MAGAts suck at jokes... And also might actually be brain dead...
Now, I get that this is meant to be a joke of some kind. Obviously, Abbott isn't actually going to impose a tariff on people moving from New York to Texas. The whole premise is absurd.
But the joke being funny at all is entirely predicated on his base having no idea what a tariff even is!
Maybe you don't know either.
Very simply, a tariff is a tax a nation imposes on importers of goods manufactured in foreign countries. When an iPhone manufactured in China arrives in the US, Apple pays a percentage of the cost to the US government.
Because of this, a lot of companies increase the price of their goods to compensate for the added tax.
Trump's trade war has hit a lot of small independent companies particularly hard. Especially those using Kickstarter, where a company agreed to sell a product to backers for a set price, made the product in another country, and was then hit with sudden tariffs forcing an unexpected burden on the company and forcing them to sell their product at a huge loss.
States cannot put tariffs on other states. Doing so is completely illegal and against the US constitution.
You can't put tariffs on humans... and maybe Texas specifically shouldn't be joking about it...
Obviously, just on the face of it, there's no way this could be enforced. What would you do? Place people at the borders of the states to inspect anyone entering and charge them 100% of what they're worth if they're from New York City?
On its face, it's silly. But it's a joke. You aren't really supposed to analyze the mechanisms of enforcement too closely. The real point I want to make is that this isn't something the Texas governor should be joking about in the first place.
A tariff is based on the worth of a product.
When someone says they're imposing a 100% tariff on something, they mean to say that they're putting a tax on the imported good of 100% of its worth.
And that brings us to a concept Texas has struggled with in the past.
Human beings aren't goods!
We are not products that can be bought and sold! We do not have a monetary worth to impose a 100% tax on!
We fought a war over this when Texas and several other states committed treason to ensure they could continue buying and selling human beings as property. And Texas lost.
You should think long and hard, as a governor of a treasonous Confederate state, on joking about treating human beings as goods.
This is just weirdly hateful... to other Republicans...
The hypothetical people who would be "fleeing" from Mamdani's evil communist regime and its affordable grocery stores and its free buses aren't even going to be the people who voted for him!
This is apparently playing towards a particularly gross form of local xenophobia in red states. Now, normally, xenophobia is fear of foreigners from other countries. But some red states seem to take this further and have developed a fear of their states being invaded... by Americans from other states!
I won't say that zero people are going to be moving from New York to Texas. But the people who do this aren't the liberals who voted for Mamdani! Guess what? Liberals hate Texas! And Oklahoma and Alabama and all the other red states that leech off of the success of blue states, taking in far more taxpayer dollars than they pay in while denying citizens of essential services and intentionally sabotaging education.
So this is just so... deeply weird...
Like, you could make a post welcoming Republicans who want to move to your state to get away from the evil communist. But instead, you make a joke about... taxing them?
Punishing the individuals who are moving to your state to get away from the evil communist jihadist or whatever you think Mamdani is?
Why are you going out of your way to make Republicans from blue states who would want to move to your backward proto-authoritarian wannabe theocracy less welcome?
Has your xenophobia gone so far that you're just hating on fellow Republicans for being born in blue states?
What is actually wrong with you???
