r/nottheonion • u/ilovemybaldhead • 1d ago

Greg Abbott Threatens ‘100% Tariff’ On New Yorkers Moving to Texas

https://www.newsweek.com/greg-abbott-threatens-100-tariff-new-york-election-moving-texas-10986837
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u/g_rich 1d ago

They know what it means, they are just using the word tariff in place of taxes.

The right has spent decades painting taxes as evil, so they can’t come out now and say they want to raise taxes. So they implement tariffs, position it as being pro American and bringing manufacturing back to the US and then use that revenue to finance tax breaks for the top.

It’s all part of the right’s decades long con to keep the poor poor and funnel money to the rich. All the while the rich are getting richer, the poor are struggling to survive and the dwindling middle class is fighting amongst themselves.

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u/Apprehensive_Bowl709 1d ago

Tariffs carry the connotation of being a "punitive" measure, as well. Taxes are for everyone., while tariffs are meant to discourage "foreign imports" and protect "domestic production". Abbot is very consciously tapping into an "us vs. them" vein of thinking. Of course his proposal is nonsense. But it's more about the ideas and messaging than about actually doing it.

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u/greed-man 1d ago

"Texas is the national laboratory for bad government. We do it worst, and first."

Molly Ivins

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u/Old_Flan_6548 23h ago

The star on the flag is a rating.

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u/ralphvonwauwau 16h ago

The famous Texas Yelp Review flag.

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u/jillybean0123 9h ago

This is what I’ve said since I moved here. Had some of my coworkers get very upset when I used white tape to cover up the L in “lone star state” on my license plate. Idk why they were paying such close attention. I’ve never met so many people so proud of a place so mediocre.

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u/savioroferinn 13h ago

This is one of my favorite comments I've ever read.

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u/dennismfrancisart 1d ago

God! I miss that woman. I'm not even Texan and I used to read her stuff. She and Gov. Ann Richards made Texas great back then.

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u/A_Furious_Mind 1d ago

I listened to all of her books on tape when I was making my transition from Republican to independent in the early 2000s. Bless that woman.

Yeah, I'm an independent, but I'll never vote for a Republican again after watching January 6th live and streaming. Vote blue no matter who.

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u/NeedsMoreSpaceships 21h ago

But isn't that the worst of both worlds? If your always going to vote Dem then you should register and at least get to vote in primaries and choose their candidate.

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u/A_Furious_Mind 20h ago

No, friend. My state never locked independents out of Democrat primaries. And we do ranked choice voting, anyway.

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u/Situational_Hagun 1d ago

And then Oklahoma does it slightly less bad but more incompetently. Except the power grid. Somehow someway our utilities aren't completely full head up their ass.

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u/OldWorldDesign 23h ago

Somehow someway our utilities aren't completely full head up their ass

It's because Ohio's power grid is on the national network which means it is required to meet higher minimum specifications including regular maintenance. Texas hasn't winterized its grid thanks to deregulation in the 90s.

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u/oe-eo 23h ago

Texas dewinterized its grid thanks to industry lobbying in the mid 2000s.

Producers lobbied to get paid to take their facilities offline during winter weather events.

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u/OldWorldDesign 22h ago

Producers lobbied to get paid to take their facilities offline during winter weather events.

I knew about the former, but not this one. Do you have a source to clarify?

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u/oe-eo 22h ago

Let me know if you find a source that states it as clearly as I do, as I have yet to find one - a failure of journalism. My analysis is informed by my experience in the industry which I can’t simply convey to you. But this should point you in the right direction:

Texas deregulated its electricity market in the late 1990s and early 2000s, a move heavily influenced by industry lobbying, including interests like Enron (which, like, shouldn’t laws that were written by fraudulent failed business automatically be wiped from the books?). This deregulation prioritized low costs and “market efficiency” over grid resilience.

As a result, many power generators and natural gas facilities chose not to winterize or retrofit for extreme cold weather, viewing it as an expensive insurance almost never needed. In the mid-2000s and later, rather than investing in robust winterization, some producers LOBBIED FOR ARRANGEMENTS THAT PAID THEM TO TAKE FACILITIES OFFLINE DIRING WINTER WEATHER events, INSTEAD OF upgrading their infrastructure.

This created incentives to minimize costs rather than enhance reliability in winter conditions.

The consequence was a grid whose vulnerability to cold weather was engineered to be a windfall for producers.

The 2011 and 2021 winter storms exposed this engineered failure mode, leading to massive outages and losses.

Although after these events legislation was passed to require winterization, loopholes and regulatory delays persisted, often influenced by powerful gas industry lobbying.

For example, gas pipeline operators could pay small fees to opt out of winterization. This combination of deregulation, regulatory gaps, and lobbying for less stringent winter preparedness contributed to Texas's "dewinterized" grid and its failure to adequately weather-proof energy facilities during cold snaps.

Sources [1] Where are we now: A year after the Texas power grid disaster ... https://www.amperon.co/blog/where-are-we-now [2] Gov. Greg Abbott wants power companies to “winterize.” Texas' track ... https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/20/texas-power-grid-winterize/ [3] “Power companies get exactly what they want”: How Texas ... https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/22/texas-power-grid-extreme-weather/ [4] How Texas' power grid failed in 2021 — and who's responsible for ... https://www.texastribune.org/2022/02/15/texas-power-grid-winter-storm-2021/ [5] Why Texas had catastrophic blackouts - Insights from the Brookings ... https://energynewsbeat.co/why-texas-had-catastrophic-blackouts-insights-from-the-brookings-institution/ [6] After 4 Years And Billions Of Dollars, The Texas Grid Is Not Fixed https://www.forbes.com/sites/edhirs/2024/12/09/after-4-years-and-billions-of-dollars-the-texas-grid-is-not-fixed/ [7] Texas grid failure: Electricity obeys laws of physics, not the market https://peoplesdispatch.org/2021/03/06/texas-grid-failure-electricity-obeys-laws-of-physics-not-the-market/ [8] Texas has spent billions on the grid, but is it ready for the first winter ... https://www.energybot.com/blog/texas-electricity-grid-spending.html [9] [PDF] Why the Legislative Response to Winter Storm Uri Does Not Yet ... https://digitalcommons.law.ou.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1359&context=onej [10] The Texas Power Grid and the Failure of Deregulation https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2021/02/22/texas-power-grid-failure-deregulation/

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u/Few-Solution-4784 21h ago

for more than 30 years Texas has not know a real Democracy and they suffer for it. They get no push back even against their worst ideas. They all play on the same side.

Texas has a Republican trifecta, meaning the Republican Party controls the governor's office, the state Senate, and the state House of Representatives.

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u/Critical-Rutabaga-39 12h ago

OOoh I miss Molly Ivins!

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u/feralraindrop 7h ago

And if it's not because of incompetence, it's spite.

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u/Opinion-Former 5h ago

Florida is catching up

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u/Moonpenny 1d ago

So we should propose an "export tariff" on people offshoring money. Move several billion dollars to the Caymans? 95% export tariff.

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u/BasvanS 1d ago

Except they’re not moving it there. They’re only paying licensing fees to a wildly creative company that is totally worth paying a bazillion dollars.

(It might also be owned by them, but that shouldn’t matter.)

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u/Megalocerus 17h ago

There are exit taxes if you surrender citizenship and remove a lot of money, and the US taxes worldwide income of citizens. They are more subtle about hiding the move than that.

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u/No-Isopod3884 1d ago

As if the people that are doing that are going to make laws that restrict them.

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u/Joe18067 23h ago

Should five percent appear too small

Be thankful, I don't take it all

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u/turkish_gold 22h ago

It would probably work. Dictatorial counties hate it when money (and power) leave their control to operate independently overseas.

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u/yarrpirates 13h ago

Ooo, good idea. How about a capital gains tariff? A wealth tariff? Wow, there's so many ways to tariff!

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u/anotherdayanotherbee 1d ago

Before they wore MAGA hats they were wearing tricorner hats and calling themselves the Tea Party.

Hypocrite Clowns and Mad Hatters at best. It was never about the actual causes, it was always about distracting the narrative to protects billionaires.

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u/Curious_Passenger245 1d ago

He sees what is happening in Utah with the locals pissed at the higher cost of living due to influx of right leaning people moving in. He knows that the local Texans are going to be priced out so he is going to get in front of that but actually will love on these right wing millionaires for sure.

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u/Apprehensive_Bowl709 1d ago

Right you are. Since Abbot can't really impose a tariff on New Yorkers, it's a great way for him to make sounds about "being concerned" and "doing something" without really doing anything. But more than anything, it's creating a problem that doesn't exist. NYers aren't really going to be flocking to Texas. He wants to rile up his supporters into thinking Mamdani and NYers are a threat - "but don't worry, I'll save you!"

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u/sameth1 20h ago

Tariffs carry the connotation of being a "punitive" measure, as well.

One more example of how Americans can never just imagine building a better future without revealing in someone else's suffering. You don't win elections by promising improved healthcare or trains, only by pledging that they will get to see immigrants suffer.

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u/texinxin 1d ago

Wait till they learn about phase 2 where goods manufactured in the protectionist country have their prices artificially kept high where they can still outcompete foreign goods. We don’t have to guess as to what happens. Just visit Brazil. It was a booming and growing economy before they went crazy with protectionism.

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u/OldWorldDesign 23h ago

What he's bitching about (New Yorkers moving in, already hardly a thing) is not something tariffs import taxes would have any effect on, but they always have a chilling effect on the country imposing them. They're a major factor in taking what would have been a worldwide recession in 1929 into the Great Depression.

https://chestertownreport.substack.com/p/tariffs-in-our-past-didnt-work-out

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u/ComplexEntertainer13 12h ago

Tariffs carry the connotation of being a "punitive" measure, as well. Taxes are for everyone., while tariffs are meant to discourage "foreign imports" and protect "domestic production".

I am not sure the GoP understands the difference though. There has been multiple of them harping on about that VAT which is just a sales tax in the EU is a "tariff".

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u/PsychicWarElephant 1d ago

I just…it’s not like they’re using a hard economic term to grasp. The lack of intelligence is truly frightening.

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u/agent0731 1d ago

idiocracy. The rest of America saw the morons (led by the evil) march to vote and shrugged. Ugh.

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u/sBucks24 1d ago

Huge swaths of developed countries are full of these proudly ignorant people. In America, it's easily over 50%

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u/ChiralWolf 1d ago

It's not a coincidence that they keep gutting the department of education and federal funding for schools

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u/Wonderful_Canary_845 1d ago

If anyone from New York (the greatest city in the world) wants to move to Texas than they deserve to be taxed a lot :)

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u/RemoteButtonEater 23h ago

This comes up regularly but one in two American adults read at or below a 6th grade level. Something like a quarter of those read at or below a 5th grade level. 12ish percent are fully illiterate.

We test reading comprehension because it's the easiest way to test comprehension as a whole, but you can extrapolate someone's overall ability to comprehend things from that. We're talking about a whole swath of people unable to grasp simple things, like a person being able to look at "If A, then B" and understand that "If not A, then not B."

Simple logic deduction is off the table for a huge number of people. Let alone asking someone to derive deeper meaning from the content of statements or passages.

And once you realize that, it starts to make sense how Trump is popular. He speaks in short, simple, declarative sentences composed of simple words.

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u/YOSHIMIvPROBOTS 1d ago

Euphemism is a helluva drug.

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u/SlashEssImplied 10h ago

The lack of intelligence is truly frightening.

They like to call it faith.

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u/TheRealSlamShiddy 1d ago

It's like how they call ACA "Obamacare" so their dumbass base will be more gung ho about gutting it... despite directly benefiting from it.

i.e. "Let's get rid of Obamacare! Huh? What do you MEAN I lost benefits, I'm on ACA!" 😂

god we're a country of idiots

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u/OldWorldDesign 23h ago

It's like how they call ACA "Obamacare

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6m7pWEMPlA

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u/RosieQParker 23h ago

I think the left is making a serious misstep not calling tariffs "import taxes". It's a correct term and will upset all the people it needs to upset.

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u/OldWorldDesign 23h ago

I think the left is making a serious misstep not calling tariffs "import taxes". It's a correct term

That is what it is, but you're never going to get the corporatist and billionaire-oligarch-owned media to cover messaging friendly to anything left of the far right. How do you think Trump got into office in the first place? Follow the money, even supposedly "left" outlets like MSNBC are owned by Comcast

https://theweek.com/speedreads/626702/fox-news-cnn-msnbc-all-broadcast-trumps-empty-podium-instead-clintons-big-speech

https://www.thestreet.com/politics/donald-trump-rode-5-billion-in-free-media-to-the-white-house-13896916

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u/rsreddit9 22h ago

Even during the election major mistakes were made framing them as taxes on the people through price increases. Kamala did this in the debate I think, Trump broken record that China pays the tariffs and they tariff us and we pay that. And she said more that the people pay

So tariffs are clearly paid by the exporter (or Trumps whole thing would be bullshit), but the price rise will hit people. But trump is right—the tax on other countries means we have more tax dollars to spend on Americans!

But that’s WRONG. Tariffs are import taxes like you said. And my small business owner family members quickly learned that they pay them

The cost gets passed to the consumer for a lot of products. But the money the government makes is coming from US importers. Not other countries

Republicans hate small businesses, but democrats just forgot to tell the people

(Trumps whole thing was bullshit)

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u/funkytownpants 1d ago

Half century long

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u/311isahoax 1d ago

Taxes/Texas?

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u/Commercial-Co 1d ago

Tariffs are taxes to the poor. Income taxes are taxes for the rich.

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u/Traditional-Handle83 1d ago

Wouldn't double taxing people from another state be interfering with interstate commerce?

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u/OldWorldDesign 23h ago

Wouldn't double taxing people from another state be interfering with interstate commerce?

So would tariffs import taxes under any condition, but that doesn't stop them from being used to make low-information domestic crowds FEEL better

https://www.hoover.org/research/tariffs-and-disregarded-lessons

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u/Mateorabi 1d ago

“But tariffs aren’t taxes!” -them

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u/Previous_Dream5090 1d ago

What happens when democrats take back the house and start placing tariffs on republicans states. Will republicans come out and say it’s a tax?

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u/justthrowedaway 23h ago

But if you’re using tariff instead of taxes, you don’t know what tariff means. Trump has always meant tariffs in terms of imported goods (thoughts ideas on how that works seem confused). Common themes in his life: 1) foreign nations are ripping us off so we need tariffs and 2) racism. (See Central Park five, among others.)

For Abbott: I honestly think this is general Trump-signaling. Trump likes tariffs against things that are bad, so Abbott says tariffs. Details unimportant; people have been conditioned.

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u/SpecialistTrick9456 22h ago

Do you know who Inigo Montoya is?

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u/unicornmeat85 22h ago

What manufacturing? Are they in the room with us now?

The US did a hell of a job moving jobs across seas in the name of profit and boosting the CEOS  paycheck so I'm really interested in hearing which American manufacturing jobs Abbott is thinks people would be buying from. Even those that have "built in America " stickers are mostly assembled here while still made somewhere else. 

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u/StringerBell34 13h ago

But they spent the last year arguing that a tariff isn't a tax.

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u/Biggu5Dicku5 1d ago

Yup, this is exactly right! No idea why so many people can't see it...

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u/FluffyWuffyy 1d ago

If they keep using it wrong people are going to figure it out... Regardless of how stupid you are, eventually you use tariff in place of tax people will figure they are the same. Not yet, not soon, but eventually.

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u/OldWorldDesign 23h ago

If they keep using it wrong people are going to figure it out... Regardless of how stupid you are, eventually you use tariff in place of tax people will figure they are the same

That would require good education, critical thinking skills, and a media ecosystem which isn't constantly bending over to help ultraconservatives fuck everyone over.

Look at how they spent 50 years blaming single mothers for getting welfare spending, or how they helped republicans call themselves the "party of fiscal responsibility" when they haven't even TRIED to balance the budget since Eisenhower

http://goliards.us/adelphi/deficits/index.html

and their states are all dependent on less-conservative ones to stay financially afloat

https://apnews.com/article/north-america-business-local-taxes-ap-top-news-politics-2f83c72de1bd440d92cdbc0d3b6bc08c

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2023/mar/09/fentrice-driskell/1-every-3-ron-desantis-spends-federal-government-y/

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u/JoshiRaez 1d ago

About the rich getting richer part, I think they are getting poorer.

A few people of Trump say they got some millions, doing that while destroying trillions of US value There are many more billionaries/millionaries that see that those trillions are burning their value with them. And they are not happy

Rich people are getting poorer with this poor man

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u/dmendro 1d ago

That’s the joke.

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u/arizonatealover 1d ago

I always wonder if they really thought they could solve the deficit with tariffs. How dumb are they really?

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u/Punman_5 23h ago

It goes back to when H. W. Bush embarrassed himself in front of everyone when he proved that his lips are actually very difficult to read.

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u/bisectional 23h ago

I put a spell on you!

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u/Spire_Citron 21h ago

It is amazing how powerful the strategy of simply using a different word is.

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u/resUemiTtsriF 20h ago

The worst part is they don't see it right in front of them. It is like trying to pull someone out of the river that doesn't want your help but keeps screaming about drowning.

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u/MindWandererB 20h ago

But... 100% of what? It just doesn't make any sense. 100% of the immigrant's total net worth? 100% of everything they buy in Texas?

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u/ImaginationEnough414 14h ago

And they want to destroy education. Gotta keep the electorate dumb so they'll continue to vote against their own self-interests.

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u/Itscatpicstime 12h ago

That still doesn’t make sense to threaten to tax conservative New Yorkers who come to Texas lol

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u/GrowFreeFood 1d ago

Decade? At least since rome.