it’s not close.

This is a sector that doesn’t produce much in the way of tangible physical goods. People from elsewhere bring dollars and leave with hangovers and memories. Nevada’s hospitality sector, in turn, uses those dollars to purchase food (usually from out of state), drinks (also usually from out of state) and everything else those tourists need to feel comfortable — including the labor of hundreds of thousands of Nevadans.

To get these dollars, people have to actually want to come here. They have to be confident that they won’t be detained for several weeks if someone with a gun and a badge decides their paperwork isn’t in order. The prices they pay once they get here need to be reasonable. Most importantly, they also have to be confident that their retirement account won’t lose most of its value by the time they return home.

President Donald Trump, however, has other ideas.

To “liberate” Americans from purchasing goods from the third-smallest country in the world, a pair of uninhabited Antarctic islands and Navy Support Facility Diego Garcia (it’s located in the British Indian Ocean Territory), Trump’s team raised tariffs — a fancy word which functionally means sales tax — on every good shipped into the United States. To decide where and how much to raise them, Trump’s team either asked an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot for a plan or the team independently developed a plan that could be confused with one an AI chatbot might come up with.

That’s not a compliment.

Why is he doing this? Well, it depends on when and where you ask him.

Officially, these are “reciprocal tariffs,” which were carefully designed to balance bilateral trade deficits between the U.S. and every country code used by the U.S. Census Bureau to track imports and exports. How carefully, you ask? Well, since businesses and consumers buy more goods from the European Union than European businesses and consumers buy from the United States, Trump assessed a 20 percent tariff against the European Union. Since the Trump administration didn’t realize French Guiana is an outermost region of the European Union, however, it only applied a 10 percent tariff to that territory.

Did I mention that these tariffs apply to all imported goods, even those used as raw materials by American businesses to manufacture products for sale and export? Until Nevada’s lithium loop comes online, the parts and materials used to build batteries for Tesla just became at least 10 percent more expensive.

According to Rolling Stone, however, Trump is pushing a different story on social media. He recently shared a link to a video posted on TikTok claiming he’s intentionally pushing the stock market to crash by 20 percent this month — that’s one-fifth of the market’s value. Supposedly, that will cause the market to “push cash into treasuries,” which will somehow “force the Fed” to lower interest rates. 

Why, exactly, investors would push cash into American treasuries — instead of, say, the treasuries of a jurisdiction that doesn’t start a trade war and crash its own markets at the whim of a single man — remains an exercise for the reader.

Whatever the real intent of the tariffs might be, the results so far have been nothing short of disastrous. 

Markets around the world are going into free fall. Tariffs on steel and aluminum imports — along with corresponding retaliatory tariffs from our trading partners — are already biting into the bottom line of the American automobile industry. The base tariff rate on Chinese goods is now 54 percent — in response, China responded with matching tariffs against the U.S., along with export controls on rare earth minerals used in advanced manufacturing processes.

All of this … medicine, as Trump calls it … almost makes one want to plan a vacation. Too bad nobody knows right now if they’ll be able to afford one in Nevada, especially with tariffs raising the price of every imported good used to keep guests happy.

Perhaps now is a good time to remind everyone, including our congressional delegation, that Nevada’s economy relies on financially comfortable tourists from around the world spending money in our state to keep a third of our workforce employed. It sure would be nice if someone removed Trump’s authority to unilaterally raise taxes on Americans whenever an “emergency” flitted through his mind.

David Colborne ran for public office twice. He is now an IT manager, the father of two sons, and a recurring opinion columnist for The Nevada Independent. You can follow him on Mastodon @DColborne@techhub.social, on Bluesky @davidcolborne.bsky.social, on Threads @davidcolbornenv or email him at david@colbornemmx.com. You can also message him on Signal at dcolborne.64.