Let me get this straight. The big plan to "save" American business involves a policy so brilliantly conceived that the very people it's supposed to help are now suing the government to make it stop.
You can't make this stuff up. This isn't just a headline like Trump says his tariffs will help American businesses. So why are they suing?; it’s the punchline to a very long, very expensive, and very stupid joke.
We’ve got guys like David Levi, an electrical engineer in Virginia trying to teach kids about science by letting them turn a banana into a keyboard. A "Banan-a-Synth." It sounds awesome, right? A little bit of weird, wonderful American ingenuity. But he can’t launch it. Why? Because the tariffs on the electronic bits and bobs he needs are bouncing around like a superball in a racquetball court, making it impossible to set a price, plan production, or do anything a normal business needs to do to, you know, exist.
Levi’s now at a point where he’s considering moving production out of the country just to get some stability. Read that again. The "America First" policy might force an American entrepreneur to take his American business overseas.
And he’s not alone. He’s joined by a woman in Vermont making cycling gear, toy sellers in Illinois, and a wine importer in New York. These aren't corporate behemoths with armies of lobbyists. They’re people who, like Cassie Abel in Idaho, leveraged their own damn houses to build something. She said it herself: "every tariff increase means the risk of losing my home."
This isn't a spreadsheet problem. It's a "will my family have a place to live next month" problem.
Now, offcourse, there’s always one guy. In every one of these economic master plans, there's always one dude who holds a press conference to say how great things are. This time, it’s Drew Greenblatt from Marlin Steel Wire Products.
He says the tariffs are a "blessing for the American factory worker" because they leveled the playing field against subsidized Chinese steel. He even snagged a $1.3 million job from a Canadian company. Good for him. I’m genuinely not being sarcastic—good for him and his workers.
But here’s the thing that drives me crazy. It’s the same thing with every big D.C. policy debate. They find the one winner, put him on camera, and pretend he represents the entire economy. It's like finding the one guy who won the lottery and using him to argue that scratch-off tickets are a sound retirement strategy.
Greenblatt says if just 10% or 20% of manufacturing jobs come back, his factories will "double or triple in size." That’s great math for him, but what about the businesses that use his steel baskets but can no longer afford the imported parts that go inside them? Are we just picking winners and losers based on who has a better soundbite? It feels less like a coherent economic strategy and more like a game of musical chairs where the government keeps yanking away seats just to see who falls.
And the big players, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, are basically screaming from the rooftops that this is unhinged. They told the Supreme Court this mess has caused more uncertainty than the COVID pandemic. The pandemic. A global plague was less disruptive to trade than this policy. Let that sink in.
This is the part where I feel like I'm losing my mind. We have a fleet of economists, including a former Fed Chair, telling the Supreme Court that this entire premise is wrong. They argue that the decline in manufacturing jobs isn't because we're making less stuff. We're actually making more stuff than ever; it just takes fewer people because of technology and automation.
The tariffs, they say, are a net loss. A self-inflicted wound. The Federal Reserve's own economists found that during the last go-around with this, the U.S. lost five times more manufacturing jobs than it gained.
So the experts say it's a bad idea. No, "bad" doesn't cover it—they're basically saying it's economic malpractice on a national scale. And we're supposed to ignore all this data because one guy in Baltimore is happy he can run six shifts around the clock...
It’s exhausting. You see a guy like Jess Nepstad, who runs a coffee equipment company out of Montana, talk about how he literally wept on his porch one night when a lower court blocked the tariffs. Can you imagine the sheer, bone-deep stress you have to be under for a court ruling about import duties to bring you to tears? This isn't just `stock market today` fluctuations; this is people's lives and their sanity.
The whole case goes before the Supreme Court on November 5th. And guys like David Levi, the banana-synth inventor, are just hoping for an answer. Any answer. Because right now, the American dream isn't about innovation or hard work. It's about trying to run your business while the government randomly changes the rules of gravity every other Tuesday.
Let’s be real. This was never just about economics. It’s political theater, and these small businesses are the unpaid extras. The goal isn’t to create a stable, predictable environment for entrepreneurs; it’s to look "tough" on trade, consequences be damned. The fact that the people who are actually on the front lines of American commerce are begging for it to stop tells you everything you need to know. They aren't asking for a handout. They’re just asking for the government to get its foot off their throat.
