Yes, you!
You paid the so-called China Tariffs. And here’s the depressing part: China paid nothing.
Nothing at all.
That’s the grandiloquent nature of tariffs: big loud noise, wheezy fart-like impact.
Trump and his economic advisors are selling you Snake Oil in a fake Made-in-America bottle — one that was absolutely injection-molded in Guangdong.
Don’t buy it.
Anyone with the tiniest experience in trade knows this: A container hits Long Beach; there are tariffs; U.S. Customs invoices the American importer for the “China tariffs;” the American importer wires the money to the U.S. Treasury before the goods can be released.
Beijing gets no bill. Chinese factories get no bill. Not one dime crosses the Pacific as a result of tariffs.
American businesses pay tariffs in full. Then they face two choices: eat it or pass it on. Most did both — accepting thinner margins while simultaneously raising prices. Almost none decided to build a domestic factory. In fact, employment in manufacturing is down.
IT’S DOWN.
The added cost stayed entirely domestic: from American importer, to American wholesaler, to American retailer, to you.
To you. And to me.
Trump is bragging about $200 billion in collected revenue. That’s our money, my friend. It was a tax on the American people , and we were never consulted. No vote. No debate. No representation.
Tariffs can be strategic on occasion — the same way removing your appendix can be strategic. But if your surgeon is Wilhelm the Butcher, who believes cutting out all your internal organs is more cost-efficient, well ….run, Forrest, run!
That’s Trump. Not surgical tariffs. All tariffs on everyone all at once. No back up plan.
The Supreme Court has pulled the curtain back. The Oz trick is exposed. The snake oil — which turns out to be bacon fat — is spilled all over the floor. And yet Trump is already promising to reissue tariffs in some new form.
Of course he is.
So here’s the only thing left to say: if you call yourself a fiscal conservative, a libertarian, a Tea Party patriot, a small-government Republican, a taxpayer rights advocate — any of that — and you are not furious right now, then you are not what you claim to be.
Two hundred billion dollars extracted from American consumers and businesses. They dressed it up as a trade war. They sold it as punishment for China. But you and I paid for it.
Unless we make some noise — unless the people who scream loudest about government overreach scream just as loud about this — they will find a way to do it again. In some new pig-in-lipstick form. With a different name but with the same outstretched hands in your pocket.
America: no backdoor taxes. Not now. Not ever.
No taxation without representation.
We kind of covered this as a nation 250 years ago.