A logistical and humanitarian nightmare

Trump’s campaign has begun to unveil their policies should the worst happen.

To the surprise of no one here, his policies would cause prices to go through the roof, especially as they relate to tariffs and immigration.

Immigration

One of Trump’s main platform points is a mass deportation of all undocumented people living in the United States.

The humanitarian catastrophe is a bonus to MAGA, if not the entire point.

But ask them about the logistics and economics.

It is one of America’s dirty secrets that many sectors of the American economy, especially the agricultural and construction sectors, depend heavily on immigrant (and in particular undocumented immigrant) labor that can be paid below minimum wage to keep costs down. Not to mention these jobs are so dangerous, uncomfortable and tedious that most Americans avoid them like the plague.

Is this ethical? Not even close.

But that does not change the reality of how these entire sectors operate as of today.

We saw what happened when COVID-19 killed thousands of workers in various industries across the United States along with damaged supply chains.

Prices went up by quite a bit.

Now imagine what will happen to grocery prices if you remove even more labor from the agricultural sector.

The grocery bills of Americans everywhere will skyrocket.

I am far from a trained economist, but even I could come to this conclusion by knowing some very basic things about economics.

Labor is one of the biggest costs that businesses have to consider when operating, if not the biggest.

Labor gets more expensive when supply of labor goes down. When labor gets more expensive because of a sudden decrease of supply, operations tend to slow down. When operations slow down, so do profits that come from volume purchases. The differences need to be made up somewhere. So to make up the shortfall, prices go up.

Groceries are an inelastic good, which means that demand tends to stay steady regardless of prices.

What happens when a supply of a good gets more expensive while demand is steady?

Prices go up substantially.

If people are upset about food prices now, imagine how they will feel if their grocery bill goes up even higher because so much of the labor in the agricultural sector got deported en masse.

Don’t forget that undocumented labor makes up a substantial part of the construction industry and many of the same dilemma’s apply. Many vital industries in America are dependent on this type of labor as well.

If people think goods and services are expensive now, what do you think will happen to prices when there is a sudden crash in the supply of labor?

That is not to mention that even if the United States Military gets involved with mass deportations, moving hundreds of thousands of people (at minimum) would be a logistical nightmare even for the best administrators and policy makers. Trump’s record when it comes to the nuts and bolts of governing and policy making is catastrophically bad. Before COVID-19, most if not all of the crises he dealt with were self-inflicted, and there were barely enough adults in the room to keep Trump’s absolute worst impulses and ideas in check.

Considering how badly Trump handled COVID-19 even compared to the rest of the world, all the evidence points to him bungling mass deportations as well.

Bungling in this context means massive delays and people being shipped to the wrong locations.

Tariffs

Trump’s campaign has put forward a plan to replace income taxes with massively hiked tariffs.

This plan is being presented as a tax break for working class Americans.

The reality could not be more different.

A massive tariff increase would represent one of the most regressive taxes in American history. A fact that economists all over America can see almost immediately.

Now, I am in favor of breaking up the American economy from China’s because today, China is our biggest adversary by a long shot and I don’t like that so many of America’s supply chains are tied up in China.

But doing skyrocketing tariffs on our allies and potential allies is nothing short of lethally stupid. In addition, Trump’s record on carrying out his policies that have the blue moon good idea is really bad.

Causing a massive logistical and humanitarian nightmare with cruel and poorly thought out policies.

What is more Trump than that?

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