Trump on TruthSocial (Bloomberg):
“TARIFFS WILL START BEING PAID ON AUGUST 1, 2025. There has been no change to this date, and there will be no change”
Figure 1: EPU (blue, left scale), and centered 7 day moving average (red, right scale), SF Fed News Sentiment index (green). Red dashed line at “Liberation Day”. Source: policyuncertainty.com, SF Fed, and author’s calculations.
“TARIFFS WILL START BEING PAID ON AUGUST 1, 2025. There has been no change to this date, and there will be no change”
Just yesterday when asked if the August 1 date was firm, Trump replied:
“No, I would say firm, but not 100 percent firm”.
Who ya gonna believe, Donald Trump on Monday or Donald Trump on Tuesday? That’s Bessent’s so-called “strategic uncertainty” in action.
The Bloomberg article ends with: “That caveat — paired with Trump signaling that he was still negotiating additional deals — fueled skepticism among some in Washington and on Wall Street that the president would follow through on his latest tariff threats.”
Hey, you think?
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins on farm laborers: “There will be no amnesty. The mass deportations continue, but in a strategic way. And we move the workforce toward automation and 100% American participation, which with 34 million able-bodied on Medicaid we should be able to do fairly quickly.”
So a Down to the Countryside Movement? I think we have seen this before.
Only about 4 million of those 34 million don’t already have jobs so they really are proposing a Down to the Countryside Movement. You can see the numbers for yourself here:
https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2025/05/15/is-there-really-an-epidemic-of-workless-medicaid-recipients/