Quotulatiousness

December 30, 2025

Tariffs are an economic burden, even when you claim they’re paid by foreigners

Filed under: Business, Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

At the Foundation for Economic Education, David Hebert responds to a recent pro-tariff puff piece from financial columnist, Matthew Lynn:

As Lynn acknowledges, “the tariffs are a tax”. Because they are a tax, they are going to be paid by someone in some form. You can’t have money flowing into the Treasury without someone paying that extra money in some way. Broadly speaking, we can divide the potential payors of American-imposed tariffs into three camps: American consumers, American importers, and foreigners.

One of the oft-cited effects of a tariff is to reduce the amount of imports coming into America. This makes sense and is in fact one of the numerous goals administration officials have pointed to. Insofar as American consumers and importers end up paying the tariff, they will buy less of the now-more-expensive foreign products. We’re already seeing this happen in the US, which Lynn alludes to throughout his article.

If foreigners pay the tariff, they’ll sell less of the now-tariffed goods to the US. This will, as President Trump and others have correctly identified, hurt their bottom line. To offset at least some of this, these countries will try to sell more of their products to their domestic consumers or consumers in countries other than the US. This is exactly what we have seen and what we are seeing, as other countries around the world are securing new trade deals with one another and deliberately excluding the United States from said deals.

So, Lynn is correct to point out that foreign corporations have incurred costs because of the Trump tariffs. However, despite his repeated implication to the contrary, this is not money that goes to the US Treasury. Volkswagen, for example, has raised the price of its 2026 models by up to 6.5 percent, largely due to tariffs, and has indicated that this is just the beginning. That’s more money coming out of American consumers’ pockets. At these higher prices, American consumers are purchasing fewer Volkswagens than last year. Volkswagen’s losses from the tariffs include an almost 30 percent decline in profits from auto sales. Importantly, sales that do not happen count toward the reduced profit that Volkswagen reported but generate no tariff revenue for the Treasury to collect. That Lynn, a financial commentator, does not understand this distinction is deeply troubling.

Who Really Pays the Tariff?

Lynn’s central argument rests on a fundamental confusion between what economists refer to as the “legal incidence” and the “economic incidence” of a tax. Legally, because tariffs are a tax on imports, it is the US importers who must write the check to Customs and Border Protection. But this says nothing about who actually pays the tariff.

For example, when landlords’ property taxes go up, who pays? The landlord will obviously write the check to the county assessor, but unless Lynn thinks that landlords are running charities, that cost gets passed on to tenants in the form of higher rent, less frequent maintenance, or fewer included benefits (utilities or access to designated parking, for example). The legal incidence falls on the landlord, but the economic incidence falls disproportionately on renters, i.e., young Americans already besieged by high housing costs.

Tariffs work the same way. US Customs and Border Protection bills the American importer directly, which is the legal incidence of the tariff. But the economic burden gets distributed among American consumers, American importers, and foreign exporters, depending on the particulars of the individual markets.

Lynn cites the Harvard Pricing Lab finding an approximately 20 percent “pass-through rate,” meaning that American consumers are only paying about one-fifth of the tariff costs. He treats this as a permanent feature of the tariff regime and as proof that foreigners are footing the bill. But the question isn’t who writes the check today, it’s who bears the cost over time. And here, the evidence directly contradicts Lynn’s fables.

As we have seen, pass-through rates are not static, but evolve over time as markets adjust. And every piece of evidence suggests that the pass-through rate has been and is continuing to rise rapidly. Goldman Sachs and the Council on Foreign Relations tracked the evolution over just this administration. Their findings are stunning: In June, US businesses absorbed about 64 percent of the tariff costs, American consumers about 22 percent, and foreign exporters about 14 percent in the form of reduced profits. Just four months later, American businesses absorbed just 27 percent, while American consumers absorbed 55 percent and exporters absorbed 18 percent. Projections for 2026 continue the trend with consumers absorbing 67 percent, exporters 25 percent, and importers just 8 percent.

The logic behind this is simple and has been echoed by President Trump and Scott Bessent themselves. In the initial months following Liberation Day, American importers could not quickly shift to alternative suppliers, giving them little leverage to demand price cuts from existing foreign vendors. Many American importers also believed (or hoped?) that the tariffs were simply a negotiating tool that would be bargained away. Having built up inventories before April, they were able to avoid raising consumer prices, with the belief that the “temporary pains would be worth the long term gains.”

That’s no longer the case. As the BLS notes in its latest import price index report, the price of imports has barely changed. This matters because US importers, not foreign sellers, are legally required to write the tariff check. American buyers pay the foreign company’s price, then pay the tariff on top of it. If foreigners were truly absorbing the tariffs, they’d have to lower their prices to compensate, and we would see a decrease in the import price index. We haven’t. The index is flat, which is evidence that the burden of the tariff is, as economists warned, being paid disproportionately by Americans in one form or another. As the Council on Foreign Relations analysis points out, by October, importers have “had time to seek alternative suppliers, giving them a bit more negotiating leverage.” More importantly, the “trade deals” that the administration has inked have made it clear that substantially higher tariffs are here to stay. All of this gives importers and retailers good reason to continue passing more of the costs along to consumers.

We are already seeing evidence of this happening. The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston’s survey of small and medium-sized businesses, for example, confirms this dynamic. Firms expecting tariffs to persist for a year or longer plan to pass through three times more of their cost increases to consumers than firms expecting short-lived tariffs. As of August, over 45 percent of affected businesses expected their costs to be impacted for longer than a year.

But how does all of this compare to the pass-through rate felt during the 2018–2019 tariffs? The Harvard Pricing Lab — the same data that Lynn cites — actually undermines his entire argument. After just six months, the 2025 tariff pass-through rate is indeed around 20 percent. But if we compare this to the 2018 tariffs, the difference is night and day. After Trump’s first-term tariffs, the pass-through rate stayed under 5 percent after a full year. This isn’t evidence that these tariffs are working. It’s evidence that these tariffs are hitting consumers harder and faster than the previous round.

“This is where Canada is now”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, L. Wayne Mathison handily sums up the state of the nation:

I’ve reached the point most people hit right before systems fail.

The point where facts stop working.

Charts don’t matter. Reports don’t matter. Evidence doesn’t matter. You can post receipts until your fingers cramp and political partisans will still clap, chant, and rationalize while the house fills with smoke. They are not misinformed. They are committed. And commitment beats reality every time.

That’s where Canada is now.

The Liberals and the NDP no longer govern with outcomes in mind. They govern with narratives. If the story sounds compassionate, the damage underneath is waved away as acceptable collateral. Housing explodes. Healthcare buckles. Food banks flood. Productivity sinks. And if you point to any of it, you’re told to be kinder, quieter, or more patient.

Patience is a luxury people without power can’t afford.

What scares me isn’t just the policies. It’s the psychology. We are watching a ruling class that confuses control with competence and optics with success. Every failure is met with more management, more spending, more moral language, and less accountability. When reality resists, they don’t change course. They tighten.

That’s where Mark Carney enters the picture, and why he should worry anyone paying attention.

Carney doesn’t speak like a democratic leader. He speaks like a risk officer explaining why losses are necessary. “Sacrifice.” “Stability.” “Confidence.” These are not solutions. They are words used when the model is failing but the managers refuse to admit it. In his world, the problem is never the plan. It’s public resistance to the plan.

That mindset is poison in a democracy.

The Liberals broke affordability and papered it over with subsidies. The NDP cheered and demanded more of the same. Now Carney offers to professionalize the decline. Smoother language. Tighter controls. Bigger levers. Less dissent. He doesn’t promise prosperity. He promises management.

Here’s the part people don’t want to hear.

You can’t fix a country by overruling its citizens.
You can’t tax, regulate, borrow, and moralize your way out of shortages.
You can’t feed kids, house families, or staff hospitals with press releases.

And when governments start treating criticism as a threat rather than a warning, history tells us what comes next. Not reform. Hardening. Surveillance language. Emergency logic. Ever broader definitions of “harm”. Ever fewer off ramps.

This is how civilizations don’t collapse in a bang. They collapse in meetings.

I don’t expect to convince partisans anymore. That window is gone. This is a warning, not an argument.

If you are still cheering while food banks replace paycheques, while hospitals ration care, while housing becomes a privilege, while leaders talk about sacrifice without ever naming their own, understand this: they are not fiddling while Rome burns. They are insisting the fire is necessary.

And once that belief sets in, facts won’t save us. Only consequences will.

By then, our children are already in the smoke.

December 29, 2025

The war against white men didn’t start in 2015

Filed under: Business, Economics, Education, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Janice Fiamengo responds to Jacob Savage’s essay on the “lost generation” of young white men who have been subject to open and explicit discrimination in education, employment, and loudly denounced for noticing this:

Most people who have discussed Savage’s essay accept his time frame: that the exclusion of white men took place mainly over the past ten to fifteen years. But this is not true. It has been going on for much longer than that, as Nathan Glazer made clear in his comprehensive Affirmative Discrimination: Ethnic Inequality and Public Policy, first published in 1975 and updated in 1987. Government initiatives to provide jobs for women and racial minorities, particularly blacks, were rooted in the equal rights legislation of the 1960s, implemented later that decade and aggressively expanded in the 1970s and 1980s. The National Organization for Women under the leadership of Betty Friedan, for example, brought a lawsuit against the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to force it to comply with federal legislation, and sued the country’s 1300 largest corporations for alleged sex discrimination.

Anyone wishing to read a detailed prehistory of what Savage has chronicled can also consult Martin Loney’s extensively documented The Pursuit of Division: Race, Gender, and Preferential Hiring in Canada (1998), which shows how what was called equity hiring in Canada spread across areas such as the police force, firefighting, the civil service, crown corporations, law, teaching, academia, and elsewhere, beginning in the 1980s. What Glazer’s and Loney’s research shows is that discrimination against white men in employment is far more deeply embedded than most people realize and has affected many more men than is currently recognized.

It is ridiculous to castigate Boomer white men, as it seems popular now to do, for allegedly implementing and benefiting from diversity policies. The last thing that should be encouraged is for younger white men to turn their anger on older white men. Many of these older men themselves faced active discrimination, psychological warfare, divorce-rape, and immiseration. Every organ of the culture told them it was time to change, get with it, stop being Archie Bunker, recognize the superior merits of the women and racial minorities their people had allegedly oppressed for so long. White women were by far the majority and most enthusiastic architects and proponents of equity hiring, bullied in turn by the black and brown women with whom they originally formed their alliance against white men (and all men, with a few exceptions).

Older white men may have secured (tenuous) positions of power, but they had no power in themselves as white men. Most of them knew they could find themselves disgraced, friendless, and jobless as the result of an unpopular decision or an unguarded statement. Accusations of sexual misconduct to take such men out of their positions were not confined to millennial males.

I was in the academic job market in 1997, and diversity hiring was already commonplace then. Everyone knew it was going on, and it was signaled both explicitly and implicitly in the advertisements that encouraged applications from women and visible minorities. My friend Steve Brule remembers when affirmative action was brought in at the large chemical company where he worked in 1984. At the beginning, it was said that these programs would be time-limited, lasting only for a short season. Instead, they lasted for well over 40 years and are still going strong.

It is foolish to imagine that such discrimination is now going to lie down and die. There have been a number of occasions over the last few years in which that was confidently predicted (remember Claudine Gay?) and did not occur. Already the diversity advocates, who are legion, are marshalling their counter-arguments and nit-picking the evidence, finding (or lying about) the ways in which what Savage described hasn’t really happened, recalibrating numbers, rationalizing and justifying them. Thousands of academics will spend years joining forces to discredit claims about discrimination, recasting them as a MAGA or Groyper lament and a dangerous attack on the legitimate (but still inadequate!) gains made by valiant women and long-oppressed racial minorities. Recently for The Washington Post, Megan McArdle, in an ostensibly critical article, is still playing with false justifications and outlandish untruths, saying the following about the rationale for equity hiring:

    … One could say of course it’s unfair, but repairing the legacy of slavery and sexism is a hard problem, and sometimes hard problems have unfair solutions. It wasn’t fair to round up huge numbers of men born between 1914 and 1927 and send them off to fight the Nazis, but that was the only way to win.

    One might argue that, but I haven’t seen anyone do so. No one seems brave enough to state baldly that we should penalize White men born in 1988 for hiring decisions that were made in 1985 by another White guy who was born in 1930. Instead what I’ve seen is a lot of deflection.

What bizarre nonsense, what spurious claims even if her point is that such logic is ugly. Discrimination in favor of white men has been illegal since 1964, and affirmative action/equity hiring was already fully in place by the mid-1980s when the “white guy who was born in 1930” was allegedly discriminating in his hiring practices. As McArdle inadvertently shows, we’ve been operating on the basis of deliberately-perpetrated false beliefs for years, beliefs that the intelligentsia adhered to and promulgated.

On the City Journal Substack, Renu Mukherjee argues that Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts is correct that “The best way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is stop discriminating on the basis of race”:

First, public opinion is clear: Americans of all racial and ethnic backgrounds have long opposed the use of racial and identity-based preferences. While this trend extends to employment, I’ve studied it extensively in the context of college admissions. The data underscore Americans’ strong support for colorblind meritocracy.

One year before the Supreme Court struck down the use of racial preferences in college admissions in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the Pew Research Center asked Americans whether an applicant’s race or ethnicity should be a factor in the college admissions process. 74 percent of respondents said that it should not, including 79 percent of whites, 59 percent of blacks, 68 percent of Hispanics, and 63 percent of Asian Americans. By way of comparison, 93 percent of Americans said that high-school grades should be a factor in college admissions, and 85 percent said the same about standardized test scores. Several surveys since then have produced similar results.

A May 2023 study that I co-authored with my Manhattan Institute colleague Michael Hartney reinforces this point. Through an original survey experiment on the 2022 Cooperative Election Study (CES), we asked Americans to play the role of an admissions officer and decide between two competing medical-school applicants. While the applicants’ accomplishments were randomly varied, the specific pair of applicants that respondents saw always consisted of an Asian American male and a black male.

Our objective was to determine whether, and when, Americans believe diversity should take precedence over merit in medical-school admissions. We found that even when respondents were informed that the medical school lacked diversity, the vast majority made their admissions decisions based on merit — in this case, college grades and MCAT scores — not race.

A few months prior to the publication of that paper, for a separate report, I reviewed hundreds of survey questions on affirmative action stored on the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research’s online database. I found that Americans are most likely to say that they oppose “affirmative action” when survey language explicitly describes the policy as providing “preferential treatment” or “preferences” for a given group. This suggests a deep American aversion to racial and gender-based favoritism — which is why Democrats, when pushing policies rooted in such ideology, tend to rely on euphemisms. Republicans should not do what even Democrats know doesn’t work.

Unfortunately, over the last few weeks, they have sounded like they might. Several prominent Republicans have taken to the social media platform X to argue that “Heritage Americans” — those who can trace their lineage to the Founding era — are inherently superior to more recent arrivals. In doing so, they suggest that the former are entitled to preferential treatment on the basis of ancestry. Here, the logic is that “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others”.

Republican leaders, such as Vice President JD Vance, should reject such grievance-based politics. These ideas were unpopular when Democrats pushed them, and they will be unpopular when Republicans try them, too.

Will 2026 finally be the year Canada abandons food cartels?

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Food, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

For reasons unknown, Canadian politicians both left and right have been willing to sacrifice almost anything in trade negotiations except the cosy protectionist scheme we call “supply management”, which enriches a tiny number of farmers in Ontario and Quebec by keeping grocery prices significantly higher than the free market price. On his Substack, The Food Professor predicts that Prime Minister Carney will be forced to give up this market-rigging, anti-consumer scheme in the coming year:

Image from Agri-Food Analytics Lab, Dalhousie University

As we enter 2026, several forces are converging to reshape Canada’s food economy. Consumer empowerment — amplified by social media — continues to accelerate, while geopolitics, particularly tensions with our southern neighbour, are becoming increasingly disruptive. Together, these dynamics will push food policy issues that once lived in technical silos into the public spotlight.

At the top of that list sits CUSMA and supply management. Prime Minister Carney has signaled firmness on market access, backed by legislation that shields supply management from parliamentary debate. That protection, however, is unlikely to endure. Even if the United States has little genuine interest in exporting more dairy to Canada — and even if Canadian consumers show limited appetite for it — President Trump now understands, far better than during his first term, that supply management is a potent political wedge. The system protects roughly 9,400 dairy farmers who exert disproportionate influence over agricultural policy, while compensation payments continue to flow without any meaningful reduction in production or market share. For a growing number of Canadians, this arrangement increasingly resembles a closed loop rather than a public good. The irony is that global demand for dairy is rising and Canadian milk should be part of that growth story. Instead, the system prioritizes insulation over ambition — a missed opportunity at a time when competitiveness should matter most.

January 1 also marks the formal implementation of new front-of-package nutrition labels. Although these symbols have been appearing on shelves for some time, many consumers either overlook them or misunderstand their purpose. Their real impact has been largely invisible to the public: they have already reshaped how food companies formulate products, invest in research, and redesign portfolios. Whether the labels meaningfully change consumer behaviour remains debatable, but their influence on product development is no longer.

[…]

Finally, 2026 coincides with the United Nations’ International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists — a timely moment to reset the debate around meat consumption and livestock production. Rangelands underpin global meat systems by converting grasslands — often unsuitable for crops — into high-quality protein. In a world where demand for animal protein continues to grow, portraying livestock as inherently incompatible with sustainability ignores nutritional, economic, and ecological realities. Well-managed grazing supports rural livelihoods, strengthens export economies, and can enhance biodiversity and soil health rather than undermine them. If policymakers are serious about food security, climate resilience, and affordability, 2026 should mark a shift away from apologizing for meat production and toward recognizing livestock as a strategic pillar of resilient food systems — not a sector to be regulated out of existence

December 27, 2025

Diversity is not our strength, no matter how many times they say it is

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Education, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, John Carter responds to a post from Martin Sellner on the visible results of institutionalized “diversity”:

These are the consequences of anti-white policies!

“DEI” has robbed an entire white generation of their careers and thus the realization of their life plans.

The infographics show the impact of the “DEI” policies on a whole generation of white male millennials.

John Carter:

The young white men whose lives were derailed by this psychosis amount to millions of quiet personal tragedies — careers that didn’t launch, marriages that never happened, children who were never born.

But the civilizational fallout is even worse.

The diversity shoved into the places that should have gone to talented young white men has proven itself unequal to the task, to put it mildly. They weren’t smart enough to be mentored for the positions they occupied. As the boomers shuffle away into retirement, they’ll take their knowledge and skills with them — knowledge and skills that weren’t passed onto the diversity (which was incapable of learning it), but also weren’t passed on to talented young white men (who could have mastered it, but were prevented from doing so). Since the diversity is too dumb to master that material, it’s certainly too dumb to pass it on. The chain of knowledge transmission is broken.

Autodidacticism only goes so far. There’s only so much you can learn from books and YouTube videos. There’s ultimately no replacement for hands on professional training. Those talented young white men have gotten very good at podcasting, trading crypto, growing their presence in the attention economy … But by and large they haven’t been allowed to become doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc. Maybe that won’t matter in the end because of AI, but in the meantime, if you think the quality of everything has nosedived throughout the Cancelled Years, you really haven’t seen anything yet. The dwindling old guard of white male boomers is the only force keeping the lights on. When they leave, the real darkness closes in.

December 21, 2025

Boomers – A vampiric generation battening on the blood of the young

Filed under: Economics, History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

As a member of the recently identified “Generation Jones”, I could take part in the widespread boomer hate with a clear conscience … but as Scott Alexander points out, the hate may be more than a little over-done:

“… Millennials and Generation Z have more money (adjusted for inflation ie cost-of-living, and compared at the same age) than their Boomer parents, to about the same degree that the Boomers exceeded their own parents. This is good and how it should be. The Boomers have successfully passed on a better life to their children”

There’s a more developed theory of Boomer-hating. The more developed theory goes: Boomers are plundering the young. We know this, because their share of resources is high and keeps increasing. They use their large population share and good voter turnout to vote themselves ever-higher pensions at the expense of working taxpayers.

How might we investigate this theory? We can’t use total social security spending, because the number of elderly has gone up. Can we use social security spending per elderly person? No; the amount of social security paid out depends on the amount paid in. If each year’s retirees earned more during their career than the previous year’s did (this is true), then each year’s will get a higher SSI payment, even if the system’s “generosity” stays the same.

We might start by looking at change in social security payment divided by change in median income. Over the past fifty years, average Social Security payment in inflation-adjusted dollars increased 60%. If we expect these payments to reflect earnings twenty years before disbursement, we can look at real median personal income from 1953 to 2003; this also increased 60%. There is no increase in generosity.

Or we can just look at the history. The Social Security Administration’s own website says that its generosity peaked in 1972, when the program primarily served the Greatest Generation; since then, it’s been one contraction after another. In 1983, the government increased the full retirement age from 65 to 67; in 1993, they made Social Security more taxable. Since then, most of the changes have been cost-of-living increases, which are indexed to inflation and not the result of active lobbying on old people’s behalf.

Why do so many believe that old people have discovered a vote-themselves-infinite-benefits hack? Since old people represent an increasing fraction of the population, are living longer, and face a secular trend of rising healthcare costs, even when their benefits per capita per year are stable or declining the government will spend more money on them as a group. This spending is indeed rapidly becoming unsustainable, the elderly will need to accept big benefit cuts to make it sustainable again, and they are resisting those cuts.

So have we finally discovered the fabled Boomer selfishness? Call it what you want. But remember that the Boomers did pay money into Social Security to support their own parents, believing that they would be supported in turn. Learning that yours is the generation where the pyramid collapses is a hard pill to swallow. Maybe they should suck it up and take the sacrifice. You’d do this, right? Voluntarily give up money which is yours by right, in order to help other generations? Oh, sorry, you didn’t hear the question, you were too busy writing your 500th “You don’t hate Boomers enough, why won’t they hurry up and die, we need to declare intergenerational warfare and seize our rightful inheritance” post.

Update, 22 December: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

December 20, 2025

Ours is a culture that actively conspires against and sabotages its own children

Filed under: Business, Economics, Education, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Following up on yesterdays post (here) on the viral essay about the Millennial “lost generation”, John Carter enumerates the extent of damage done to Millennials in general and Millennial men in particular:

A Bloomberg report from 2023 tracked reported hiring by 88 Standard & Poor’s 100 companies and of 323,094 reported hires from 2018-2021, only 6% were white.

The response to the essay has been an outpouring of suppressed rage that has been simmering for years in an emotional pressure cooker of silenced frustration. The author, Jacob Savage, provides a ground-level view of the DEI revolution’s human cost, beginning with his personal experiences as an aspiring screenwriter, and then widening the reader’s perspective via interviews with would-be journalists and academics. Every subject described a similar pattern of frustrated ambitions in which, starting around the middle of the 2010s, their careers stalled out for no other reason than their melanin-deficiency and y-chromosome superfluity. Young white men were systematically excluded from every institutional avenue of prestige and prosperity. Doors were closed in academia, in journalism, in entertainment, in the performing arts, in publishing, in tech, in the civil service, in the corporate world. It didn’t matter if you wanted to be a journalist, a novelist, a scientist, an engineer, a software developer, a musician, a comedian, a lawyer, a doctor, an investment banker, or an actor. In every direction, Diversity Is Our Strength and The Future Is Female; every job posting particularly encourages applications from traditionally underrepresented and equity-seeking groups including women, Black and Indigenous People Of Colour, LGBTQ+, and the disabled … a litany of identities in which “white men” was always conspicuous by its absence.

The Lost Generation does not rely only on the pathos of anecdote. Savage includes endless reams of data, demonstrating how white men virtually disappeared from Hollywood writing rooms, editorial staff, university admissions, tenure-track positions, new media journalism, legacy media, and internships. He shows how, after the 2020s, they even stopped bothering to apply, because what was the point? The comprehensive push to exclude young white men from employment wasn’t limited to prestigious creative industries, of course. The corporate sector has also adopted a practice of hiring anyone but white men, as revealed two years ago by a Bloomberg article which gloated that well over 90% of new hires at America’s largest corporations weren’t white.

The Bloomberg article was criticized for methodological flaws, but judging by the outpouring of stories it elicited (just see the several hundred comments my own essay got, the best of which I summarized here) it was certainly directionally accurate.

The real strength of Savage’s article isn’t the cold statistics, though, but the heartrending poignancy with which it highlights the emotional wreckage left in the wake of this cultural revolution.

Hiring processes are opaque. If an employer doesn’t extend an offer, they rarely explain why; at best one receives a formulaic “thank you for your interest in the position, but we have decided to move forward with another applicant. We wish you the best of luck in your endeavours.” They certainly never come out and say that you didn’t get hired because you’re a white man, which is generally technically illegal, for whatever that is worth in an atmosphere in which the unspoken de facto trumps the written de jure. Candidates are not privy to the internal deliberations of hiring committees, which will always publicly claim that they hired the best candidate. Officially a facade of meritocracy was maintained, even as meritocracy was systematically dismantled from within.

The power suit-clad feminists who body-checked their padded shoulder into C-suites and academic departments in the 1970s flattered themselves that they were subduing sexist male chauvinism by outdoing the boys at their own game and forcing the patriarchy to acknowledge their natural female excellence. Growing up I would often hear professional women say things like “as a woman, to get half as far as a man, you have to be twice as good and work twice as hard”. [NR: usually with a smug “fortunately, that’s not difficult” tacked on] The implication of this was that women were just overall better than men, because the old boy’s club held the fairer sex to a higher standard than it did the good old boys. Of course this was almost never true, these women were overwhelmingly the beneficiaries of affirmative action programs motivated by anti-discrimination legislation that opened up any corporation that didn’t put a sufficient number females on the payroll to ruinous lawsuits. Moreover, a fair fraction of them were really being recruited as decorative additions to the secretarial harems of upper management. Nevertheless it helped lay the foundation for the Future Is Female boosterism that stole the future from a generation of young men.

There was a time, not so long ago, where I naively assumed that my own situation was simply the inverse of the one women had faced in the 70s and 80s. I was aware that I was being rather openly discriminated against, but imagined that this simply meant that I had to perform to a higher standard, that if I was good enough, the excellence of my work would shatter the institutional barriers and force someone to employ me. It took me several long and agonizing years to realize that this just wasn’t true. The crotchety patriarchs of the declining West may have been principled men capable of putting stereotypes aside to recognize merit; in fact, the historical evidence suggests that they overwhelmingly prized merit above any other consideration (just as the evidence suggests that their stereotypes were overwhelmingly correct). The priestesses of the present gynocracy hold themselves to no such standard. They don’t care about your promise or your performance, at all. If anything, performing well is a strike against you, because it threatens them. Nothing makes them seethe more than being outperformed by men. They champion mediocrity as much to punish as to promote.

Young white men had been raised to expect meritocracy. They’d also been raised to be racial and sexual egalitarians. People in the past, they believed, had been bigoted, believing superstitious stereotypes about differences of ability and temperament between the sexes and races that had no foundation in reality, pernicious falsehoods that were developed and propagated as intersectional systems of oppression with the purpose of justifying slavery, colonialism, imperialism, and genocide. Naturally they were appalled to have such charges laid at their feet, and so they they agreed that we were all going to try and correct this injustice, and we’d do it by carefully eliminating every potential source of racial or sexual bias, eliminating all the unfair barriers to advancement within society, in particular although not certainly not exclusively via university admissions and institutional hiring. That was the original official line on DEI: that it wasn’t about excluding white men, heaven forbid, no, it was simply about including everyone else, widening the talent pool so that we could ensure both the fairest possible system of advancement, and that the best possible candidates were given access to opportunity. In practice, we were told, this wouldn’t be a quota system: everything would still be meritocratic, but if it came down to a coin flip between two equally qualified candidates, one of whom was a white man and the other of whom was not, the not would win. Fair enough, the young white men thought at first: we’ll all compete on a level playing field, in fact we’ll even accept a bit of a handicap in the interests of correcting historical injustices, and may the best human win.

But the DEI commissars had absolutely no interest in a level playing field. That the playing field wasn’t already as level as it could be was, in fact, one of their most infamous lies. The arena has always been level: physics plays no favourites in the eternal struggle for survival and mastery. If some always end up on top – certain individuals, certain families, certain nations, certain races – this is invariably due to their own innate advantages over their competitors. An interesting example of this was provided by the Russian revolution. The Bolsheviks cast down the old Czarist aristocracy, stripping them of land, wealth, and status, and then discriminated against them in every way possible; a century later, their descendants had clawed their way back to power and prominence. The only possible conclusion from this is that the Russian aristocrats were, at least to some degree, aristos – the best, the noblest – in some sense that went beyond inherited estates.

The young white men did not think of themselves as aristocrats with a blood right to a certain position in life, but as contestants in a fair competition, who would rise or fall on their own merits and by their own efforts. They then abruptly found themselves competing in a system in which it was simply impossible for them to rise, but which also lied to them about the impassable barrier that had been placed in their way. If you noticed the unfairness, you were told that this was ridiculous, that as a white man you were automatically and massively privileged, that it was impossible to discriminate against you because of this, and that in addition to being a bigoted racist you were also quite clearly mediocre, a bitter little man filled with envy for the winners in life, the brilliant beautiful black women who had obviously outcompeted you because they were just so much smarter, so much more dedicated, and so much better because after all they had succeeded in spite of the deck being stacked against them whereas you had failed despite having been born with every unearned advantage in the world.

An entire generation had their future ripped from their hands, and were then told that it was their fault, their inadequacy. They were gaslit that there was no systemic discrimination against them, that their failure to launch was purely due to their individual failings … while at the same time being told that those who were so clearly the beneficiaries of a heavy thumb on the scale were the victims of discrimination, that the oppressors were the oppressed, and that to cry “oppression” yourself was therefore itself a form of oppression.

Do you see how cruel that is? How sadistic? It is more psychologically vicious by far than anything the Bolsheviks did to the Russian aristocracy. At least the Bolsheviks were honest. Although, it must be said, the psychological sadism of the gay race commissars is part of a tradition, communists have often been noted for their demonic cruelty.

December 15, 2025

The wrong way to address the credit card debt issue

Filed under: Economics, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Daniel Mitchell says that US politicians seem to have identified a real problem and they’re proposing solutions. Unfortunately, the biggest proposal not only won’t solve the problem … it’ll make it worse for the most vulnerable credit card debtors:

“Credit Cards” by Sean MacEntee is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

According to a new report from the New York Federal Reserve, Americans have accumulated over one trillion in credit card debt, an all-time high. It’s a record that would make financial advisor Dave Ramsey lose the remaining hair on his head, but even worse, the share of balances in serious delinquency climbed to a nearly financial-crash level of 7.1%. In other words, Americans are borrowing more and paying back less.

This alarming trend has naturally drawn the attention of politicians eager to offer a quick fix.

Unfortunately, the solution gaining bipartisan traction is a blanket cap on credit card interest rates. Like most political quick fixes, it is an economic prescription guaranteed to harm the very individuals it claims to protect.

The impulse to cap rates is rooted in a fundamental economic misunderstanding. It treats the interest rate as an arbitrary fee levied by greedy banks rather than the essential economic mechanism it is: the price of risk. This misguided philosophy is embodied in the legislation introduced by the populist duo of Senators Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT), which seeks to impose a nationwide cap on Annual Percentage Rates (APRs), sometimes as low as 10%.

Make no mistake: two politicians don’t know better than the marketplace and the law of supply and demand that governs it. The consequences of imposing a price ceiling on credit are not debatable. They are historically certain. Interest rates on credit cards are higher than on mortgages, for instance, because credit cards are unsecured debt. If a borrower defaults, the bank cannot seize collateral to cover the loss. The interest rate must therefore be high enough to reflect the expected default rate across the entire high-risk pool.

It’s wrongheaded. Faced with the possibility of a government-imposed price cap, credit card companies would of course respond as any company would. They will stop extending credit to those who will possibly not pay them back. Studies show that even a cap as high as 18% would put nearly 80% of subprime borrowers at risk of losing access to credit. In other words, the 10% cap proposed by the Hawley–Sanders alliance would have truly devastating effects for credit access, potentially eliminating millions of accounts.

The victims of this policy will not be the wealthy, who already qualify for prime rates; nor will they be the financially literate, who pay their balances in full. The victims will be the economically vulnerable, the working-class single mother needing a short-term buffer, the recent immigrant attempting to build a credit score, or the young person trying to establish his or her financial footing. For these individuals, the Hawley–Sanders policy will deliver not cheap credit, but no credit at all.

December 14, 2025

Where does all the money go for so many First Nations bands?

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Economics, Government — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Earlier this month, I shared a long thread highlighting some incredible findings from the audit of a single First Nations group in Saskatchewan (here). On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, @Martyupnorth discusses how the federal government has gone out of its way not to ensure that First Nations funding is transparent:

    Cory Morgan @CoryBMorgan
    The Siksika reserve got $1.3 billion a few years ago and the housing is still predominantly shit.

    It’s not lack of government funding folks.

    It’s a broken system of racial apartheid.

    This ruling won’t help a bit.

Let’s talk about transparency in First Nations reserve finances in Canada. It’s topic that’s sparked a lot of debate.

Back in 2013, the Harper government passed the First Nations Financial Transparency Act (FNFTA), which required chiefs and councils to publicly disclose their salaries, expenses, and audited financial statements. The goal? To ensure accountability for the billions in federal funding going to reserves, empowering community members to hold leaders responsible and curb potential corruption.

But the Act was controversial from the start. Critics, including many First Nations leaders (no surprise there), called it paternalistic, imposed without proper consultation, and an infringement on Indigenous sovereignty. Some argued it violated privacy by forcing the public release of sensitive financial details, like personal remuneration schedules.

Enter Justin Trudeau. During his 2015 campaign, he promised to repeal the FNFTA, saying it wasn’t “respectful” to First Nations and needed replacement with a co-developed approach. Once in power, his government didn’t formally repeal the Act, but effectively reversed it by suspending enforcement. They stopped withholding funds from non-compliant bands, halted court actions, and reinstated frozen money. Compliance rates plummeted afterward, with fewer bands disclosing info publicly.

See the screen shot below. The Siksika Nation, to whom Cory refers to, hasn’t dislosed financial data since 2013.

The Liberals’ rationale? Building “mutual accountability” through partnership rather than top-down rules, addressing privacy concerns and respecting self-governance. But a decade later, as of 2025, the Act remains on the books unenforced, while polls show most Canadians still want transparency in how reserve funds are mis-managed.

What do you think? Does ditching enforcement help or hinder real accountability?

Update: At some point, the audits have to start and the government and the courts will then have their hands full:

December 13, 2025

Misunderstanding the causes of wealth

Filed under: Economics, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

As most economists could point out, there’s no point asking what are the causes of poverty, because poverty is the default condition. Getting people out of poverty, that is a much more interesting discussion. Tim Worstall responds to a recent video from someone who clearly doesn’t understand where wealth comes from:

From this video here. Given that Grace [Blakeley] herself posts it she must approve the content.

    Because the way that capitalism generates prosperity for some is by generating misery for others. You cannot have universal prosperity in a capitalist system. Just think about, like, this phone. What has happened for me to be able to hold this phone in my hands right now? A bunch of kids in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, at gunpoint, have been sent to scratch coltan out of the ground …

So, first thought. If the world, the economy, is a zero sum game then yes, we can only have some prosperous if others are not — some can only have more pie if others have less. On the other hand if we know how to bake the pie bigger then all can have more at the same time.

So, do we know how to make the pie bigger?

That source of Brad DeLong means yes, this is correct. Where’s that inflexion point, that bend in the curve? About where we start doing capitalism with free markets. As Marx, K himself pointed out capitalism is really very productive.

OK, so we know how to increase the size of the pie, it is possible for all to gain. It is not necessary for some to get less in order for others to gain more. The central contention is wrong. Provably, obviously, wrong.

Oh, sure, sure, it could work out that we take stuff off others in order to feed some. You know, say taxing child carers in order to pay train drivers massive salaries, as we do. But it’s not in fact necessary.

We can also check this another way:

So, lots and lots have become better off in this period of capitalism. Sure, sure, we should do better as a civilisation, we want all to do so. But while so many have got better off no, it is not possible to say that this has been done at the expense of those in extreme poverty. Because extreme poverty itself is set at the subsistence level. If you take stuff off the extreme poor then they die — that’s what subsistence level means. So that majority of humanity has not got rich by nicking it off the extreme poor. Because if they had there would be no extreme poor as they’d all be dead.

So, the overall claim is simply wrong. But it’s also wrong in specifics.

December 9, 2025

Auditing where the money goes, First Nations edition

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Economics, Government — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I don’t think many Canadians would argue with the government providing funding to First Nations groups in remote areas so they have access to services and amenities that most of us take for granted. But the government has been giving so much money for so long with very little evidence that the money is actually making a difference. Surely, a regular system of audits would show what happens to the money after the feds cut a cheque and why conditions in First Nations communities aren’t improving? Well, on the social media site formerly known as Twitter, @The Reclamare shares a thread detailing some of the findings of a recent audit of a First Nations NGO and it’s kind of disturbing:

Where our taxes go, First Nations Edition

KPMG audited the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations (FSIN) representing 74 First Nations in Saskatchewan

They analyzed spending between April 2019 and March 2024

Hang on🧵

#1 – COVID Funding

$26 million was audited
KPMG found $23.5 million was questionable
** an 89% failure rate**

– no records
– missing contracts
– missing invoices

# 2 – Travel expenditures

$800K of travel spending was audited
$316K was flagged by auditors, a 39% failure rate

Half the travel bookings couldn’t be justified, either policy violations or they couldn’t explain the purpose. And one Vice Chief was billing personal trips

# 3 – Executive Pay Raises during Covid

On November 5, 2020, a briefing note went to FSIN’s Treasury Board recommending:

$60,000 pay raise for the Chief
$40,000 pay raise for each Vice Chief

Retroactive 8 months prior

(more…)

December 8, 2025

QotD: Austerity versus “austerity”

Filed under: Economics, Government, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Too great attention to the use of language is a distraction from the essential and easily becomes mere pedantry; but to pay too little is to risk being deceived or manipulated by those who use language wrongly. Words, Aristotle said, should not bear more precision than possible; but neither should they bear less than possible.

Words have connotations as well as denotations, and one way of insinuating an untruth into someone’s mind is to disconnect the two, so that the denotation and the connotation are at variance and even opposite. An excellent example of this is in the use of the word austerity as applied to certain government economic policies. Frequently one reads, for example, that the difficulties of countries such as Britain and France in the matter of responding to the Covid-19 epidemic were caused by previous government austerity, that is to say, failure to spend more. But irrespective of whether, had the governments spent more (and France already devotes a greater proportion of its GDP to healthcare than the great majority of countries at the same economic level), the epidemic would have been more easily mastered, their policies in restricting their expenditure cannot be called austerity, because they still spent more than their income: as, in fact, they had done almost continually for forty years.

Supposing I were to say, “This year I’m going in for austerity. Last year I spent ten per cent more than my income, but this year I am going to spend only five per cent more,” you would think I were uttering a sub-Wildean paradox. But if I were to say only, “This year I’m going in for austerity,” you would think I were going to wear a hair shirt and subsist on locusts and honey. To say that the British and French governments have exercised austerity is to mean the first and imply the second, which is clearly dishonest: though we should note that the proper term, reduction of the deficit, is neutral as to whether it is economically wise or unwise. After all, I can borrow equally to start a business or drink champagne for breakfast.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Controlling Thought”, New English Review, 2020-06-09.

Update, 9 December: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

December 4, 2025

Don’t put a lot of trust in the “surging Canadian GDP stories” they’re pushing

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Stephen Punwasi put together an interesting thread on the latest “rosy scenario” GDP numbers the state media have been making such a big deal about:

2/ What do we see? Imports contributed 0.7 points out of 0.6 points of Q3 GDP growth. The rest of the economy was a net drag.

Imports contribute to GDP as a part of net exports: exports minus imports.

Smaller imports boost net exports. Imports made the biggest drop since 2022.

3/ What we’re seeing is a phenomenon called import compression: the balance was boosted by falling imports.

It’s a superficial improvement due accounting mechanics. The only growth is actually weakness.

We figured it out. But wait — how do they get import/export data? 😬

4/ Let’s start with imports. I recalled reading about the CBSA’s new customs & revenue management (CARM) platform.

Totally normal bedtime reading for weirdos, I know.

CARM delayed data to StatCan, who had to estimate on trend & revise. I can’t recall the issue being resolved.

4/ I contact StatCan. Delays have improved but recent data is heavily impacted.

They warn to expect larger than usual revisions to September — a third of Q3. 😅

It gets funnier: 🇺🇸’s gov shutdown means 🇨🇦 can’t get data for ~75% of its exports. Trend estimate again.

5/ so all GDP growth was imports, which fell faster than exports.

Imports & exports are estimates based on trend.

But wait — what exactly is a trend? It’s based on seasonal adjustments — smoothing predictable variation.

In 🇨🇦, that means suppressing summer & boosting winter.

6/ non-predictable variations to consumption like recession & trade wars can’t be filtered out.

The adjustment over/understates. e.g. 🇺🇸 Fed research shows this overstated recovery & lengthened the financial crisis. Ditto with COVID.

It can’t be fixed until years later.

7/ let’s put this together:

– 🇨🇦’s GDP grew exclusively due to the trade balance.

– import compression — a weakness that overstates growth

– trade had to be inferred via trend

– trend overstated by irregular shock

Yup.

8/ just to clarify — none of this is StatCan’s fault.

They’re tasked w/a deadline over the past year & 🇨🇦 decided to overhaul its trade data during a trade war.

They told me Dec 11th will be when revisions for imports come in & we’ll get an update on CARM.

9/ Bonus fun facts for the pros:

– by pushing it back to the 11th, this overstatement helps suppress yields for the GoC cash management program

– the 11th is after the last auction data is provided to dealers

Fascinating combo while 🇨🇦 is asset cycling for short-term optics.

10/ anyway, full write up, direct quotes from StatCan, & a fun bonus GDP fact for the kiddos.

Also, follow @BetterDwelling if you found this interesting.

We take research & insights reserved for deep-pocketed investors & give it away to normies w/plain english explanations.

December 2, 2025

The elites will continue pushing high immigration despite the obvious social costs it imposes

Filed under: Economics, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

One of the very tip-top luxury beliefs is that massive immigration is always and under all circumstances a good thing. A great thing, even. One of the things about the holders of luxury beliefs is that they are almost always completely insulated from any of the consequences of their beliefs, and this is especially true in this case. As Lorenzo Warby points out, the elites’ devotion to this cause contributes to collapsing levels of trust in the society absorbing all those immigrants and deeply undermines confidence that the leadership have anyone else’s but their own best interests at heart:

There is a straightforward, respectable view on immigration to Western countries. More people means more transactions, means more gains from trade, so immigration is a good thing. Immigration grows the economy, it increases GDP, so sensible folk support immigration.

There are extra bells and whistles, such as providing needed skills; compensating for falling fertility; willingness to do jobs locals are not. All the extra bells and whistles have responses. Why not train locals (i.e., citizens)? Won’t the immigrants’ fertility also fall? (Yes, though possibly more slowly.) The real willingness is to do jobs at lower wages and conditions than the locals would accept. For instance, potentially using US H1B visas to bring in entry-level employees who will work for less, and in worse conditions, than the locals.

Moreover, increasing total GDP is not the same as increasing per capita GDP. Even with per capita GDP, there are always questions about the distribution of those gains to GDP.

Nevertheless, the basic intuition is: immigration means more transactions, more gains from trade. Those who believe in markets — in positive-sum interactions — should support immigration.

This is not the trumping response it appears to be. Immigration does not only import workers—nor even just increase mutual-gain transactions — it imports people, so potentially affects all aspects of the receiving society. This means, of course, that there are a much wider range of possible concerns about immigration that “yes, but more gains from trade” is not an adequate response to.

Efficiency and number of transactions are not the only issues for a social order, particularly not a flourishing social order. There are also issues of social cohesion; social resilience; connections and social capital; the distribution of GDP gains; effects on relative prices; congestion costs; how well institutions are managing the influx; effects on local communities; cultural differences; social coordination issues and the ability to manage collective action problems; increased competition for positional goods — goods that cannot, or are blocked from, responding to increased demand.

These are all legitimate grounds for concern that are not answered by “yes, but more gains from trade“. How many of those “yes, but more gains from trade” folk have grappled with mass rape and sexual exploitation of young women and girls as a cost of culturally divergent immigration (and its systematic mismanagement)? How many of those “yes, but more gains from trade” folk have grappled with violent disturbance, even civil war, as a potential cost of immigration, even though we have historical examples of precisely that?

If, on one hand, the respectable people insist “yes, but more gains from trade” is an adequate response, and that other concerns are not legitimate, this will almost certainly be taken as the contemptuous dismissal it is. Not only will it not be persuasive, it will (and does) generate anger and resentment.

If people have concerns that the “reasonable”, “liberal-minded” folk will not deal with — or, worse, are dismissive of such concerns even being raised — then people will turn to unreasonable and illiberal folk, if they are the only people who will respond to their concerns. Significant gaps in political markets will be filled by political entrepreneurs.

If folk are told that “if you believe in markets, you have to support (high levels of) immigration” then many folk will respond with “OK, I reject markets“. Moreover, it is simply false that market economics entails that mass immigration is a good thing.

The idea that there is some economic phenomena such that marginal costs exceeds marginal benefits for all people over all ranges in all forms is not Economic thinking, it is magical thinking. (More precisely, it is class-signalling parading as Economics.)

It is magical thinking that falls foul of economist Thomas Sowell‘s dictum that there are no solutions, only trade-offs. Immigrants may be engaging in lots of positive-sum, gains from trade transactions, yet still be imposing more costs than benefits on a society, and on resident citizens, precisely because societies are not just efficiency arenas for free-floating transactions and no one is just an economic transactor.

Update, 3 December: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

November 27, 2025

Carney – “Who cares?”

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Economics, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Melanie in Saskatchewan reacts to Prime Minister Mark Carney’s shrugging-off the economic concerns of ordinary Canadians with a casual “Who cares?”

Dear @MarkJCarney

“Who cares?”

That’s what you actually said when asked when you last bothered talking to Trump about the tariffs that are currently body-slamming Canadian jobs.

“Who cares? … It’s a detail.”

Really Mark? Let’s meet some of those “details”, Prime Minister.

The single mom juggling three gig jobs because the factory that used to pay her mortgage “paused investment” and then paused her entire livelihood: she’s just a detail.

The Windsor autoworker whose night shift got cancelled forever while you were busy perfecting your thoughtful squint for the cameras: tiny detail.

The steelworker in Hamilton burning through EI while the mill runs skeleton crews and you call the carnage a “temporary adjustment”: just a little detail.

The small-shop owner deciding which of her three employees to fire this month because 25% tariffs turned her cross-border contracts into suicide notes: who cares, right? Detail.

The rail worker staring at empty tracks where trains full of Canadian auto parts and steel used to roll: super minor detail.

The Saskatchewan electrician watching Nutrien build its next billion-dollar terminal in Washington State instead of BC because at least the Americans aren’t at war with their own economy: I guess that’s barely worth mentioning.

The welders and millwrights being told the next big plants are going up in Ohio and Texas, not Ontario or Alberta, because Canada’s too busy arguing about jurisdiction to actually fight for work: pfft, details.

The family parked on gurneys in an ER hallway at 3 a.m. because we never trained enough doctors and now the ones we have are bolting: honestly, who has time for that detail?

All those kids with degrees doing DoorDash because private-sector job growth is wheezing and every company is frozen waiting for the next Trump tweet or Trudeau shrug: whatever, details.

You flew around the world taking heroic photos, sold us “Team Canada”, bragged you were the adult who could handle Trump, and the second a reporter asks when you last actually picked up the damn phone to fight for Canadian jobs, you smirk and say “Who cares?”

Message received, loud and clear.

Those people I mentioned above? They care.

Every single one of them cares when the shift vanishes, the mortgage renews, the mill goes quiet, the doctor quits, the plant gets built south of the border, and their kids ask why Mom’s crying at the kitchen table again.

But you don’t care.

And the worst part? You didn’t even bother to lie about it.

You lied to every single Canadian to get elected, yet you don’t care.

Well Mark … we sure as hell do care.

And you WILL care.

When your greasy grifting ass is voted to the curb and we undo all the harm you’ve caused Canadians to fatten your coffers. You cant stand living in Canada and can’t wait to move back to the UK … remember?

We sure will.

Just watch us.

Sincerely,
One of the millions of Canadians tired of being your rounding error.

Melanie in Saskatchewan

Also published on her Substack.

Apparently even the most detached of politicians can occasionally be persuaded to acknowledge an unforced error:

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