Inflation Feels Like a Flood, but the President Says, Nothing to Worry about; it's Just a Trickle

Shoppers are strongly complaining about how much they are struggling under inflation this Christmas season as they try to buy gifts. The Trump Administration, on the other hand, keeps insisting it is all a Democrat hoax, and conveniently, hasn’t gotten an actual inflation report out in months for us to see whether we are facing a flood of inflation or not.

So, you can believe the work-deluged (due to DOGE firings), long-shutdown Bureau of Belabored Statistics with its much belated and beleaguered reports, or you can believe the cries of shoppers like yourself in more than one recent poll. The various articles and the merchants quoted blame the Grinched-out shopper’s feelings on the Trump Tariffs.

A tariff tale

Today, I’m going to tell a little tale of tariffs from my own recent deluge. Over the weekend, I’ll use my Deeper Dive to spell out the tariff troubles via a number of the articles highlighted below. Today, however, I’m going to present an analogy from the recent flood waters that have surrounded me, which you can see in the videos below.

I live about half a mile from one of the badly flooding rivers, where I was surprised to see water flowing over the top of the dike for about a mile-long stretch. I’ve seen flooding in the region many times before, but I’ve never seen it go over the dike in this area. It usually floods through the back-channels of streams that have to penetrate the dike.

I was impressed by the engineering. The top of the dike was so perfectly matched to the slope of the top of the river that the water overflowed evenly over a long stretch, making for a thin sheet of muddy water flattening down the grass that covers the dike as the water turned the surrounding corn, potato and hay fields into a mile-wide, rippling stream. The grass on the dike worked almost like a thatched roof, and the perfectly even slope kept the dike from eroding by spreading the flow across a large distance. Had the water found a low point, a more concentrated flow could easily have achieved enough force to cut through the clay dike.

Since rivers slope gradually downhill, you cannot just make the top of the dike level. That would be easy. The engineers have to figure out what the slope of the top of the river will be at flood stage as it makes its slightly downhill journey in order to set the dike exactly parallel with that slope so that the entire dike tops at the same time with a thin even flow. It worked beautifully, and the dike held up well. Yesterday, the rains largely stopped, and today the fields have already drained down to mere puddles. Sometimes government does us a great service with quality work.

That does not mean, however, that it worked that perfectly everywhere. Our area was well controlled but a dike did break in another nearby county where the river reached a record far above anything ever experienced there in the river’s recorded history, and even some parts or the county where I live saw major flooding with lots of rescues, and that was due to bad government design.

So, it goes with money flow, too. When too much is printed and too much flows, it can cause a flood of inflation throughout the economy. When well regulated, it does not. Tariffs, though, are like manmade holes in the dike. For businesses, and now with a spreading flow downstream to consumers, tariffs forced a flood of rising prices by government mandate that is now swamping everyone.

So, while Trump now boasts he is helping tariff-struck farmers with bailouts, the farmers have retorted today that the only thing he is doing is plugging holes in the dike that he made. The farmers say his tariffs resulted in counter tariffs that ate away most of their trade. We’ll look into all of that this weekend.

Here’s my homespun analogy:

Our own home sits on high, sandy ground, so it never has any flooding issues whenever the endless Pacific-Northwest rains pour down and the nearby Nooksack River floods. I live in a Dutch community, and I’m not Dutch (so I’m not much around here), but the Dutch do know how to do dikes. That must be why so many of the locals are named Van Dyke and Van Dyken or just Dyke. I’m surrounded by Dykes, most of whom are not the masculine female type, and some of which are literal dikes—manmade levees.

Anyway, the flood waters have already just about vanished here in Dykesville, and the good-natured community has joined rescues of nearby towns that were not so well engineered by their government. One town, we’ll call it Tarifftown, exists on what used to be a swampy lake that was turned into a landfill. Subsequent to human settlement on the landfill, the government built a relief point in the river’s improved dike about a mile upslope from this ancient lakebed where the Nooksack’s dike is made to overflow to relieve pressures at larger towns further downstream.

Because the government built the overflow exactly upslope from the already-existing, low-lying Tariffville, the town gets deluged up to the windows of its shops and homes about every ten years when the river tops extreme flood stage. Why the government would do this by design, no one seems to know, except that, prior to human settlement, the river regularly overflowed its ancient natural levee through the lake that used to exist there and into the much larger Frasier River a few miles away in Canada, for the two rivers share the same delta lands.

By picking the most natural point for the engineered overflow, the engineers assured regular ruin to Tariffville and heightened flood problems for a neighboring Canadian town. That is like the government’s mandated tariffs. You know they are going to deluge everyone with inflation, even in other nations. You can see it coming from a mile away. Why the government would do this, you cannot figure. It’s a completely predictable inflation flood by government mandate that many are forced to suffer in a space where inflation was already running above its normal waterline. The government supposedly did this for everyone’s own good. Why? Because some officials higher upstream thought Tariffville was a beneficial sacrifice, I guess.

It’s such an obviously bad plan, when we have years of past knowledge about how that flood of inflation from tariffs works and how it impacts surrounding countries who are none so happy about our overflow of troubles into their lands. WE are making the mess for everyone.

Back home

Returning to my own life, things are settling down now. The floods are not disrupting my writing any longer, so I’ll be putting together the Deeper Dive for this weekend, which strikes me as a particularly suitable name for it at present. I’ll be covering the numerous articles on the high inflation that is being reported from non-government sources as being deliberately government-caused by tariffs.

For my own little part in dealing with this deluge, I have a twenty-year-old Honda CRV I had finally decided to sell after getting a Jeep Grand Cherokee months ago because I only used the extra car once. I’ve changed plans in light of the present floods, and I’ve decided I’m just going to give the car to a flood victim, as a number of people lost their cars in nearby communities, and some only had liability insurance because they could not afford full coverage. It wouldn’t sell for much anyway, but it is still an extremely reliable little vehicle, even with its quarter-million miles. It’s never given me trouble, and it’s not bad looking for a little runt of a car.

The point is, we have to take care of each other when times are tough. My wife and I have decided we’ll get more joy out of putting a bow on the little, red Honda SUV and giving it as a Christmas car than out of selling it.

Maybe this Christmas you can find a way to bring relief to others who live in Tariffville who are feeling the pinch of the government Grinch if you live among the more fortunate in Dykesville.

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