Let Them Eat Tariffs
Tariffs are back, and with them, a level of economic absurdity not seen since powdered wigs and duels at dawn.
Today, the “very stable genius” who sits in the Oval Office, surrounded by sycophants, talks about how raising the prices of everything from cars to coffee will make America great again. “For decades, our country has been looted, pillaged, raped and plundered by nations near and far, both friend and foe alike,” Trump said in announcing the tariffs. And if anyone knows about looting, pillaging, raping, and plundering the United States and its citizens, it’s most certainly our current President. So of course, on the totally-not-ominous-sounding “Liberation Day” tariff announcement, President Trump wisely decided to impose tariffs to make the daily lives of most Americans even more unaffordable.
Trump has been loud in his support of tariffs and believes that they are the cure-all to this country’s ills. Based on his boasting, here’s everything we can apparently expect to achieve from tariffs: balanced trade and increased US manufacturing, halted illegal immigration and human trafficking, stopping the flow of fentanyl, “immediately” balancing the federal budget, imposing “fairness” but also retaliating against other countries, bolstering national security, making childcare more affordable, making America “rich”, and protecting the soul of the country. Surely no one knows more about “soul” than a President bringing together church and state and capitalism by selling a $60 “God Bless the USA” Bible together with copies of the country’s founding documents.
But how exactly are the tariffs supposed to achieve all of this? Well, since our businessman-in-chief went to the “best business school” where he (could have) learned all about tariffs, he most definitely knows that tariffs have a (totally predictable) way of slowing down the economy by making it hard to buy things. After all, “tariff” is just a fancy word for a tax on an imported product, and when a company has to pay more to bring something into the country - be it a toy, a TV, or a tomato - it won’t eat the extra cost out of some patriotic duty. It passes that expense to Americans by charging more for the product. So when Trump slaps a 145% tariff on “China”, this doesn’t punish China, but the American dad who now pays $49 for a $20 Barbie for his daughter’s birthday. And this concept isn’t new; people have known that tariffs raise prices for centuries.
For instance, there was the Tariff of 1828, also known as the Tariff of Abominations, where high tariffs were tacked onto a bill to try and prevent the bill from passing (it didn’t work). The abominable rate? A 38% tax on some imported goods, and a 45% tax on certain imported raw materials. Surely, President Trump’s “very good brain” knows that the country nearly went to war over the cost of the tariffs during the Nullification Crisis, when a state outright refused to recognize them. The crisis was only defused through the Tariff of 1833, which was a compromise to reduce the tariff to a more acceptable rate of 20%.
And because history loves a sequel, cue theSmoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, which was intended to protect U.S. industries from foreign competition during the Great Depression, but likelyprolonged and deepened the depression by sparking retaliatory measures from other countries. But even under Smoot-Hawley, tariff rates were a mere 59.1%, and only applied to 37% of all imported goods. Might our businessman President be right by applying higher tariffs (some over twice that rate) to almost everything that Americans will buy? He is clearly playing 4D chess and has some big, beautiful rationale for this, right?
Image via James 4, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Speaking of rationales, let’s take a moment to unpack the laundry list of national ailments that Trump’s tariffs were supposedly designed to cure. High on that list: “balancing the federal budget” and “making America rich”; two modest goals that suggest Trump sees tariffs as a sort of economic magic wand for raising government revenue. Historically, there is a kernel of truth to this. Before the federal income tax was introduced (first from 1861-1872, and then permanently in 1913), tariffs were a primary source of federal funding. But in true Trumpian fashion, he takes this dusty factoid and super-sizes it into full-blown fantasy, claiming in a Fox interview that “there is a chance that the money from tariffs could be so great that it would replace [the income tax].”
Ah yes, the classic “tariffs instead of taxes” strategy, brought to you by someone who seems to believe math is a deep-state hoax. For context: the U.S. imported about $3.1 trillion of goods in 2023, but taxed $20 trillion in income that same year. Even someone as, well, “intelligent” as our President should be able to tell the difference between those two numbers without needing a calculator.
But let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that Trump does understand arithmetic and is just ignoring it. There’s still the inconvenient reality that astronomically high taxes (tariffs included) can backfire. The basic principle is simple: the more things cost, the fewer things people buy. It’s possible that President Trump doesn’t understand this concept personally since he’s never had to make up a grocery budget, but surely being a “businessman” he knows that economists call this concept “income elasticity.” Income elasticity means that slapping massive tariffs on imports might actually reduce the amount of revenue collected because consumers stop buying goods when they cost twice as much. There is even a neat little chart for this called the Laffer curve (but as we'll see, graphics and math aren't their strong suit).
Okay, so maybe the point of tariffs isn’t revenue after all. Maybe it’s about shielding American industries and promoting that nostalgic ideal of smokestack-powered prosperity. Trump has insisted that tariffs will balance trade and “reshore” manufacturing jobs, all in an effort to revive the American middle class one soot covered shift at a time. But even in the most patriotic fever dream, where every factory is miraculously reassembled stateside overnight like Lego sets, the percentage of Americans working in manufacturing might creep from 8% to…a staggering 10%. A true renaissance!
And let’s not forget the unspoken bonus prize of all this reshoring: pollution, glorious pollution. After all, many of these industries American corporations offshored weren’t just chasing cheap labor; they were also exporting their cancer-causing emissions and river-poisoning waste too. Bringing the jobs back means bringing the grime back, especially for an administration that denies climate science. Picture it: a golden era when the air had texture, children played guess-the-toxic-chemical by smell game, and your local river glowed like a rave. Apparently, “making America great again” means making it smoggier again—a hazy, patriotic tribute to the Industrial Revolution, minus the child labor laws (which certain states are trying to roll back).
Finally, if neither revenue nor industrial revival is the answer, maybe it all boils down to Trump’s personal favorite grievance: “fairness.” According to the President, the world is “ripping us off,” and only reciprocal tariffs can restore balance to this imaginary ledger of economic injustice. Hence, on May 19th, 2025, the Trump Administration announced, in its typical whiplash fashion, that it willreinstate the April 2nd tariffs on countries that are unable to reach a deal by July 8th, 2025. These tariffs were apparently calculated using a “complex” equation, which, in reality, is just a glorified subtraction problem: the amount a country exports to the U.S. minus how much it imports from the U.S. To lend this back-of-the-napkin math a whiff of credibility, the White House even cooked up a graphic with enough Greek letters to make a fraternity rush poster jealous, hoping people would just squint and pretend that it’s complex economics:
Image by Jill
But like most things from the Trump Administration, this explanation was of course, another fabrication. It turns out that the “reciprocal tariffs” also applied to a group of barren, uninhabited islands near Antarctica, from which the U.S. imports nothing but cute internet photos of penguins. So much for precision. And while the math may be technically correct, using it as a basis for trade policy is like trying to perform heart surgery with a butter knife - it wildly oversimplifies a complex system. The U.S. imports more than it exports not because we’re being “ripped off”, but because American consumers and companies have the purchasing power to buy goods from around the world. Trade deficits aren’t evidence of failure, but signs of economic strength and global trust in the U.S. dollar. Or rather, they were signs of such trust.
Which brings us to the unavoidable conclusion: in the grand tradition of doing things “bigly,” Trump’s tariffs are less an economic plan and more a tragi-comic plot twist in a reality show that no one can turn off. Except instead of laughing, we’re trying to smuggle in eggs from Mexico and wondering if our kids can live without toys, clothes, and electronics. Promised as a panacea for everything from trade deficits to the opioid crisis, these tariffs have managed to accomplish the impressive feat of being both economically illiterate and aggressively self-defeating.
Still, it’s comforting to know that when the history books are written—perhaps to be sold alongside the “God Bless the USA Bible” in a limited-edition Freedom Box—we’ll remember this era not for sound policy or fiscal wisdom, but for telling Walmart to “EAT THE TARIFFS” like some gaudy version of Marie Antoinette. Maybe next he’ll impose a 200% “Freedom Tariff” on air, just to continue the trend of boosting non-existent manufacturing jobs. Because nothing says “economic strategy” quite like yelling at a retail chain on the internet while the country quietly slips into a recession, all because one man’s ego can’t admit that maybe, just maybe, he got it wrong.
Enjoyed this article? Get updates on the movement, volunteer opportunities, and more by clicking below.