Op-Ed: Pricing the madness – Deportations, annexations, wars with allies, etc.

US President Joe Biden is expected to push for a higher corporate tax rate in his State of the Union address – Copyright GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA/AFP/File Nathan Howard

Much has been said about what America will do in the coming years. Talk is cheap, but none of this is cheap. It’s incredibly expensive. America can’t pay for any of it.

The dilapidated, outdated and constantly undermined US revenue system can’t do it. The US borrows to pay its own debt, racking up more debt.

Bear in mind this debt is real money, not book entries. You can issue bonds until you’re red, white and blue in the face, it has to be paid back.

To do any of the stated things in “policy” as stated would cost trillions of dollars the US doesn’t have. Print money to cover it and the USD turns into confetti at a certain point.

If trade dries up due to tariffs, you make even less revenue.

If you were playing shop as a four-year-old and didn’t have any money, you’d do pretty badly. They wouldn’t let you into kindergarten on these numbers. They’d be worried your lousy arithmetic skills were contagious.

If you refuse to pay your debt, they’d have to impound your overseas assets to recover any money at all. That’s trillions of offshore dollars, cunningly parked out of reach of US revenue by very rich incredibly stupid smug people and sleazy corporations that don’t pay tax anyway.

The good news about impounding US assets is that the rest of the world would have to ensure the greenback was still worth something for that to work.

You’d get sanctioned like Russia. Ironic, to say the least.

Interest rates would go sky-high if you wanted to borrow under these circumstances. US banks would be paying top dollar to borrow, and that could get very nasty indeed. (Remember the good old days when Savings and Loans and banks were going off like popcorn?)

Like that, but much worse. The US lost its AAA credit rating some years ago, and that wasn’t cheap, either. Some of these insane prices and imbecile debt models relate directly to trying to manage the costs of borrowing.

A little cost breakdown is in order here:

Let’s start with deportations. The numbers cited for the cost of deporting 4% of the US population are horrendous. Quotes for deportations range from $86 billion to $300 billion. Small change, you say? It’s not if you haven’t got it and your revenue is tanking.

There’s another side to this. That’s all assuming you can find all those people in a lifetime. The costs could drag on for decades. You seriously think anyone’s going to sit around waiting to be deported? What about the cost of police and officials tracking them down?

Now, tariffs. Does anyone think US importers are going to pay those added prices happily? They don’t have to, and they know it. They can smuggle. Goods can be mysteriously stolen and miraculously reappear inside the US, courtesy of those fun-loving organized criminals you admire so much.

This already happens on a routine basis, and it wouldn’t be hard to just upscale the operations. To stop that you’d need an army of regulators, monitoring, and physical handling of goods. You’d also have to track every inch of US borders, including territories, Hawaii, Alaska and the ever-so-sweetly named “Garbage Island” aka Puerto Rico. Expensive? Very.

It’s more or less Prohibition 2.0, and that never worked. Nor can this.

Greenland – You can’t buy a place if there’s no seller. You can’t invade a place with your suckers and losers and start a standoff war with your allies and expect it to be quick or cheap.

(Can’t you just see it? “General Sucker, take your losers and go invade wherever it is.” We’re now at the point of idiocy cubed. You also have to pay to keep that very large military up-to-date and functional.)

Canada? Forget it. Just forget it.

Gulf of America? No. The name change of international waters needs approval.

Mexico – None of you are Teddy Roosevelt. Do you want a full-scale modern Vietnam on the southern border and a trade war with your own manufacturers on the Mexican side of the border? You geniuses, you.

Panama – Check out the state of the canal and its financial issues. Ever heard of places called the east and west coasts of the US: Try shipping from there.

Abolishing income tax. The one and only coherent expression in the Republican vocabulary is right out of its depth here. It is possible to abolish income tax, but you need viable revenue, which you don’t and won’t have with a half-witted revenue scheme of tariffs that can’t work at all.

China – You are about to make all these fatal and totally avoidable mistakes in the face of a very rich, solvent, and mainly competent, competitor. Any ideas? No? What a surprise.

Don’t worry about it. You’ll all be very broke soon enough if any of this happens.

Meanwhile, you might want to try meds that actually work.