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Joshua Scheer
A slow bleed is underway—and most Americans are being told not to notice.
As the U.S. dollar weakens, prices are creeping higher across everyday life: groceries, travel, fuel, imports. Economists call it currency fluctuation. But for working people, it functions more like a silent tax—one that shrinks purchasing power without a single vote in Congress.
The drop—roughly 10% against major currencies since Donald Trump’s return—hasn’t triggered headlines the way stock market swings do. But its impact is everywhere. A weaker dollar means imports cost more, and in an economy dependent on global supply chains, that means higher prices passed directly to consumers. Coffee, for example, is already up sharply—partly driven by currency shifts layered on top of war-driven supply disruptions.
Most presidents pretend to defend a strong dollar. Trump doesn’t bother with the pretense. “You make a hell of a lot more money with a weaker dollar,” he bragged last year—an admission that reads less like policy and more like a tell. For a career grifter, a weaker currency isn’t a problem—it’s an opportunity. For everyone else, it’s a pay cut in slow motion.
Here is Trump in January, laying bare his dollar doctrine—what he shrugs off like a “yo-yo,” rising and falling at will. As the currency slid to its lowest level in years, he didn’t flinch. “I think it’s great,” he said. Not concern, not caution—approval. And markets listened. His words didn’t just describe the drop—they accelerated it, sending the dollar deeper into decline as traders took the signal for what it was: permission.
Behind the noise, the logic is simple—and dangerous. A weaker dollar can juice exports, pad corporate profits, and make balance sheets look stronger on paper. But it comes at a cost, one pushed downward. Imports rise. Prices climb. And what’s framed as strategy at the top becomes erosion at the bottom—a slow, grinding loss of purchasing power dressed up as economic strength.
Even as his own Treasury insists on the ritual language of a “strong dollar policy,” the contradiction hangs in the air. Stability is preached. Volatility is practiced. And in that gap—between what’s said and what’s signaled—the dollar slips, and ordinary people pay the difference.
Here is Reuters reporting on why Trump embraces a weaker dollar—and how his own words don’t just describe that reality, but help bring it into being.
That was from January and we see today that the decline is happening—sadly, like most things in this world, and now at its deepest. But here’s the divide: while working Americans absorb the hit, multinational corporations quietly benefit. Overseas earnings become more valuable when converted back into weaker dollars. CEOs call it a “favorable currency impact.” For everyone else, it’s just another bill getting harder to pay.
Small businesses—especially those reliant on imports—are getting squeezed from both sides. Higher costs, thinner margins, and no hedge against currency swings. Many are raising prices just to stay afloat, pushing the burden further down the chain.
And looming over it all is war. The ongoing conflict with Iran is already driving up fuel and commodity prices—costs that stack on top of currency decline. The result isn’t accidental. It’s structural. A system where geopolitical decisions, monetary policy, and corporate interests converge—while ordinary people are left to absorb the fallout.
Call it what it is: a transfer of pain downward, wrapped in the language of markets.
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