Incoming U.S. president DonElon TruMusk has vowed to make America groan again. He promises huge price increases on everything from housing construction to cars and gasoline by forcing us to pay very high taxes on foreign goods. Especially goods from Canada, Mexico and China, our chief sources of imports.
His gasoline tax, for example, will add as much as a dollar a gallon at the pump. And his tax on Canadian lumber will be so high that new housing will be out of the question. Except for the very rich. Groan.
Why is DonElon doing something this dumb?
As Publius has thoroughly documented, The Dumb Dude was never able to learn to read and write. So, he never passed primary school. Penn has carefully avoided telling us how Dumb DonElon was admitted—like how much his dad, Fred, paid to get him in—and how he was graduated. He’s now our next President. Groan Again.
DonElon claims to have studied business. If he had been able to so much as open his first-year economics textbook sixty years ago, he would have known that taxing people for imports makes an economy less competitive. So, naturally, it shrinks. Penn graduated this guy.... Groan Again.
Take Walmart’s logo, “Save Money. Live Better.” Now go into your local Walmart and check out how much of what it sells, including parts, is foreign made. Especially in China. Add Dumb DonElon’s import taxes at the wholesale level. Calculate the retail price increase. You are looking at the implosion of the world’s biggest company by sales and its entire ecosystem. Dumb DonElon’s new logo for Walmart: “Pay More. Live Worse.” Groan Again.
Then there is the Department of Government Efficiency fiasco. Dumb DonElon has directed his copresident, Elon Musk and a top Trumpista, Vivek Ramaswamy, to make the federal government efficient. Whence DOGE.
This will cost taxpayers staggering sums.
Why? Having done dozens of corporate restructurings, including the biggest ever, Publius knows that everything depends on where an organization’s IT sits on the Information Cost-Velocity Curve. Here the cost of information is always falling and velocity always increasing. All competitive advantage comes from how far ahead of the market you are on the ICVC.
Three quarters of a century ago you could manage shifts on the ICVC with a plan and a budget laid out over years, even a decade.
The world is different today. We live in Moore Time, where a year is the half-life of a microprocessor, about two months.
DOGE’s biggest challenge is that the federal government has a mish mash of incompatible thirty-year-old IT. Some dates back over half a century. This makes it close to 200 years old in Moore Time. The hardware and software needed to support this junk has not been available for a long, long time. There is, therefore, no way DOGE can even see, literally, what to streamline without an IT upgrade on a scale and cost no one has ever seen before. Groan Again.
Then there is the ultimate groan: the mass deportation tax. As Publius showed years ago, rounding up, detaining and deporting 15 million undocumented immigrants will triple the federal budget. And that does not count the cost of building the Trumpamo detention center, which will be 2X the size of New York City.
Groan America. Groan again and again. Dumb DonElon is back!!
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