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Trump’s Unrealistic Demand That Walmart ‘Eat The Tariffs’ – OpEd

A Walmart store. Photo Credit: Inoyamanaka79, Wikimedia Commons.

 June 11, 2025 

By FEE

Recently, a post from President Trump on Truth Social went viral. An attempt to convince retail giant Walmart to keep prices down despite the tariffs, it read:

“Walmart should STOP trying to blame Tariffs as the reason for raising prices throughout the chain. Walmart made BILLIONS OF DOLLARS last year, far more than expected. Between Walmart and China they should, as is said, “EAT THE TARIFFS,” and not charge valued customers ANYTHING. I’ll be watching, and so will your customers!!!“

Trump’s demand here is, simply put, unreasonable, and it reflects a basic misunderstanding of how pricing decisions are made in a market economy. Let’s unpack why.

Walmart’s Thin Margins

The biggest problem with the President’s view is that it doesn’t pass a basic numbers test. To break it down, let’s look at Walmart’s financials.

It’s true that Walmart generates billions of dollars in revenue each year, but revenue alone doesn’t tell us how much Walmart makes.

To understand that, we need to consider profit, which accounts for the company’s costs. More specifically, we want to look at Walmart’s net profit margin, because that’s an extremely important indicator of whether Walmart could realistically “eat the tariffs.”

Depending on the source, Walmart’s net profit margin is somewhere between 2% and 3%. Let’s split the difference and say it’s 2.5%. What does that mean?

That means, if Walmart sells you $1 of goods, it only keeps 2.5 cents in profit. That’s right, 97.5 cents goes toward inventory, employee wages, store maintenance, and a variety of other operating costs.

Put another way, if you spend $100 at Walmart, they make $2.50 in profit.

Now let’s say you buy a $100 television that Walmart imports. A $20 tariff is imposed—an added cost Walmart has to pay to import the TV. Before the tariff, Walmart was making $2.50 in profits. After the tariff, it’s now taking a $17.50 loss.

The only way Walmart can still sell this TV is by raising the price.

At this point, a tariff supporter might respond: “The easy way to fix this is to buy US-made TVs instead!”

Sure—you can avoid tariffs by only buying domestic, but the problem is that domestic TVs tend to be more expensive. If they weren’t, Walmart wouldn’t be importing them in the first place. So even if Walmart pulls international TVs off the shelves and replaces them with US-made ones, the prices still increase.

Here’s the key point: “eating” the tariffs is not an option. Walmart operates on slim margins, barely making pennies on the dollar—there isn’t room to eat 20% cost increases!

The Fallacy of Seller Price Determination

Trump here echoes a fallacy often heard from the Bernie Sanders left—the idea that companies can just choose their prices!

While it’s true that companies can put any number they want on a price tag, it’s fallacious to assume that they control prices. To see why, let’s consider a simplified example.

Suppose Walmart wanted to set the price of a TV at $10,000. Could they do it? Technically, yes: the store could change the price tag for a TV. But the product wouldn’t sell. Competitive pressure from other retailers would drive customers to alternatives.

Now suppose Walmart priced the TV at $1. This might seem more feasible—people would jump at the opportunity to buy a $1 TV. But in the long term, that price point is just as unsustainable. Walmart can’t make a profit on $1 TVs, and savvy customers would resell them at a markup. Eventually, the losses generated by the $1 would be too great to bear, and Walmart would either need to raise prices or go out of business.

Businesses print the price tag, but they do not determine prices. In a market economy, prices are set according to the subjective valuations of consumers and the relationship between supply and demand. If people don’t value a TV at $10,000, the price will not go that high. If people value TVs at significantly higher than $1, the price will not stay that low.

This is the fundamental flaw in Trump’s demand that Walmart “eat the tariffs.” Walmart cannot simply freeze prices, because Walmart does not control prices. When tariffs are implemented, fewer TVs flow into the country, consumers compete for scarce goods, and prices go up.

Telling Walmart to “eat the tariffs” reflects a fallacious way of thinking. Walmart has razor-thin margins, and telling them to keep prices low is essentially telling them to operate at a loss. In the competitive world, businesses that make losses don’t survive. As Margaret Thatcher might say, the problem with telling businesses to keep prices low is that eventually, you run out of other people’s money.

• About the author: Peter Jacobsen is a Writing Fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education.
• Source: This article was published by FEE

FEE

The Foundation for Economic Education's (FEE) mission is to inspire, educate, and connect future leaders with the economic, ethical, and legal principles of a free society. These principles include: individual liberty, free-market economics, entrepreneurship, private property, high moral character, and limited government. FEE is a tax-exempt, 501(c)3 educational foundation

 

Scorsese Reflects On ‘Spiritual Act’ Of Making Film About The Dalai Lama

Filmmaker Martin Scorsese at the screening of his 1997 film "Kundun" at Tribeca Festival in New York, June 6, 2025. (Tenzin Pema/RFA)

 June 11, 2025  

By RFA

By Tenzin Pema

The making of Martin Scorsese’s 1997 Oscar-nominated film Kundun was a “spiritual act” and a “very personal and special project,” the legendary filmmaker said at a rare public screening of the film on the big screen at the Tribeca Festival in New York. 

Friday’s screening was part of global celebrations honoring the Dalai Lama’s 90th birthday. Kundun chronicles the early life of the Tibetan spiritual leader, from his discovery as the 14th Dalai Lama as a young child in Tibet to his escape into exile in India at age 23 following the 1959 Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule.

“The experience of making Kundun changed my life for the better in many different ways,” Scorsese told the audience at New York’s SVA Theatre, where Kundun — meaning “presence” in Tibetan, a reverent title for the Dalai Lama — screened in its original 35mm format before hundreds of attendees, including Scorsese fans and members of the Tibetan community. 

The film represents a dramatic departure from the director’s typical crime epics like Goodfellas (1990) and Casino (1995). Unlike those acclaimed works, Kundun remains largely inaccessible on major streaming platforms, making the screening at Tribeca a coveted experience for film enthusiasts.

“It’s a big blindspot in a filmmaker whose work I have seen most of and is hugely influential in my love for cinema and the work I do,” Giovanni Lago, a New York-based writer and podcaster, told RFA. “For some reason, you can’t find it on streaming apps. You can’t find it online … So to see it on film at Tribeca with Martin Scorsese himself introducing it is just the perfect recipe.” 

Following the film’s completion, the Chinese government pressured Disney to shelve the project entirely. While Disney ultimately gave the film a limited Christmas release in 1997, the company’s then-CEO Michael Eisner publicly apologized for the production.

“The bad news is that the film was made; the good news is that nobody watched it,” Eisner said at the time. “I want to apologize, and in the future, we should prevent this sort of thing, which insults our friends, from happening,” he said. 

Even today, Kundun is not available on major streaming platforms, including Disney’s own service, Disney+. Disney did not immediately respond to RFA’s request for comment. 

“The Chinese government has consistently suppressed all the films about the Dalai Lama produced in the West … because if these films were shown in China, mainland audiences would gain a more genuine understanding of who the Dalai Lama really is,” Kunga Tashi, Tibetan liaison officer at the Washington-based office of Tibet’s government-in-exile, told RFA. 

China banned Scorsese, screenwriter Melissa Mathison, and even her then-husband Harrison Ford — who had no direct involvement in the film — from entering the country. This reflected Hollywood’s complex relationship with China, where access to the lucrative Chinese market often trumps artistic expression. Similar bans affected actor Brad Pitt for his role in Seven Years in Tibet (1997) and Richard Gere for his Tibet advocacy.

“Given that China has consistently sought to restrict and suppress the distribution and screening of this film … I believe this screening at the financial capital of the U.S. is a great win for the Tibetan race, and a matter of pride and joy for me as a Tibetan,” Tara Lobsang, a Tibetan entrepreneur and artist based in New York, told RFA.

A spiritual journey

Making Kundun was a profound spiritual journey for Scorsese, a Roman Catholic who a few years earlier courted religious controversy and even faced death threats for The Last Temptation of Christ (1988). Mathison, who wrote the screenplay for Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), brought Scorsese the script for Kundun, setting the director on what he described as his own “spiritual exploration.”

“I was really always intrigued by Tibetan Buddhism and the nature of Tibetan culture,” Scorsese reflected. “It seemed very far from my experience. But making films was always, for me, a path to discovery: discovery of new forms of expression … of different cultures, (and) different ways of existing.”

Scorsese finalized the script with Mathison after consulting with the Dalai Lama himself in a meeting at Mathison’s Wyoming home, emphasizing the project’s authenticity and reverence.

But the film’s production proved as challenging as its subject matter was sensitive for China. 

Scorsese, who later traveled to Dharamsala, India, to meet the Dalai Lama again ahead of the making of the film, initially set his sights on shooting the movie in various places in India, but the team ran into a “lot of bureaucracy” and finally settled on Morocco, where Scorsese had shot The Last Temptation of Christ. 

Using the Northern Sahara Desert and Atlas Mountains, along with specially constructed sets – to depict the Dalai Lama’s winter and summer palaces, the Potala Palace and the Norbulingka, and the streets of Tibet’s capital Lhasa – the crew painstakingly created a convincing illusion of Tibet in Morocco. 

Hundreds of Tibetans, including monks from the Dalai Lama’s Namgyal Monastery and performers from the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts in Dharamsala, traveled to Morocco, working alongside a multilingual crew who hailed from more than half-a-dozen nations. 

“We were dealing with seven languages on set – Tibetan, English, French, Italian, (Hindi), Arabic, and Berber – just to say ‘action.’ But once we got one word down, we figured the rest out,” Scorsese recalled, drawing laughter from the audience at the screening.

The screening at Tribeca marks one of the first events on the Compassion Rising World Tour — a global movement launched by the Washington-based advocacy group International Campaign for Tibet to celebrate the Dalai Lama’s 90th birthday and his vision of a more compassionate world.

“As the Dalai Lama approaches his 90th birthday, we are not just celebrating a life — we are celebrating a force of compassion that has touched every corner of the world,” said Tencho Gyatso, president of the International Campaign for Tibet. “His message is a call to awaken the best in humanity: courage without anger, strength without violence, and love without limits. This global tribute is our collective effort to carry that light forward.” 

Gyatso – who is the Dalai Lama’s niece and had portrayed his late mother, Gyalyum Chenmo, or her own grandmother in the film – told RFA the event was special as it kicks off the 30-day countdown to the Dalai Lama’s 90th birthday on July 6, 2025, and launches the 2025 Year of Compassion in honor of the Dalai Lama’s storied life and achievements.

Many other original cast members, including Tenzin Thuthob Tsarong and Gyurme Tethong who played two of the three actors who portrayed the Dalai Lama at different ages in the film, were also present at the screening. 

The making of Kundun was as much a “spiritual act” for the Tibetan cast members, advisors, artisans and crew members, as it was for Scorsese himself, the director said.

“They really weren’t acting; they were really being, they were existing in the film,” he said. “Whenever I was shooting at a 100 degrees in the heat and troubled, I’d look up and I’d see them and they grounded me and re-inspired me every day. Their devotion to their culture, keeping the culture alive after their country had been taken away from them is overwhelming.”

Scorsese reflected on the experience of filming with Tibetans who were non-professional actors and a crew that spoke a myriad languages in a country with a culture that was far-removed from the one being filmed about.

“It was stunning. We were making a film about Buddhism and Buddhists in a Muslim country directed by a Catholic. I mean, basically, we all worked in harmony because we had a common goal, which made our major cultural differences beside the point,” he said.

For Scorsese, the film remains deeply personal. 

Shortly after its completion, his mother passed away and his daughter Francesca was born. 

“Out of Kundun came our wonderful daughter Francesca,” he said. “It’s a very, very personal, very, very special project for me. And I hope that the generosity of spirit that we shared is evident in the picture itself when you see it.”

RFA

Radio Free Asia’s mission is to provide accurate and timely news and information to Asian countries whose governments prohibit access to a free press. Content used with the permission of Radio Free Asia, 2025 M St. NW, Suite 300, Washington DC 20036.

 

How A Fake News Study Tested Ethical Research Boundaries – Analysis

 June 11, 2025  

By SwissInfo

A controversial fake news study, carried out by Swiss-based researchers on the social media platform Reddit, has highlighted the ethical responsibilities and challenges of conducting studies on society. 

By Matthew Allen

The research team, which has been linked to the University of Zurich, covertly tested the ability of artificial intelligence (AI) to manipulate public opinion with misinformation on a subreddit group.

For several months, the researchers stretched the ethical boundaries of observing social behaviour beyond breaking point. They used Large Language Models (LLMs) to invent opinions on a variety of subjects – from owning dangerous dogs to rising housing costs, the Middle East and diversity initiatives.

The AI bots hid behind fictitious pseudonyms as they churned out debating points into the subreddit r/changemyview. Members of the group then argued for or against the AI-composed opinions, unaware they were part of a research project until the researchers came clean at its completion.

The revelation provoked a storm of criticism within Reddit, the research community and the international media.

At first, the researchers, who will not reveal their identities for fear of reprisals, defended their actions, because the “high societal importance of this topic” made it “crucial to conduct a study of this kind, even if it meant disobeying the rules” of the channel, which included a ban on AI bots.

They later issued a “full and deeply felt apology” as “the reactions of the community of disappointment and frustration have made us regret the discomfort that the study may have caused.”

‘Bad science is bad ethics’

“The issue here is not only about conducting research involving deception,” said Professor Dominique Sprumont, president of the Vaud Cantonal Research Ethics Commission in Switzerland. “It is about willfully breaking the rules of a community of human beings who build trust in their network based on those rules.”

“Furthermore, the scientific quality of the project is more than dubious. Bad science is bad ethics.”

The Swiss team ran into a problem familiar to many researchers: how much information to withhold from participants to make the study realistic.

Previous fake news research has faced the same conundrum, according to Gillian Murphy and Ciara M Greene from the University College, Cork, and University College Dublin, Ireland, who have conducted their own misinformation research and examined the results of other studies.

Researchers sometimes disguise the exact purpose of the study at the outset, and only inform participants once it has been completed, they wrote in an article, published in the journal sciencedirect in 2023.  For example, by stating at the outset that the research is about news consumption in general, rather than specifically on fake news.

Limits to deception

“For some misinformation research, it would be impossible to study how participants naturally respond to misinformation without employing this kind of deception, as participants’ suspicions, motivations and behaviours may change when they know the information they will be shown might be misleading,” wrote the authors.

But the authors also note that there are limits to deception. Researchers have a moral duty to respect the human rights and privacy of test participants, inform them at the outset that they are taking part in research, gain explicit consent for using their data and to take steps to avoid inflicting damage on people.

In this video, we explain some of the ways researchers can approach such research ethically. 

In 2014, Facebook was criticised by academics, lawyers and politicians for covertly manipulating thousands of newsfeeds to test how users’ moods were impacted by negative or positive posts submitted by their friends.

The social media platform said the experiment was important to test the emotional impact of its newsfeed service on users but later admitted it had gone about the study in the wrong way.

Responsibility unclear

The Swiss fake news study on Reddit has likewise been condemned for failing to inform people in advance that they were participating in a research project.

It has also stirred up confusion as to who is responsible. It was conceived by a researcher employed at the University of Zurich and presented to its Ethics Committee of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences in April of last year as one of four tests – and the only one of the four that involved AI bots.

At the time, the ethics body red-flagged the Reddit study as “exceptionally challenging”, according to the university. It recommended that researchers should inform participants “as much as possible” and fully comply with the rules of Reddit.

But the lead researcher left the university in September and only started the study after leaving, the university says, adding that responsibility for the project and publication therefore lies with the researchers and not the university.

“There were no [Zurich university] researchers or students engaged in the Reddit project at the time it was carried out.”

The research team’s preliminary findings were published at first but were later taken offline.

Stricter review process

Zurich Data Protection Commissioner Dominka Blonski has not yet started a formal probe of the matter, but her office is aware of the controversy. “We do not know whether the research was conducted by the University of Zurich or its faculty, or by individual researchers on their own initiative,” she told SWI swissinfo.ch.

Blonski must first identify whether to investigate the university or individuals. But she is concerned at evidence in media reports that point to potential violations of data protection laws, particularly related to the apparent profiling of some Reddit users.

The university must also contend with unspecified “formal legal demands” from Reddit and is investigating the incident internally.

“In light of these events, the Ethics Committee of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences intends to adopt a stricter review process in the future and, in particular, to coordinate with the communities on the platforms prior to experimental studies,” said a spokeswoman.

SwissInfo

swissinfo is an enterprise of the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation (SBC). Its role is to inform Swiss living abroad about events in their homeland and to raise awareness of Switzerland in other countries. swissinfo achieves this through its nine-language internet news and information platform.

Mapping Ireland’s peatlands to help cut carbon emissions


By AFP

June 10, 2025


Cultivated peatlands account for some five percent of greenhouse gas emissions - Copyright AFP Justin TALLIS

Peter MURPHY

Mapping more accurately than ever Ireland’s peatlands, which are vital as carbon sinks but whose boundaries can be hard to determine, could help fight global warming, researchers say.

Ireland is pockmarked with patches of dark brown peat soil that make up at least 20 percent of the land cover, according to Eve Daly, a geophysicist at the University of Galway, who co-led a groundbreaking project on finding peat.

“Peatland soils contain comparable amounts of carbon to the likes of rainforests so a more accurate map can lead to better land management decisions and mitigate against greenhouse gas emissions,” Daly told AFP.

Her research team developed a new mapping approach using gamma radiation measurements to identify for the first time “transition zones” — typically hidden under forests and grasslands — where the soil changes from being peat to mineral-based.

Daly says the area of soil in Ireland considered “peaty” has increased thanks to a new colour-coded “peat/non-peat” map produced by the researchers.

“Improved mapping at higher resolution and locating where hidden organic peat soils are and their extent are key inputs into working out carbon emission factors,” she said.

Her project co-leader Dave O’Leary told AFP about 80 percent of Ireland had now been mapped out in patches of “peat” brown or “non-peat” green.

“Few countries have invested in such an incredible data set, which puts Ireland at the forefront of peatland mapping research,” he said.



– ‘New lens’ –



Land use, including farming and peatland draining, is a major source of Ireland’s carbon emissions which could see the country failing to meet an EU-agreed climate target to cut emissions by over 50 percent by 2030.

A recent report said Ireland risks an EU fine of almost 30 billion euros if it fails to reach the target and recommended the restoring — and rewetting — of thousands of hectares of peatlands to help deliver “massive” cuts in emissions.

“We need to use more modern technologies or use old technologies with new lenses to try and find these hidden peat soils,” Daly said.

Ireland’s boggy areas are typically located in the middle of the bowl-shaped country which is ringed with hills and low mountains around the coastal areas.

Triven Koganti, an agroecology expert at Denmark’s Aarhus University, told AFP that five percent of global greenhouse gas emissions came from cultivated peatlands.

“Historical agricultural draining of peatlands… or to use them as a fuel source has led to significant greenhouse gas emissions,” he said.

So “an accurate accounting” of peatland boundaries is needed to achieve “current global initiatives to restore peatlands”, he said, adding the Irish research “plays an important role in establishing this”.



– ‘Bird’s eye’ technique –



The mapping technique — described as “bird’s eye” by Daly — is based on gamma-ray data measured by a sensor onboard a plane that has been flown low over Ireland for a decade in a state-funded geophysical survey.

“All rocks and different amounts of soils give off a certain amount of natural radiation but peat doesn’t as it’s full of organic material,” Daly said.

Soils are usually a mixture of broken bits of rock, water and air, but peat soils are distinct from mineral soils as they are formed from decaying plant material, water and air, and contain a very high amount of carbon.

When waterlogged, this carbon is stored in the soil but when water is removed, for example via drainage, peat soils then emit carbon dioxide as the decay process restarts, Daly said.

The state-funded “Tellus” survey began in 2011 and is expected to be completed later this year.