The Malignant Moron and his handlers should be careful what they wish for.

The official position is now “People are going to have to adjust to a lower standard of living”. Not buy so much, not buy unnecessary items, etc. in order to deal with increasing inflation and decreasing jobs. The idiot still claims those aren’t happening, and affordability is ‘a hoax’, but the little people are going to have to adjust to these nonexistent things anyway, just because.

Okay, we can do that. We’ve done it before. But there are consequences.

You can look at the Depression and WWII, of course. In more recent times, there’s the 1980’s economy and the tanking of Detroit. And there’s the petroleum dance that goes on every few years and has for decades.

The petroleum dance is fun to watch. The companies raise prices. Some executives have been caught on hot mikes laughing “So what are people going to do – stop driving?” And then the price gets up to a certain level and – people stop driving. They carpool. They take public transit. They run their errands in the most efficient ways they can find. And they stop driving whenever they can manage it; certainly, they don’t drive for recreation. Demand tanks, executives panic, and they drop prices again. Until the next time. Rinse, repeat.

From the 80’s – Detroit wanted to only make large vehicles using truck chassis’, which still get a tax break as ‘agricultural’ no matter what vehicle they’re actually installed in. (Naturally, this tax break never finds its way down to the consumer.) The economy was crap anyway, so, given gas prices, a number of Americans wanted smaller fuel-efficient vehicles that Japan was exporting in increasing numbers and in ever-increasing quality. Demand for the big truck or mini-van that could transport 12 kids was way down. Also, the economy was encouraging people to keep their old cars going for as long as possible. If you didn’t have a lot of money, you bought a new car when the repairs on your old car were more expensive than a new car payment. Even then, you might buy a good used car.
Detroit wasn’t (and still mostly isn’t) interested in giving up that tax break. (Look at the commercials - we’re still being told that we need to buy a tank). So they pressured the government to join them in a campaign to encourage people to buy American. Not only buy American, meaning the only vehicles they were interested in producing, but buy a new one every 2 years. It was the Patriotic American way. Demand, hell. They’d by God tell us what we wanted and we had to want it. Spoiler alert – nobody listened. We couldn’t afford to.

Back in the present, the Malignant Moron spent some time before Thanksgiving ranting about the reason the tariffs hadn’t brought much money in so far is that people saw it coming and stocked up. Oh, noes – You mean spending or not spending makes a difference? Who could have seen that coming? And simultaneously with telling us that we need to adjust our needs downwards, he’s celebrating that the ‘stocking up’ has begun to run out and we’re going to be forced to spend enough to make the tariffs work.
Umm…we can’t do both. We can and do get frugal when we have to. And it looks like we’re going to have to. When do you think the government is going to insist that patriotic Americans continue to buy food and goods the way they did before they crapped all over us? The tariffs won’t work unless we do. And we won’t. So they won’t.

None of these drunken sons of millionaires (or wannabes) understand any of this. It’s not their life; they can afford whatever they want. But they understand the stock market. Even if they’re only on a few boards or even if they just live off the market profits, they’re going to find out that all these stocks are backed up by something. Whether it’s goods or a service, when people stop buying it, the stock dives. It’s going to hit their bank accounts. They may lose their jobs.

They may get what they wished for.