News / tariffs
-
2 min read
They Finally Found A Worker Worth Defending. Not Yours.
Read more . . . →The Trump administration would like you to know it has discovered a conscience. Early this month the U.S. Trade Representative proposed slapping fresh tariffs on more than 60 countries — 10% on the ones it calls partial offenders like the EU, Canada, and Mexico, 12.5% on everyone else, China and India included — over their failure to keep goods made with forced labor out of the supply chain. Jamieson Greer, Trump’s trade envoy, called that failure “unacceptable,” and said it forces “American workers to compete globally on an unlevel playing field.” The report names the usual horrors: rice picked in...
Subscribe →Weekly digestOne email per week with the tracks worth your time. No spam, no Coldplay. -
2 min read
They Found Forced Labor In 60 Countries The Same Week Their Tariffs Got Struck Down
Read more . . . →The Supreme Court threw out Trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs, so the administration needed a new doorway to walk the exact same policy back through, and on June 3 it found one: forced labor. The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative announced it had investigated 60 trading partners — China, Japan, the U.K., the EU, basically everyone — and discovered that all 60 of them fail to properly ban goods made with forced labor. Every single one, guilty. The proposed punishment is a tariff of 10 to 12.5 percent, which, by pure coincidence, lands almost exactly where the old illegal tariffs were...
Subscribe →Weekly digestSundays. One email. Zero ballads from white guys in beanies. -
1 min read
He Set The Fire, Then Showed Up With A Hose
Read more . . . →On Tuesday Trump stood inside the Mack Trucks plant in Macungie, Pennsylvania, and told the workers he’d saved them. “I imposed a 25-percent tariff on medium and heavy-duty trucks so that Mack Truck could do very well with this factory,” he said, on camera, surrounded by people who still remember what happened in early 2025. Because that’s when Mack warned it might cut up to 350 jobs at this exact plant, and blamed the tariff chaos coming out of his own White House for the call. About 170 of them got laid off. Roughly 150 were eventually recalled, which the...
Subscribe →Weekly digestWhat you missed this week, minus the corporate emo. -
1 min read
The Tariff Refund Only Flows One Direction: Up
Read more . . . →So the Supreme Court finally struck the tariffs down, 6-3, and ruled that Trump never had the authority to impose them in the first place. Good. Except the customs agency already collected about $133 billion before anyone made him stop. That money came out of the country one checkout line at a time — the average household paid somewhere north of a thousand bucks last year, manufacturing shed tens of thousands of jobs, and the whole thing was sold as toughness. Now a court has confirmed it was illegal the entire time. You’d think the obvious next step is giving...
Get the tee →Support the blogSome shirts are statements. This one is a verdict. -
1 min read
Whirlpool Got Its Tariffs. It's Building in Mexico Anyway.
Read more . . . →If you want to know what tariffs actually protect, look at Whirlpool. This is the company that spent years lobbying for them — it got Trump to slap a 20% levy on imported washing machines back in 2018 because LG and Samsung were eating its lunch. Whirlpool wrote the playbook everyone’s running now: tax the foreign stuff, save the American factory, bring the jobs home. And in 2026, with that exact policy back in full force, Whirlpool is laying off 341 people at its plant in Amana, Iowa and moving the work to Mexico. A second round of cuts is...
Get the tee →Support the blogMade for people who left the room during Yellow. -
1 min read
The Big China Deal Is That You Keep Paying
Read more . . . →Trump announced a “trade deal” with China today. Here’s the deal: the 20% fentanyl tariff stays, the 10% reciprocal tariff stays, the effective rate on Chinese goods sits near 30% — the highest on any country on earth — and the bigger tariffs he threatened get paused for sixty days. That’s the whole agreement. He held a press conference to tell you nothing changed and that this is a tremendous win. A tariff is a tax, and you’re the one who pays it. The Tax Foundation put a number on it: this trade war is the largest tax hike as...
Get the tee →Support the blogIf you wear this and someone hugs you, that's a real friend. -
1 min read
Executive bonuses are tariff-proof. Yours isn't.
Read more . . . →The 2026 proxy season is the clearest look yet at how this economy actually works. Companies are quietly rewriting their executive bonus metrics mid-cycle to exclude tariff impacts — adjusted EBITDA, adjusted operating income, adjusted until the payout math works again. Axon did it. Caleres did it. More are coming. The tariff uncertainty was apparently too unpredictable to hold executives accountable for. The same uncertainty has hit small businesses for 13 consecutive months of job losses. The average American household is paying $1,500 more this year in tariff taxes. There’s no adjustment committee for that. These are the same companies...
Get the tee →Support the blogLooks like Helvetica. Sounds like a closing argument. -
1 min read
China got Boeing planes. You got a $1,500 tax bill.
Read more . . . →The whole sales pitch was that China was going to pay. Not you — China. Tariffs were going to force them to capitulate, manufacturing was coming home, and American workers were going to win big. What actually happened: tariffs hit 145%, the US shed over 100,000 manufacturing jobs, small manufacturers watched their profit margins drop 24%, and the average household is out $1,500 this year in higher prices. Not China. You. So Trump flew to Beijing. First US president to visit China in nearly a decade. He came back with soybeans and Boeing planes. China agreed to buy American agricultural...
Get the tee →Support the blogThree words. One opinion. Cotton. -
1 min read
The Factories Were Going to Roar Back
Read more . . . →Trump said the factories would come roaring back. He said it a lot — roaring back, coming back, bigger than ever. Seventy-two thousand manufacturing jobs gone since Liberation Day, and the Whirlpool plant in Iowa runs with 1,300 workers now. It had 3,000. The rest are in Mexico. That’s the part nobody’s saying straight: the tariffs were supposed to stop companies from offshoring. Whirlpool heard that, did the math, and offshored anyway. John Deere took $300 million in tariff costs and handed out layoff notices in Illinois and Iowa. Because that’s how it works — the tariff hits the company...
Get the tee →Support the blogWhat if your laundry was also a personality? -
1 min read
Your medication is a national security threat, apparently
Read more . . . →Trump just slapped 100% tariffs on patented pharmaceuticals. Not generic drugs — those are conveniently exempt. Patented ones. The cancer treatments, the specialty biologics, the drugs that exist because no generic alternative does yet. It kicks in July 31st for some companies and September 29th for the rest — right in time for your prescription costs to spike as the weather cools. The national security justification is real, in writing, in the presidential proclamation. The idea that your rheumatoid arthritis medication threatens American military readiness is the kind of logic that sounds like satire until you remember we’re fully in...
Get the tee →Support the blogShips in 3–5 days. The outrage ships immediately.