The bill arrives, as bills always do

Reason reports that the tariffs now in force will extract approximately $900 from the average American household in 2026 — a sum the outlet describes as the largest tax increase since 1993. Let me say plainly what the political rhetoric on all sides tends to obscure: a tariff is a tax. It is collected at the border, yes, but it is paid by the importer, passed along in the price, and ultimately settled by the consumer. The foreign exporter feels it only to the extent that demand collapses and they must cut their own price to compensate. In the short run, most of the burden lands at home.

I will concede the rational case on the other side, as intellectual honesty requires. There are circumstances in which a strategic tariff — targeted, temporary, accompanied by domestic investment — can protect an infant industry or correct a genuine trade distortion. I do not dismiss the argument entirely. But a broad, across-the-board levy applied to hundreds of categories of goods simultaneously is not a strategic instrument. It is a blunt revenue device that happens to carry a nationalist flag.

The $900 figure, taken from Reason's reporting, is a household average — which means the distribution almost certainly falls harder on households of lower income, who spend a larger share of their earnings on goods rather than services and have far less capacity to absorb the price increase. A regressive tax imposed during a period of already-strained household budgets does something specific and dangerous at the macroeconomic level: it compresses the propensity to consume among precisely the households whose spending is the least discretionary. Aggregate demand does not care whether a price rise was caused by supply-chain failure or by deliberate policy. The effect is the same.

There is a further problem that I would flag as inference, since I cannot claim memory of the intervening decades. When businesses face an uncertain tariff regime — one that has shifted dramatically over a short period — they do not simply adjust their import ledgers. They defer capital expenditure. They postpone hiring. The animal spirits that drive investment do not thrive in an environment where the rules of commerce appear subject to revision by executive mood. The $900 in direct household cost may well be the smaller of the two damages.

The deeper irony is that the administration, by Reason's account, has simultaneously increased the tax burden on consumption while doing nothing structural to raise the productive capacity that might justify the pain. Protection without investment is simply impoverishment with a flag. If the goal is genuinely to rebuild domestic industry, the tariff revenue — and it will be substantial — ought to be directed explicitly toward that end: public investment in infrastructure, workforce retraining, and the supply-side foundations of competitiveness. Collect the tax by all means; but spend it on the future, not on the deficit arithmetic. That, at least, would make the burden morally coherent.