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Agriculture, Daily Bread, Trump, Wisconsin

Daily Bread for 6.6.26: Florida Man Visits Wisconsin Farmers, Talks About His Television

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Good morning. Saturday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 86. Sunrise is 5:17 and sunset is 8:30 for 15 hours 13 minutes of daylight. The moon is a waning gibbous with 68.9 percent of its visible disk illuminated. On this day in 1944, the Allied invasion of Normandy begins with the execution of Operation Neptune —…

Courts, Daily Bread, Elections, Law, Litigation, Trump, Wisconsin

Daily Bread for 5.29.26: Federal Court Denies Trump Admin Access to Wisconsin’s Voter Rolls

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Good morning. Friday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 82. Sunrise is 5:20 and sunset is 8:24 for 15 hours 4 minutes of daylight. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 96.9 percent of its visible disk illuminated. On this day in 1953, Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay become the first people to reach the…

Daily Bread, Tariffs, Taxes/Taxation, Trump, Wisconsin

Daily Bread for 4.24.25: Trump’s Tariffs and the Wisconsin Economy

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Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be increasingly sunny with a high of 72. Sunrise is 5:58 and sunset is 7:47, for 13 hours, 49 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 14.9 percent of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1704, the first regular newspaper in British Colonial America, The Boston News-Letter, begins publishing.

Tariffs are taxes. The loudest voices1 in Whitewater claiming an anti-tax position are also those who supported the man now responsible for what amounts to the largest American tax increase in over a generation. Trump’s imposition of tariffs will cause significant hardship to Wisconsin’s economy:

“That whipsawing back and forth, that creates a tremendous amount of uncertainty,” said  Steven Deller, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor who researches the state’s agricultural and manufacturing economy. “And one thing that the economy hates is uncertainty.” 

….

First Trump added “national emergency” tariffs ranging from 10% to 25% on imports from China, Canada and Mexico. After adjusting those tariffs several times, he announced on April 2 a baseline 10% tariff on goods from all countries that export to the U.S., along with higher “reciprocal” tariffs on countries with which the U.S. has trade deficits — a move that set the stock market plunging. Trump paused most reciprocal tariffs days later. 

As it stands, most Chinese imports face tariffs of 145%, while Canada and Mexico face 25% tariffs, along with 10% for most everyone else.

….

Wisconsin imported more than $38 billion in goods last year, about half from countries facing the highest Trump tariffs: China, Canada and Mexico.

Machinery and electronic products made up about one-third of Wisconsin’s total import value last year. Pharmaceutical products, some of which Trump has since spared from tariffs, made up 12%.

….

Deller calls tariffs a regressive tax because they most affect people with lower income.

“They tend to spend their money more on goods than services,” he said. “They’re more likely to shop at a Walmart or a Dollar General-type store, and a lot of the goods that are sold in those kinds of stores come from international markets.”

See Khushboo Rathore, DataWatch: Trump’s tariffs and Wisconsin’s economy, Wisconsin Watch, April 21, 2025.

See also Tariffs Will Make Wisconsin’s Manufacturing Decline Harder to Reverse, Farmers, Farmers, Part 2 (Slogans and Reality), and The Anti-Tax Crowd Backed a Taxman.

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  1. No one has mucked up public policy in the city more than these special-interest gentlemen. If across an entire football field, a chihuahua relieved itself in one small spot, that’s exactly where these men would step. ↩︎

Jeff Bezos’s latest publicity stunt rocket trip has met with widespread ridicule. Gayle King tried to defend the trip, but Alfred “Fredo” Thomas III (always sharp) makes quick work of her defense:

Agriculture, Business, Daily Bread, Economy, Tariffs, Taxes/Taxation, Trump, Wisconsin

Daily Bread for 4.16.25: Farmers, Part 2 (Slogans and Reality)

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Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 55. Sunrise is 6:11 and sunset is 7:38, for 13 hours, 28 minutes of daytime. The moon a waning gibbous with 89 percent of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Parks & Recreation Board meets at 5:30 PM.


On this day in 2018,  The New York Times and the New Yorker win the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for breaking news of the Harvey Weinstein sexual abuse scandal.

Yesterday’s post, Farmers, cited reporting on the effects of a trade war on farmers. Trump is aware of these concerns, and so he used his Truth Social platform to publish his position on a trade war’s effects on agriculture. Below are Trump’s remarks contrasted with real experiences.

Trump’s post:

Our farmers are GREAT, but because of their GREATNESS, they are always put on the Front Line with our adversaries, such as China, whenever there is a Trade negotiation or, in this case, a Trade War. The same thing happened in my First Term. China was brutal to our Farmers, I these Patriots to just hold on, and a great trade deal was made. I rewarded our farmers with a payment of $28 Billion Dollars, all through the China deal. It was a great transaction for the USA, until Crooked Joe Biden came in and didn’t enforce it. China largely reneged on the deal (although they behaved during the Trump Administration), only buying a portion of what they agreed to buy. They had ZERO respect for the Crooked Biden Administration, and who can blame them for that? Interestingly, they just reneged on the big Boeing deal, saying that they will “not take possession” of fully committed to aircraft. The USA will PROTECT OUR FARMERS!!!

The farmer John Pihl’s genuine experience with Trump’s subsidies:

The payments were helpful, Pihl said. But they weren’t a fix for the longer-term damage done by Trump’s first-term tariffs.

“That was just for the one year. What about the market loss that continued through his term and into Biden’s term? I think the amount is incredible,” he said.

Of Trump’s remarks:

  1. The greatness of farmers has not made them targets; Trump’s trade war has done that.
  2. As lifetime farmer John Pihl explains above, Trump’s deal in his first term did not make farmers whole, and that deal was insufficient on its own, apart from the Biden Admin. See also Adriana Belmonte, Trump’s massive farmer bailout failed to make up for the ‘self-inflicted’ trade damage, January 18, 2021. (Trump’s bailout was a failure even before Biden took office.)
  3. Trump claims that China has ‘behaved’ during his administration, but he admits in his post that (a) they’ve hit back at Boeing and (b) China has applied huge retaliatory tariffs across the board.

Meanwhile, here’s how ordinary Chinese are depicting the Trump Admin:

China is killing it with the AI

— trumpwatchdog.bsky.social (@trumpwatchdog.bsky.social) April 15, 2025 at 2:28 PM

Even ordinary TikTok users on the other side of the world have Trumpism’s number.

One can and should oppose the Chinese government without stumbling into an inflationary trade war.

Meanwhile, where did Trump get all those gaudy gold appliqués with which he’s littered the Oval Office? Trump’s vulgar additions are surprisingly similar to what the Chinese sell on Alibaba:

Is Trump's oval office plastered with Chinese-made, faux gold, polyurethane "French palace" wannabe wall coverings? We don't know for sure, but boy these items we found on Alibaba sure do look similar sherwood.news/power/shop-t…

— Joshua Topolsky (@joshuatopolsky.com) April 15, 2025 at 4:11 PM