The mood of us Americans right now is flat out bonkers.
One measure of the mood of the nation is the stock market, which lost almost thirteen trillion dollars in value from the day of our president’s inauguration to April 2nd, when our president took to the Rose Garden and announced sky-high tariffs on 180 nations.
The tariff announcement was crippling. The stock market fell like an axe, amputating 6.6 trillion more dollars in just two days. That’s the equivalent of losing the entire economy of Japan.
That amputation crippled those of us with 401ks and broke the kneecaps of the pension funds that will help support you when you’re over 65.
Earlier Wednesday April 9th, our president reversed himself and announced a 90-day pause on most tariffs, but raised the tariff on Chinese goods from 104% to 125%. The result was instant. The Standard & Poor’s, the NASDAQ, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average shot up a total of $6.3 trillion. In one day. That’s equal to gaining the entire economy of Germany.
So how do we Americans feel in this week of wildly gyrating numbers? Ebullient or manic-depressive? Microsoft’s Copilot, one of the many artificial intelligences competing for our attention, says that since April 2nd, when the tariffs were announced “the mood of Americans has been marked by a mix of anxiety and frustration.”
Anxiety and frustration amplified by the fact that our president is picking a fight with a nation that has worked for years to replace us as the greatest superpower on the planet. A nation with a two-million man army and with weapons like hypersonic missiles and bridge-carrying landing barges, weapons that we don’t have. A nation that can offer what businessmen crave the most–stability.
That nation is China. And China produces eighteen percent of the imported goods that make our lives rich for a low price.
Companies are not likely to invest in factories in America to make those goods here when our economic policy is going up and down like a yo-yo. What’s more, it takes two to five years to build a factory and get it up and running. And goods produced by American workers are likely to cost nearly three times more than goods produced in China.
Replacing your smart phone when it wears out with an American-made phone, for example, could cost you between two thousand and $3,500 dollars. In fact, Forbes Magazine says it would cost in the “$30,000 to $100,000 range.”
In other words, the low cost goods from China, Taiwan, Viet Nam and Cambodia make you and me richer. Those goods multiply our purchasing power. But tariffs make you and me poorer. They give us the equivalent of a giant pay cut. Estimates are that the new tariffs will cost the average household, a household like yours or mine, almost four thousand dollars per year.
Tariffs are taxes on you and me. China does not pay the extra 125% that will jack up the costs of Chinese laptops, children’s toys, office machines, and wireless earbuds. You and I do.
But not all of us are trembling in our socks. Rasmussen, a Republican polling organization, proclaimed just before the Rose Garden tariff announcement, that 45% of us believed America was headed in the right direction.
No wonder that in its summary of the bottom line on how we feel, Gallup, the polling organization, said way back in March, that we are worried. And, to quote Gallup, “Americans’ top worries remain firmly rooted in economic insecurity.” In the last week that insecurity has been roller-coastered in ways we have never, ever seen before.
References:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/658910/worry-economy-healthcare-social-security-surges.aspx
https://www.aaii.com/sentimentsurvey
https://www.conference-board.org/topics/consumer-confidence/press/CCI-Mar-2025
https://www.cnn.com/markets/fear-and-greed
https://franetic.com/global-markets-face-steep-losses-but-impacts-vary/
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/02/trump-reciprocal-tariffs-countries-chart-imports-united-states.html
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Howard Bloom of the Howard Bloom Institute has been called the Einstein, Newton, Darwin, and Freud of the 21st century by Britain’s Channel 4 TV. Bloom’s next book, coming out momentarily, 2025, is The Case of the Sexual Cosmos: Everything You Know About Nature is Wrong. Says Harvard’s Ellen Langer of The Case of the Sexual Cosmos, Bloom “argues that we are not savaging the earth as some would have it, but instead are growing the cosmos. A fascinating read.” One of Bloom’s eight previous books–Global Brain—was the subject of a symposium thrown by the Office of the Secretary of Defense including representatives from the State Department, the Energy Department, DARPA, IBM, and MIT. Bloom’s work has been published in scientific journals and in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Psychology Today, and the Scientific American. Says Joseph Chilton Pearce, author of Evolution’s End and The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, “I have finished Howard Bloom’s [first two] books, The Lucifer Principle and Global Brain, in that order, and am seriously awed, near overwhelmed by the magnitude of what he has done. I never expected to see, in any form, from any sector, such an accomplishment. I doubt there is a stronger intellect than Bloom’s on the planet.” For more, see http://howardbloom.net or http://howardbloom.institute