Trump is promising to put a 10% tariff on all imported goods. Basically a tax on anything not made in America. This would include all food products too. Like tomatoes, other berries and crap tonnes of wheat that are increasingly flown into the country.

He also wants to do a mass deportation. Let’s ignore the whole “papers please” aspect of this that would result in actual citizens getting deported because they forgot their ID at home.

Let’s focus on what it means when a large amount of our food is grown overseas and that without this illegal work force that picks our food and cooks it for us is suddenly removed from the country. Napoleon said an army travels on its belly. Well so does a nation.*

What happens to food prices when they go up 10% overnight and then food is left to rot in the field? And then what food is available isn’t available in the ready to eat pickup, dine-in and delivery forms that people are used to and only a small portion of the population actually knows how to cook things that don’t come in a box or plastic bag?

Food costs will skyrocket. Not 10% but by orders of magnitude. It would take two years minimum for farms and food places to staff, plant, harvest and retool to correct for this assuming they even found it worthwhile to do. The profits would be insane. And once they corrected you can guarantee that it would be at least a decade before competition actually brought prices back down.

It’s not enough to hear an idea and feel good or bad about it. You need to think about the secondary and third level effects. To see how it effects other things and what the results would be. If you hear an idea, I can’t think of one way that it would go bad then you haven’t thought about it enough.

• I used this idea for a post in 2011 but it was in French and no one reacted to it so I get to reuse the idea here.