Tariffied

Economically Illiterate? Join the Club!

What’s a tariff?

It’s a question often asked by the poorly educated, with their finger far from the pulse of society.

Does that make this question invalid? Yes. Will it prevent me from answering it? No, because I am generous.

As you can plainly see, “tariff” comes from the Ottoman Turkish: تعرفه, which means rate, notice, or receipt. تعرفه, comes from عَرَف which is Arabic for “to know.” I know this seems intuitive, but the irony is no one seems interested in “knowing” what these “tariffs” are all about. Even though this is as clear as the dictums of The Prophet, I’ll further explain this for you in a modern and also dumb context. A tariff is simply a posted notice for foreign companies. If they want access to American markets, they have to pay a vig. In plain English, that means a “bribe.” A velvet rope across the border. Admission costs apply, and Uncle Sam is holding the clipboard. As simple as all of this is, no one who talks about tariffs now seems to be interested in what their implications are.

What is the American Marketplace?

Think of America as a series of boxes: shipping containers, warehouses, and big box stores for boxes that we put in our boxy houses. Cheap Chinese junk, like your toaster oven. In order for you to buy a new toaster oven at Walmart every year for $79.99, China gets to use slave labor to make this toaster oven last just long enough for the warranty to expire. You get cheap stuff, and they get to keep making cheap stuff. Everyone wins when the big line goes up. This big line is also known as GDP or Gross Domestic Product. It’s called “gross” because most of the plastic “products” we buy end up in a “domestic” landfill after 18 months.

The big box economy is part of the picture, the real fun happens at the door. Tariffs are entry fees to the marketplace, not unlike your barber paying a booth rental fee in your barbershop. But unlike giving a haircut, making stuff is hard, and paying people to make good stuff is annoying.

Or think of America as the world’s hottest club. Other nations are like hookers and drug dealers trying to access the dance floor. The president is the bouncer and tariffs are the cover charge. Unfortunately, we’ve been letting a lot of uggos in as well as drug dealers trafficking in stepped-on shit.

So how did it get this way?

Some smart accounting guys like yourself got together in the 70s and said “Hey, what’s up with these labor costs? Why can’t we have slaves again?” But slavery was made illegal in the USA, so they had to get clever. “Damn American workers, screwing up my margins. But the Chinese, they have crafty little hands and numerous diligent children! Perhaps…”

And just like that, Globo-Homo was born!

We shipped factories overseas and turned most factory workers with an average IQ into compliance officers. For example you, as an American accountant, in our burgeoning service industry economy, have an important job: helping people navigate and comply with the labyrinth that is the personal income tax. It’s a fun and valuable game. You see, the Internal Revenue Service knows how much money you make and what you owe. But accounting is not math, it’s a language! So people guess as to exactly how much they owe. If you get lucky, you’ll get a refund, which is the government’s way of saying, “Thanks for the interest-free loan!”

But if you make too much money the wrong way, or incorrectly cover your tracks, you’ll owe the government more money. This makes you a sucker, but it’s not as bad as the third approach: refusing to pay. If you fill out the wrong boxes on your tax form or refuse to pay, the government will come to your house, and force you into a series of boxes: that’s a police car, a courthouse, and then an iron cage, where you will get raped. In your box! And you thought paying taxes was a pain in the rear! And if you behave poorly in prison? Well, they send you to an even smaller box, known as “The Box.”

The pesky Constitution supposedly forbids cruel and unusual punishment, but what does that even mean? Similar to members of today’s ruling caste (homosexual rapist pedophiles), the Founding Fathers wore wigs, owned slaves, and spent maybe too much time mentoring cabin boys.

But if the government can just print money, why taxes?

Yes, we print money (AKA Sovereign Debt) to bail out of the Wall Street Casino and co-sponsoring the “Islamic Insurgency of the Month Club.” This gets expensive. It's more money than anyone has. See, paying taxes largely goes to finance our debt. The US government needs to spend a lot of money. We print a lot of money, so the debt goes up. We need more money more faster so that we can bomb brown people in unpronounceable regions, fund counter-insurgencies of brown people, and run the news media of other countries. It’s a lot of hard work.

But much of the spending (45% or something) comes from unfunded liabilities. This is fancy talk for payments the government has promised to people. They are for:

1. Social Security: gambling money for old people

2. Medicare: health care for old people

3. Medicaid: health care for poor people

You’ll notice that these cottage industries correlate tightly with cable news advertisers: the AARP, Raytheon, and pharmaceutical companies.

Then there’s another bajillion or so for defense spending, which is the only industry other countries outsource to American manufacturers. We can’t make shitty toaster ovens, but we can make some real dynamite weaponry. Business is booming, as many of the insurgent groups we fund across the globe end up with American weapons in hand. So then we have to arm their enemies, and so on. The world hasn’t completely exploded yet, so this is a pretty good subscription model for US defense contractors. Yes, it’s missiles and morphine, the fuel for our two great projects: expediting death and delaying death.

You might now say, “But that makes the Federal government sound like a big old Insurance and Pension company with an Army! Didn’t insurance and pensions exist before those programs?”

Yes, but they were run by greedy robber barons in monocles and top hats. Guys who looked like this:

“Give me the gold”

Score one for FDR. Starting with him, we began developing the largest military in the history of the world and told our trading partners: “Accept our greenback coupons, or we’ll kill you.” This worked for a while! Here at Leviathan Globo-Homo Mutual Aid Corporation, we drone strike you right in the diabetes.

Who can fix our castrated giant of an economy from the wreckage wrought by the New Dealers, The Great Society, and the Great Leap Forward? Why the man who signed the CARES Act, the greatest transfer of wealth in human history from the working class to the laptop class. Don’t worry, he’s learned his lesson.

As a casino magnate, Trump knows how to run the hottest club in town. The point of a sovereign is to increase the property value of his kingdom. If we’re going to fix the plumbing, we’re going to need to raise the cover charge. Uggos, freeloaders, and drunks will be thrown out until they pony up and show better behavior. In fact, all patrons are losers until they prove they can meet the dress code and be an asset to the club. Oh no, our fake economy is crashing! Well surprise, almost no one in the Rust Belt gives a damn - they are not shareholders.

But Tariffs are Taxes!

This argument is rich, coming from the progressives of all people, who never saw a tax they didn’t like. We have:

Federal Income Tax, which taxes you for the privilege to work.

State Income Tax, which taxes you for not living in Florida, Nevada, or Texas.

Property Tax, which continually taxes you for something that you already own. Property tax mostly taxes you for the privilege of funding our sterling public schools. These days the curriculum is mostly about how to be a gay communist and how math is racist. Don’t worry, most of the employees in education aren’t even teachers.

Sales Tax, which taxes you for buying anything.

Estate Tax, which taxes you for dying.

And of course, inflation, the silent killer.

What’s one more shakedown between friends?

Why Tariffs Bad?

Here’s the reductio ad absurdum: if cheap goods are bad, then aren’t free goods even worse? What if all of sudden, instead of selling us cheap toaster ovens, the Chinese just gave them away? How could that be bad? All the people who love taxes don’t like this tax, so it’s a bad tax. It’s mean to our vassals and partners. Captain America is supposed to play nice.

Why Tariffs Good?

The best argument I’ve heard goes like this: this administration is deliberately causing a stock market crash so that investors flee to bonds and the Fed lowers interest rates. We can then refinance our debt and do more good stuff more better. We also get the satisfaction of riling up pretty much every country in the world to see if they’ll play ball. Whether it works or not, the nuclear option was the most fun part of 1945. Let’s see how this plays out.

Where does the author stand?

On the shoulders of giants. This too shall pass.

The preceding misinformation has been subjected to a 43% Tariff. In order to keep reading, you’ll have to reciprocate by signing up for a paid subscription or sending a bribe.