As you probably know, the “high earners” in the upper income brackets are blessed with a multitude of tax loopholes which their well paid accountants leverage to ease, if not erase, their tax burdens. There are loopholes galore for the top brackets where the Trumps of the world reside. what you may not know is that the average every day citizen does not have access to such loopholes, and the few loopholes remaining are being systematically deleted by the current administration.
Case in point.
Up until today, small businesses, side hustles, and thrifty consumers who purchased only small amounts of imports from countries like China and Hong Kong (think Alibaba, TikTok prods, etc) had a loophole that allowed them to get around Trump‘s heavy corporate tariffs called the De Minimis Rule. Under this rule, all imports under $800 were not subject to Trump’s heavy tariffs—or any customs for that matter.
The De Minimis loophole enabled small businesses on Etsy, eBay, and owners of innovative niche market apps and social media pages to thrive and create good incomes and side hustles. Of course it didn’t allow them to compete with monopolies like Amazon, but it was something, and something was better than nothing.
Kiss it goodbye.
As of today the De Minimis loophole is gone, because the Trump administration has decided that everyone will pay taxes—pardon me—tariffs, regardless of how much product they are moving, because well, the billionaires have decided that those with nothing have too much.
Trump just signed an executive order ending the De Minimis loophole for good. Evidently, he didn’t think the non Wall Street class (read: 70% of America) was being pushed out of every single market fast enough, and he wanted to accelerate the process. Mission accomplished. His latest EO will have a massive negative economic impact across America, thousands of small businesses will close, and of course, consumer choices will continue to get smaller and smaller.
Someone will say that Trump is doing America favor by forcing people to buy American. That’s nice in theory, but a fool’s errand in reality. In reality, the vast majority of these products being imported from China are either not made in America, will never be made in America, or are too expensive to be made in America, and those three realities are never going to change, no matter how powerful and compelling the political sloganing and rhetoric.
Meanwhile, the upper income brackets continue to enjoy endless loopholes to avoid paying taxes. In fact, many of them don’t pay any taxes at all due to all of these loopholes. Yet the Trump administration hasn’t done a single thing to close any of them. And why would they? if they did, the upper brackets would come unglued and scream bloody murder, whereas the lower brackets allow the government to do whatever they want to us without a whimper of protest.
I’m doing my small part with this page to raise awareness on these many critical issues that are absolutely deteriorating quality of life for the majority of Americans. I hope you will do your part and share these posts and help people get informed. Maybe, if we can get enough people informed, we will stop tolerating our government waging war on us? A man can dream.
MJ