Michigan's Border Towns Feel the Tariff Squeeze. Small Businesses Are Caught in the Middle.

In Newberry, Michigan, a faded logging town 60 miles from the Canadian border, Ben Rahilly is watching his profit margins shrink. He runs four businesses: an appliance store, a gift shop, a furniture store, and a concrete company. And he's watching the math get harder every day.

"Prices are going up. Our shipping charges are getting more and more every day," he told NPR. "The cost of just goods is going up, so it's making it tougher on our profit margins. Trying to keep it small town, small prices … so people can afford to keep shopping with us."

This is what a trade war looks like when it lands in a real town. It's not abstract. It's not about China or strategic competition. It's about a small-business owner in Michigan trying to keep his doors open and his neighbors employed.

Why This Matters

Michigan's Upper Peninsula, known locally as the UP, is woven into Canada's economy. The region relies on cross-border goods, services, and tourism. Canada is Michigan's largest trade partner, and tariffs don't punish distant corporations cleanly. They ripple through supply chains, into the checkout lanes of appliance stores, onto shipping invoices, into the gap between what a small business pays for inventory and what it can charge customers.

Trump's decision to impose a 50% tariff on nearly $20 billion in Canadian goods hits at a moment when the UP is already struggling. The region is geographically isolated, accessible by two bridges and a land border with Wisconsin. That means transportation costs are already higher than in better-connected parts of the country. Diesel fuel prices compound the problem. A rural county with 5,300 people, where the biggest employers are a prison, a hospital, and a mill, doesn't have the scale to absorb these costs.

And here's the political part: the UP has voted Republican consistently for 15 years. The last Democrat to represent the region in Congress left office in 2011. But even conservative business owners like Rahilly, who voted for Trump, are now openly questioning the tariffs. "We do a lot of business with Canada," he said. "We need goods made in America, but we don't have a workforce either, so we're not going to get it. So we have to bring in some stuff. We just have to be able to work with them countries."

That's not ideology talking. That's the voice of someone running a business in the real world.

What the Common Good Party Says

The CGP trade policy is simple: trade generated $2.6 trillion in gains while destroying 2.4 million jobs in communities that never recovered. The fix is fair rules, not blanket tariffs.

That distinction matters. Fair rules means transparency, reciprocity, enforcement against actual dumping and labor violations. Blanket tariffs are a hammer. They hurt everyone downstream, the small-business owner, the customer buying appliances, the worker whose employer can't compete on input costs.

The tariff story also exposes a deeper problem: communities like Newberry have been left behind by decades of trade policy that was rigged toward capital, not people. When the mills closed and the jobs vanished, the federal government didn't invest in retraining, infrastructure, or diversification. So now these towns depend on whatever work they can find, and when tariffs disrupt the one source of stability they have (cross-border commerce), there's nowhere to pivot.

That's not a reason to abandon trade. It's a reason to pair trade policy with actual support for communities: job training tied to real jobs, infrastructure investment, wage standards that workers can live on. Policy that says: we're going to compete globally, and we're going to make sure nobody gets left behind.