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May 1, 2025 - The David Knight Show
18:56
Why So Serious? Trump Furious About Itemizing Tariff Surcharge
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Let's talk a little bit about the truths about tariffs.
Trump and the administration and their cheerleaders on Fox News went apoplectic at the idea that Amazon would itemize the new tariff charges that they're putting on.
There are online retailers where you buy things out of China that are going to be doing that.
They are going to be doing it.
And so it was reported by one group that Amazon was going to do that.
And Jeff Bezos pushed back against it, but Trump called him.
Called him.
As soon as somebody had that, as soon as there was a small article that put it up, and it was a publication I've not heard of.
It was Punch Something and Punchbowl.
I've never heard of Punchbowl.
So, I don't know who that is.
But some, I guess, relatively obscure, maybe they're not obscure, they're obscure to me, but some organization reported this, and the Trump administration freaked out, and Donald Trump personally called Jeff Bezos to get him to not do that.
What are they afraid of?
I thought that...
It wasn't going to raise the prices of anything.
Haven't we had that talking point hammered on us repeatedly?
Don't worry.
These tariffs are going to be nothing.
I mean, there's going to be tariffs on the wholesale price.
And you realize what a big markup they do?
So that's a tariff on this.
They mark everything up by a factor of 10 or whatever.
And so this is going to be doubling the price of what was 10% of the price.
That's going to double.
Don't worry.
They're going to just eat that.
They're not going to even pass that along.
It's going to be so minor you won't even see it.
Oh, really?
Really?
Then why is Trump freaking out, right?
The very fact that Trump and Caroline Levitt and you have Maria Bartiroma, they're all freaking out about this stuff yesterday.
But I thought it wasn't a problem.
It's not going to be inflationary.
It's not a tax, right?
Yeah, it is.
It is.
They know it.
And they didn't want people to see it.
They're lying to you about this.
They're trying to hide what they're doing.
They're trying to give you a hidden tax while he is out there saying, well, you know, now I'm going to drop the income tax rate.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's a shell game.
Watch this hand over here while he does this over here.
Yeah.
MAGA.
The magician's trick, right?
It's a magic trick.
It's a MAGA trick.
And it's only the MAGA people who are like, whoa, how'd he do that?
They don't see the trick of what's happening in the one hand while he's waving the other hand over here.
While he's waving this hand in front of your face, he's reaching around and lifting your wallet out of your back pocket with the other hand.
Trump said he talked to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos on Tuesday shortly after a report claimed that the e-commerce giant was going to show the cost of tariffs next to the total price of products on its site.
White House Press Secretary Caroline Lovett blasted Amazon, calling its reporting hostile and political.
It's hostile and political to tell people how much Trump's going to increase the prices of things.
Jeff Bezos, though, said Trump was very nice.
He was terrific.
He solved the problem very quickly.
He did the right thing.
He's a good guy.
I will take this since I just got off the phone with the president about Amazon's announcement.
This is a hostile and political act by Amazon.
Why didn't Amazon do this when the Biden administration hiked inflation to the highest level in 40 years?
And I would also add that it's not a surprise because as Reuters recently wrote, Amazon has partnered with a Chinese propaganda arm.
So this is another reason why Is Jeff Bezos still a Trump supporter?
Look, I will not speak to the President's relationships with Jeff Bezos, but I will tell you that this is certainly a hostile and political action by Amazon.
Secretary, if you have anything to add.
Yeah, I would also add that bringing down the terrible Biden infliction has been a priority for the first 100 days of the Trump administration.
And President Trump has done a great job of leading that since January 20th.
Interest rates.
...
So you get the idea, right?
Let's stop and think about that.
Think about how dishonest that answer was.
If Bezos or Amazon was going to show the The amount of the surcharge that Trump is putting on, the tariff surcharge he's going to be putting on.
That would be hostile and political, to tell you the truth.
It would also make him a Chinese foreign agent and propagandist, right?
But isn't she a propagandist?
She said, why didn't Amazon do this when the Biden administration hiked inflation to the highest level in 40 years?
Oh, okay, 40 years.
Well, that's kind of cherry-picked, isn't it?
Going to 1985.
So, you know, if you go back just a few years earlier, yeah, we had some inflation go up.
But it was also the line of attack, that same line of attack.
And I'll show you how ridiculous that line of attack is.
repeated by Maria Bartiromo as she curried favor with dictator Don.
I will say that there was no mention whatsoever at Amazon about Joe Biden's infirmity.
And the fact is, is that we got to.
You don't itemize inflation.
Inflation measured by the consumer price index was up 9.1%.
We all remember we were at the cash register.
Everything costs so much more.
So, you know, why they're putting a little bug now.
This is because of the tariffs and they didn't put a little bug.
This is because of the $7 trillion spent by the Democrats under Joe Biden is a question.
That's an absurd question, Maria.
That would have been politically disputed and hostile and all the rest of the stuff.
Inflation is not the same as when somebody goes out and says, we're going to put a surcharge on, we're going to put a restaurant surcharge on, or we're going to put a hotel surcharge on, or we're going to put a tariff on, right?
And those things are typically itemized.
And to the point of the inflation, yes, in the Biden error, E-R-R-O-R, in 2022 we had 9% inflation.
And of course it varies month by month, but you know, the peak, it was 9%.
In 2023 it was 6%, then it dropped down significantly in 2024.
And so Trump's going to bring it back up again.
But isn't it interesting that...
For these talking points, oh, you know, he created inflation, so now we can add taxes.
How's that?
That's a non-sequitur, really.
But she also cherry-picked the year 1985.
She said, for 40 years.
What happened before 1985?
1985 was when they started getting things under control with massive interest rate increases.
I remember.
I lived through all this stuff.
If you go back to 1974, You had inflation peaking at 10%, 1982, 8.4%.
But prior to that, 1980, 15%.
1981, 12%.
Right?
So, 1974, 10%.
Then you get to 1980, 15%, 81%, 12%, 82%, 8.4%.
Yeah, it was higher and more sustained than what we went through.
And the Biden error.
And yet, they want to focus on that.
They want to cherry-pick that.
I want to look at that.
Again, you know, statistics don't lie, but liars use statistics, don't they?
Cherry-picking the starting point is kind of the same thing these climate creeps do when they go back and they look at temperature.
They miss the medieval warming period.
Right?
And they start with a little mini ice age in the 1800s and then go from that.
It's kind of like when you look at the gas pump.
You should pay attention to what the state and local taxes and the federal taxes are in terms of the price that is there.
So, in San Francisco.
These surcharges have been common for over 15 years, initially as a protest against the city's health care mandate for employers.
However, starting in July 2024, last year, a new California state law will ban restaurants from adding service charges and other surcharges to customers' bills.
And so what happened was, last year in California, and then we also had it at the federal level, you had Government bans on putting these surcharges in here.
Why?
Because listing the surcharges separately was a form of political protest against these mandated surcharges.
It's a surcharge.
It's not inflation.
It's a surcharge, a direct surcharge.
And it is a form of political protest.
But just like the Democrats, the Trump administration doesn't like political protest.
And just like the Biden administration, they'll lie to your face about all this.
They'll spin, they'll misdirect, they'll throw, well, what about the other guy, you know?
All that stuff.
So when you look at what's going on with restaurants, the case of restaurants, they typically operate on a very thin margin, for example.
The new surcharges are not a sinister move to bolster the bottom line, but rather a genuine attempt to remain in the black.
Despite the twin onslaughts of hefty wholesale price increases and shortages in supplies and labor.
In other words, you've worked out what the price of your items need to be in terms of supplies and labor and overhead and all the rest of this stuff.
And they come in and say, well, we're going to hit you with a particular tax.
Or we're going to have a particular expensive mandate.
So what they did was they just itemized that as another thing, like a sales tax.
We used to have, when we had British friends in Houston, when we first got married, the group that I was working with, there was a lot of people from other countries in it.
And they said, I hate this.
When I go up to the register and they tell me that this is going to be this much, and then they add the sales tax to it.
And there's always one.
You never quote the price.
The price that's put up never includes the sales tax.
In the UK, they would always incorporate the sales tax.
Here, sales tax is there as a surcharge.
And for the same reason, I would think that I wish they would put the tariff charge there for honesty and also for simplicity for the people who are trying to operate the business.
And that's what they're saying here.
They say the typical small business restaurant.
Operates on a 3-5% pre-tax margin.
Razor-thin margins.
For the vast majority of restaurant operators, about 88% of them, total food costs are higher now than they were in 2019.
Labor costs are up for 86% of operators.
Profits are down, too, with 85% of owners reporting lower numbers than before the pandemic.
This one person they interviewed said, well, I've changed my pricing three times since the pandemic.
Menu pricing is up 20% thanks to inflation.
When I started, Flounder cost $49 a case.
Now it's $92.
More than double.
Well, almost double.
Eggs were $34.
Now we're paying $62.
Again, almost double.
Chicken was $80 a case.
Now it's $189 a case.
More than doubled.
She said, beef has gotten so expensive, I've just taken it off the menu.
Don't even have it there.
And so, like I said, California kept adding surcharges to things.
And of course, you know, the inflation, how do you calculate that?
Because as you see, different...
Ingredients go up different amounts.
There's no way that you could add an inflation surcharge.
What a lying argument from Carol Lyon.
Let's call her Carol Lyon.
Love it.
Because that was the most ingenuous argument that they could possibly have.
Yeah, well, he raised prices too, so we're going to raise prices now.
Oh, you admit you're going to raise prices.
Anyway, the restaurant industry is now getting a ban as of last year.
This is a year ago.
April 24th, 2024, a year ago, the Federal Trade Commission said that the restaurant industry was not going to be able to list surcharges that are put on it by the government.
So that was in April.
It came from the FTC.
Other things were prohibited.
Other surcharge listings were prohibited in California in July.
So a year ago, April 24th, 2024, the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission, Held an informal hearing on its recently proposed ban on so-called junk fees.
Should call them junk feces.
The Restaurant Association said the FTC unfairly swept restaurant operators into its far-reaching junk fee rule.
Restaurant fees are not junk fees.
They're long-standing fees for additional services or for greater convenience, which customers choose that add value, like delivery fees.
But you can't itemize those anymore.
But the real issue is that they don't want people itemizing.
They don't want restaurants itemizing these surcharges that are put on by local, state, and federal government.
And that's really where we are.
Trump hates it.
Biden hates it.
Because they lie to you about this stuff.
The FTC estimates this rule will cost restaurant operators about $5,000 per restaurant.
For small independent operators who run on a 3-5% pre-tax margin and make an average of $45,000 a year, that's about 10% of their total income.
One rule from a federal bureaucracy.
Just wipe out 10% of your income.
On Rumble, DG8, thank you for the tip.
He says, David, Biden's policies were horrible.
Only added more inflation that was bound to happen after Obama and Trump added $8 trillion to the debt.
And never forget the $6.2 trillion CARES Act.
Yeah, they did forget that, didn't they?
I should have mentioned it as well.
You want to talk about inflation?
Let's talk about what Trump did to us when he locked us down.
He set a whole new curve.
On the deficit, right?
The annual deficit, it took a whole new slope based on what he did.
They have some nerve talking about inflation.
Especially when, even before, what he did with the phony pandemic and the CARES Act and all the PPP, you know, were supposed to help small businesses and yet more than 50% of it went to the 5% biggest people.
All of that Corruption and that scam and that inflation.
The Trump administration even predated that.
He was leaning on the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates, do quantitative easing.
And then in 2019, in the fall, before this lockdown stuff, you had the repo market.
And I remember reporting on that.
I said, look at this.
You know, I talked about it.
Salenti talked about it.
But before I talked to Salenti about it, I saw that they were dumping in.
You know, $100 billion or something is repo market.
What in the world is a repo market?
And are they taking back cars or something?
That was the only repo market I knew about.
No, it wasn't that.
But I looked it up and said, so how does that compare?
I started comparing it to the gross domestic product of other countries.
So that one, the first time I noticed, it was about the same as the gross domestic product of Puerto Rico.
And the Trump administration, or the Federal Reserve, at the encouragement of the Trump administration, dumped that much into that financial market.
And then it kept on going.
Not long after that, they dumped in an amount that was even bigger.
I looked that up, and that was equivalent, in just this one dump, that was equivalent to the entire gross domestic product of Switzerland, which is the 20th largest It's all of them.
pressure and quantitative easing inflation all of that our interest rates all of that was inflationary and now they want to pretend that it was only biden who did the inflation it's all of them so
The common man.
They created common core to dumb down our children.
They created common past to track and control us.
Their commons project to make sure the commoners own nothing.
And the communist future.
They see the common man as simple, unsophisticated, ordinary.
But each of us has worth and dignity created in the image of God.
That is what we have in common.
That is what they want to take away.
Their most powerful weapons are isolation, deception, intimidation.
They desire to know everything about us while they hide everything from us.
It's time to turn that around and expose what they want to hide.
Please share the information and links you'll find at TheDavidKnightShow.com Thank you for listening.
Thank you for sharing.
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