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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   24001 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026

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Trump announces plan to hit UK, Denmark and other European countries with extra tariffs over Greenland

Several EU countries sent tripwire forces into Greenland a few days ago. Now Trump has announced 10% tariffs on imported goods from Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Finland. As a sidenote, despite predictions of economic catastrophe, Trump's tariffs have been smaller and done less economic damage than estimated.

For starters, inflation is running below projections. In December, the just-announced inflation rate was 2.7 percent. The Fed’s favorite indicator was unchanged from November when the core inflation rate, at 2.6 percent, was the lowest since 2021.

Tariffs have had surprisingly little impact on higher consumer prices. “Tariff pass‑through to consumers has been much milder than anticipated,” Olu Sonola, head of U.S. economic research at Fitch Ratings, wrote in a recent research note. Yet revenue from tariffs brought in close to $300 billion in 2025, up from about $80 billion in 2024, and is currently on track to produce over $350 billion this year.

The evidence suggests that most costs are being absorbed by foreign exporters or by domestic sellers accepting lower profit margins. And since the actual tariffs on different countries are a crazy quilt of different rates, producers have also become expert at shifting their supply chains to countries with relatively lower tariffs. In addition, it’s easy to overstate the impact of tariffs on household costs, since imports are only about 14 percent of GDP. In other words, there are no tariffs on 86 percent of GDP.

The high tariff rate on China skews the averages. Excluding China, the effective tariff rate on the rest of the world, adjusting for trade share and exempt categories, is not the average 17 percent. It’s well below 10 percent. Thanks in part to the tariffs, the chronic U.S. global trade deficit has been shrinking. The October deficit was $29.4 billion, down nearly 40 percent from September. The decline continued in November, the last month for which statistics are available.

Still, no one knows what's the next step of Trump's master plan. Will it fizzle like the whole "Canada 51st state" thing? Polymarket estimates 27% chance that Trump will take "part of Greenland" in 2026.

LMAO. Europe needs to get a good kicking to jolt it out of being the USA's little bitch, a position it has dutifully played for the last 75 years. This should be the breaking point but we all know that it'll just lead to more "but muh international law" from spineless leaders as they slowly go along with it. The only good thing going to come out of all this is going to be seeing Europe be on the receiving end of what these countries did and continue to do to the third world.

We all know the next thing that's going to happen is that the US will threaten to pull out of the Ukraine deal unless Europe hands over Greenland, which will be responded to by the Europeans with more moderately worded letters (it shows how cucked the Europe of 2026 is that they don't have the constitution to even send strongly worded letters over direct attacks to their territorial sovereignty).

The only real solution here is to abolish the welfare state, a largesse the continent can no longer afford, and redirect the money into long term capital investments. It'll also massively cut down on illegal immigration once the immigrants very quickly realize they won't be getting much or even anything if they come to Europe.

Europeans will riot if you abolish the welfare state. It can only happen like Greece during the crisis (although there were still plenty of riots then) where there’s no money and the government says it’s this or we starve. Even the French aren’t there yet.

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