The Tariff Man's Toll

In Which Statistics Are Strangled and Charts Are Drawn by Crayon

There was a time—not golden, but at least brass-plated—when the economy was navigated by instruments:

Trade balances, ledgers, treaties, tonnage.

One required maps to know the world, and numbers to understand it.

But now, we drift in darker waters.

Here, in the Age of the Tariffman, maps are redrawn by whim, and data is something to be yelled over rather than studied.

One does not read an index; one feels it.

The Dow goes up? Victory!

The Dow goes down? Fake news.

Act I: The Bludgeoning of Balance Sheets

Trade deficits—once a measure among many—have become fetishized, wielded like cudgels to justify anything and everything.

“We’re losing!” cries the Tariffman, pointing at the gap between imports and exports,

as if the economy were a footrace and not a system of exchange.

Never mind that a trade deficit is neither inherently good nor evil.

Never mind that many deficit nations prosper.

Never mind the economists waving furiously from the back bench.

In this regime, nuance is for losers.

Act II: Charts Without Axes, Claims Without Footnotes

Diagrams are produced in great quantity, if not quality.

Arrows point up. Arrows point down. Some loop in joyful spirals toward nowhere.

“$5 Trillion in Investment!” they proclaim, with all the specificity of a séance.

Inquiry is discouraged.

Footnotes are faint rumors.

And all economic discussion begins with a slogan and ends with a shrug.

Act III: Mercantilism Reanimated, and Not in a Good Way

Once thought buried beneath centuries of trade theory, the zombie corpse of mercantilism now lurches again across the land:

Never mind that supply chains span continents, or that American products contain parts from twenty nations.

Trade, in this vision, is not a collaboration. It is conquest.

And conquest must be taxed.

Thus, the ledgers are cooked.

The charts are doctored.

And the policies are drawn from maps that fold inwards on themselves like a Möbius strip of make-believe.

When numbers lose meaning, the only thing left is noise.

And in noise, the Tariffman thrives.