Predictability and trust is key to American business, and they're disappearing quickly

Running a small business is tough. It's so unpredictable that most people have to run them as side projects alongside their day jobs, and you can't really quit your day job (with all its healthcare and predictable checks coming in each month) until your small biz is running so well that it eclipses your income and looks like it really has a future.

Small business predictability

Running a small business paycheck to paycheck is overwhelming and exhausting. So instead, you plan ahead. Running my own thing 10-20 years ago, I got used to seasonal differences, where 50% of my annual revenue might happen over 2-3 months of the year around the holidays, so it had to be socked away to cover the remainder of the year's budget. I was always planning things 3-6 months in advance, with a close eye on 12-month cycles of annual variation. I made additional plans for what to do 2-3 years in advance.

What I wanted most out of small biz planning was predictability, and one example of that was payroll.

I paid every employee a month's salary on the first of each month, so you think it'd be easy to predict in a spreadsheet. But I used a payroll company that insisted on taking money out of the business account every 15 days. The weird part was the money they'd take out was never exactly 50% of payroll. Say my total monthly payroll was $50k; you'd expect to see 25k on the first and the 15th of each month come out of the business account. But this payroll company had a bizarre escrow system where they held one month upfront plus a variable amount over the course of the year that started by overpaying but eventually got to break even by the end of the year through lower payments.

So in January, the two payroll withdrawals for a month might be 32k and 27k but by December, the payroll hits might run 22k and 21k. It drove me crazy because I liked to plan things out months ahead but I couldn't predict payroll, even though every employee had stable salaries. Eventually I had to arrange a special setup where there was no escrow and they simply took payroll out a month early for the same amount every month. And that solved this problem.

How small businesses work today

I have dozens of friends with small companies that produce games, software, trinkets, t-shirts, and collectables. Everyone plans out their year like I used to, knowing they have holiday rushes, tentpole events, and the occasional surprise meme-fueled sales rushes. Everything is planned months in advance.

Everyone I know, from those building bike parts to those making tiki mugs to those producing small electronics, uses our global international trade network to do what they do. Even if it doesn't seem like you'd need overseas manufacturing for a business, it touches literally every step of the process. Plastic and metal produced by a shop inside America often uses molds or presses that were created in Asia. Products might be assembled in the US, but the printed-out instructions and any electronic parts inside come from elsewhere.

Much of US business spent the early 2000s obsessed with JIT or Just In Time manufacturing, where you ordered parts from 20 different places the moment someone placed an order, had it arrive quickly for assembly, then go out. No inventory carry over and no stockpiles, as you could goose profits by keeping the bare minimum on site.

So many industries have offshored vital parts of their process that undoing all that might take decades to be recreated within America, if at all.

A great example is this podcast episode, about an engineer who wanted to produce a product (in this case, a BBQ grill brush) entirely inside of US borders. If you don't want to listen to the whole hour, know that even the metal shops they used to produce their parts didn't know how to make master molds. In the end, the people behind the product achieved their goals, but it took years to teach US companies how to produce the building blocks that they always just ordered from Asia, while also paying 3-5x more for simple things like a metal screw made entirely in the US.

The Puzzle of the All-American BBQ Scrubber — Search Engine — Overcast

Overcast

All my friends with their small businesses have stockpiles of inventory for the next several months, but literally everyone is freaked out about what the world will be like four to six months from now, when importing any part from another country suddenly costs 50-100%+ more.

People like my pal Jesse, here talking about his $300 handmade wooden computer keyboard that he meticulously spent over a decade researching and building prototypes while sourcing the best switches and factories in Asia to help produce it. This same keyboard may soon cost about $650 each to sell to Americans, without any additional profit seen by him, as all that cost would be for covering inflated charges for imported materials.

Every friend I have with a small business is looking at either doubling their prices, or shutting down in the coming year. It's frightening, but it's our new reality.

Why we have separation of powers in the constitution

Presidential tariff authority exists only through powers delegated by Congress and they could and must put a stop to this, but our current president has been eroding the balance of powers in our three branches of government for years now, tipping things far too much in his favor.

Having a moody, thin-skinned, power-hungry tyrant change the nature of global markets with the stroke of his pen with almost zero oversight is a recipe for disaster.

Not only were the tariffs announced and rolled out haphazardly and far too quickly, but within a few days the tariff against China doubled again. This is no way to let US-based small businesses plan for anything, and what we have today is total chaos in the aftermath.

That's why the stock markets are crashing. But it gets worse as our reliable, predictable US Bond markets are also crashing, because the worldwide currency standard of the US dollar is no longer trusted.

And why should any American wealth be trusted by the rest of the world, when a single reactionary, narcissist leader can disrupt global markets with unchecked power?

Global trust is eroding, or "what even is money?"

This whole thread on Bluesky should scare the bejeezus out of everyone. I'll pluck out a couple bits here:

Go read all of it, but it's true that as bad as things have gotten economically for the past 100 years, the USA was insulated from much of it thanks to the global economy basically agreeing to standardize on the US dollar. When all else failed, everyone could always depend on a dollar. So things never quite got that bad here.

With that going away, and European countries banding together to route around US policies, and China participating in our trade wars with less to lose, America will suffer, swiftly and greatly.

So what now?

These are very grim times. Everyone I know with a small business is talking about shuttering and laying off employees. They can't make predictions about what supply chains will look like in just a couple months and no one wants to increase their prices greatly.

There's no American alternative to a highly mechanized, specialized process that factories in Asia have perfected for the past 50 years. The best time to protect American manufacturing jobs through tariffs was 40-50 years ago. In 2025, it's far too late and everything is far too globally connected to just put up a toll booth around America and expect anyone to pay up before entering.

Instead, countries will avoid the USA. Investors will avoid US markets. Everything we thought was long-term and dependable is going to see sharp, downward trends.

And the stupidest part is that all of this was self-inflicted. None of this had to happen, but it did. The only question is how is anyone going to stop it?