Please, don’t squeeze us Charmin…

Not to worry, the ancient Romans had an alternative…

So now we’ve got Trump’s tariffs, but never mind the rising price of avocados, I’m worried about something that touches all of us far more intimately.

Toilet paper.

I don’t know about you, but I can go weeks, monthseven, without guacamole, but one big Mexican meal and, come morning, I’m reaching for… Yeah, you too.

That day and every day.

Going through life, there are things we don’t think of, at least not until we have reason to.

I’d been reading about Trump’s 25 percent tariff on all things Canadian just before Mother Nature demanded my attention. As I was performing a bit of routine facility maintenance, I happened to notice the wrapper on my Charmin Essentials multi-pack was bi-lingual – English and French. Now being the worldly fellow that I am, I’ve been long aware that all products marketed in our neighbor nation to the north are labeled both in English and in French. It dawned on me that my TP was about to be caught in the crossfire of a trade war.

This is a distressing thing.

In the preceding weeks we’ve heard a great deal of anecdotal commentary warning of the Trumpian impact on the price of Mexican avocados as a way of illustrating the anticipated negative impact of his arbitrarily-imposed tariffs. However, the imposition of an equally high, equally unreasonable tariff on Canadian goods is all too likely to result in a much more far reaching and intimately felt pain in the ass.

Canadian imports play a massive role in that ever-so-vital bathroom roll.

Now we only directly import 10 to 20 percent of the toilet paper sold in the U.S., the largest percentage of that imported from … you guessed it … Canada. The tariff on those rolls would have a minimal impact on the average family’s bathroom budget. Where the problem lies is that toilet paper – particularly the thick, soft, cushy stuff Americans overwhelmingly prefer – is little more than finely ground, highly processed, reconstituted trees, and 80 percent of the trees we ultimately send to the city sewer are imported from Canada, and as of Tuesday, every one of those trees is gonna cost Kimberly-Clark and the other giants of the TP biz 25 percent more than the ones that came across the border on Monday.

Wanna guess whose pocket that 25 percent is gonna come out of?

Yup. You guessed it. And, if all goes well at the gut level, we’ll be feeling that extra 25 percent every day…

And it’s gonna add up. American’s use more toilet paper per capita than anybody on earth. The average American flushes 140 rolls every year … 5 percent of the world’s population using up 20 percent of the world’s supply. More than 100 pounds of toilet paper per household every year. It’s a number that may give material credence to the conviction on the part of so much of the world that we Americans are really full of it…

But I digress. The gist of it is, for every ten bucks you spend on TP now, get ready to drop $12.50.

And that’s just to wipe your butt. I expect it to cost a bunch more to get to that moment. Lent fish fries are coming up, you can bet the price of Canadian walleye and Canadian-caught cod will be coming up with them. Those Mexican tomatoes will set you back another two-bits on the buck … and that’s just the next step, there’ll be plenty more to come -- to join what’s already here.

Yeah, that Trump tax is already coming out of our pockets here in Minnesota. Gas that was $2.99 Monday was $3.14 Tuesday, the day Trump’s 10 percent tariff was levied on Canadian crude. Now most of the gas, diesel, and other petro products we use here in Minnesota comes out of the Koch Refinery in Rosemount, and that refinery gets 80 percent of its crude from the Alberta tar sands. Is it coincidence that the day their price went up, our price went up?

Funny how that works…

By the way, to take care of things, the ancient Romans used a sponge on a stick they kept in a jar of vinegar next to the facility, ready for the next user…so there is a MAGA alternative.

And ain’t that great…