News / tariffs
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1 min read
You Built the Bridge and Paid the Toll
Read more . . . →Canada spent $6.4 billion building the Gordie Howe International Bridge. Then agreed to share the toll revenue with the United States for fifteen years. Then scrapped the digital services tax. Then killed the Netflix tax. Then pulled its own retaliatory tariffs off the table. A reporter asked Carney what Canada got back for all of that. He couldn’t name one thing. Not a reduced rate, not a delayed deadline, not a handshake agreement scribbled on a napkin. Six and a half billion dollars and a stack of policy surrenders bought exactly zero goodwill from a man who doesn’t sell it....
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1 min read
Walmart Gets $2.4 Billion Back. You Get the Receipt.
Read more . . . →Walmart just got a $2.4 billion refund check from the federal government. Apple got $2.19 billion. Amazon, $600 million. Ford, $1.3 billion. Your refund: zero. Trump spent two years collecting $166 billion in tariffs that the Supreme Court ruled were illegal, and now the money is flowing back — to the corporations that filed the customs paperwork. You paid the markup at the register for two straight years. You ate the price hikes on everything from groceries to sneakers. The refund process is designed so that only the “importer of record” can claim a cent. You were never the importer...
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1 min read
He Lost in Court So He Changed the Name
Read more . . . →The Supreme Court told him the tariffs were illegal. So he kept the rates, swapped the legal citation, slapped “forced labor” on the label, and went right back to taxing 99.4% of U.S. imports like nothing happened. Twenty-five state attorneys general filed suit yesterday because they can read a calendar — the old tariffs expired and the new ones showed up at the same rates, on the same goods, the next business day. His own trade rep went on record promising “continuity.” That’s not even a cover story. That’s a guy plagiarizing his own paper after the professor caught him...
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1 min read
He's Taxing Your Prescriptions and Building Himself a Ballroom
Read more . . . →The White House confirmed today that construction on a $200 million ballroom starts in September. Ninety thousand square feet. Capacity for 650. Designed after Mar-a-Lago, because the man looked at the people’s house and decided it needed more of his living room. “Private donors” are covering it, which is Washington for people who need something from this administration and are buying the most expensive receipt in the country. Also today: 100% tariffs on imported patented drugs kicked in. Seventeen pharmaceutical companies were big enough to negotiate their way out. The rest pass the cost straight to you. He is taxing...
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1 min read
He Told You It's the Same Tariff
Read more . . . →The Supreme Court told him no. Six justices, including three he appointed, said the tariffs were illegal. That was February. By July he’d slapped tariffs on sixty countries under a different statute and walked up to a microphone at a GM proving ground in Michigan to say, out loud, that the new ones are “doing the same thing” as the ones the court struck down. He said it was “a shame” he had to “go a harder way.” The man described his own workaround for a Supreme Court ruling like he was complaining about a detour on his commute. A...
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1 min read
He Dug Up a 1930 Law to Put a 50% Tax on Hockey Sticks
Read more . . . →Trump found a tariff law from 1930 lying in a drawer and decided the real threat to America was hockey sticks. On August 19 a 50% tax lands on a stack of Canadian goods — wine, cement, dairy, furniture, wigs, and yes, hockey sticks — under Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930. That’s the same era of trade law that helped turn a stock crash into a decade of soup lines. He didn’t write new policy. He went to the attic, found the exact legal instrument that made the Great Depression worse, blew the dust off it, and...
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1 min read
They're Spreading the Tariff Out So You Won't Notice Who Did It
Read more . . . →The New York Fed just published the part of the tariff story nobody at a podium will read aloud. Ask companies what they’re doing with the bill and 47% of service firms and 44% of manufacturers say the same thing: raising prices, with more to come. But the word that matters in that report isn’t “raising.” It’s how. The Fed calls it “trickle up” — you don’t jack the price all at once, because a jump big enough to notice is a jump big enough to get blamed on. You leak it in. A little on this order, a little...
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1 min read
400 Companies Begged His Trade Office for a Break. That's the Confession.
Read more . . . →Trump has spent his whole second term telling you tariffs are a tax on China, on Europe, on whoever the villain is that week — the bill lands on foreigners, never on you. That’s the load-bearing lie of the entire project. So here’s the part he’d rather you skip: when his trade office opened the floor for public comment on the newest round, more than 400 companies wrote in, and almost every one of them was begging to be let off the hook. Ford. The electrical manufacturers. The people who import cigars. Nobody writes a panicked letter asking to be...
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1 min read
They're Boiling You Slowly So You Don't Notice
Read more . . . →The New York Fed just described, in polite economist language, a scam being run on you in real time. Companies are done eating Trump’s tariffs. They’re passing the cost to you — but not all at once, because a sudden jump would make you angry and paying attention. Instead they’re doing it a few cents at a time, month after month, a strategy the Fed’s own people call “trickle up.” Corporate America has a friendlier name for it internally: boil the frog. Turn the heat up so gradually the frog never jumps out of the pot. You’re the frog. The...
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1 min read
You Pay $900 More So a Guy With Three Houses Can Pocket $66,000
Read more . . . →They finally put a number on it, and the number is $900. That’s what the middle 60 percent of American households will pay extra in 2026 once you add up Trump’s tariffs and the tax bill he signed — $900 out of your pocket, this year, for the crime of being in the middle. Now here’s where the $900 went. The richest one percent are getting an average net tax cut of $66,000. The top tenth of one percent — the yacht tier — clears roughly $200,000. So you handed over nine hundred bucks and a guy who owns three...
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