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At today’s City Council meeting, during public comment, perennial local Republican candidate Victoria Palmer gave this speech: “Hi, I’m Victoria Palmer with the King County Republican Party, and I’m here to follow up on your recent panel discussion about the federal policy on tariffs. Just to let you know, our party submitted an op-ed to the Seattle Times, which was published on June 13, and it was urging patience with the Trump tariffs, as a way to push our economy and develop it in a way that we can sustain domestically. Think of it like a torniquet, to turn off our dependency on imports, for our economy, that’s what’s going to save us, is, the American spirit. Thank you.” Five minutes later it was my turn to speak at public comment, and I said: “Good afternoon, Council. I actually just changed my mind about what I wanted to talk about today, because I wanted to offer a rebuttal to some of the comments offered by Republican speakers earlier, which, with all due respect to what they said, but here’s why I disagree about tariffs. As you all remember, when Trump announced his tariff policy, the stock market crashed. Now, for all of the valid criticisms about unhealthy focus on ‘the stock market’ and ‘capitalism’, one thing about stocks is that they are forward-looking. And if informed investors believed that the tariffs were really going to bring more money and more jobs to America, that would have been reflected in a boost in stock prices at the time. And as everybody here knows, that’s not what happened, stocks crashed, and they only rebounded a little bit later because Trump walked back his previous policy. “And the reason is that progress takes the form of finding an easier or cheaper way to do something. Sometimes that can be a new invention, but it can also be importing it from somewhere else. Now, we should be concerned about people who are temporarily disclocated by those changes, but the solution is to support people who are temporarily affected by those changes who did things the old way, not to stop all imports and block the new way of doing things. Thank you.” Victoria Palmer, incidentally, was part of a group in 2020 that would regularly hang a banner over I-5 saying “The Pandemic is a Fraud. Investigate, don’t Participate”. Lately she’s been trying to rebrand herself as more moderate, focusing on economic issues and pushing back against COVID restrictions (I still disagree with that position, but it’s not outright denying reality), and she never brings up that she used to claim “The Pandemic is a Fraud”. But Pepperidge Farm remembers. (Ironically, what I was planning on saying was that I think one or more of the Council members should do a Reddit AMA, but I can say that any week.) submitted by /u/bennetthaselton |
