Where the Money Goes

 The news has been dominated this week by two big tales of our current government's colossal self-inflicted economic mismanagement: namely, 1) the rise of the national debt to over $40 trillion; and 2) Trump's renewed trade war with our closest neighbor and biggest trading partner, Canada. 

I've been talking less about the second of these two, in part because I tend to lump these tariff wars into the mental category of the merely inane aspects of Trump's rule—as opposed to the genuinely evil aspects, like his wars and enforced disappearances of innocent people to overseas detention camps. 

But it's worth pausing for a moment to recall that all these things are connected. After all, Trump defends his tariff wars against our allies—which are driving up the basic costs of consumer goods for Americans—as necessary to raise revenues. 

Thus, the tariffs are really just a highly regressive form of indirect taxation. And presumably the proceeds are going in large part to service that massive national debt, to disappear those innocent people to detention, to conduct those extrajudicial killings on boats, and to fight those illegal wars. 

And on that subject, James Russell Lowell had an apt word or two to say, all the way back in 1848, in the Biglow Papers: 

If, by means of indirect taxation, the bills for every extraordinary outlay were brought under our immediate eye, so that, like thrifty housekeepers, we could see where and how fast the money was going, we should be less likely to commit extravagances. 

He goes on: If we could know that a part of the money we expend for tea and coffee goes to buy powder and balls, and that it is Mexican blood which makes the clothes on our backs more costly, it would set some of us athinking. 

Lowell was arguing in part that the two biggest national policies of his day—the Mexican-American War and the federal tariff—even though they were backed by two different parties and seemed wholly disconnected from one another—were actually complementary and mutually reinforcing. 

It was the money raised by the Whig's tariff after all that was going to pay for the Democrats' illegal war on Mexico. And so, Polk's Democrats may "talk agin tayriffs," as Mr. Biglow says—in Lowell's satirical poem—but they "act fer a high one"; that is, their war policies demand the revenues. 

So today, we sometimes treat Trump's idiotic and self-destructive trade war with Canada as a separate issue from his human rights atrocities—but we really shouldn't. One pays for the other. 

This week marks about one year since the Trump administration started blowing up boats full of civilians, without charge or trial or any attempt to inspect the boats' cargo or passengers, in the Caribbean and the Pacific. Just this past week, they murdered two more unknown people under this same program. 

That brings the total number of people murdered in these boat strikes up to at least 223. 

Recent reports also suggest that secret U.S. operatives may be behind a recent string of murders of fishing boat crews in Ecuador. 

We are also now nearly six months into an illegal war of aggression against Iran. 

And the U.S. government continues to maintain what it gleefully depicts as a sort of neo-colonial rule over the subject population of Venezuela, for purposes of resource extraction, after betraying the country's pro-democracy movement and keeping an authoritarian puppet regime in power indefinitely. 

These horrors may seem far removed from Trump's merely ludicrous baiting of Ottawa; his threats to rename Lake Ontario to "Lake America"; and other inanities. 

But we shouldn't forget: the money Trump raises through these tariffs—if they even survive the courts—raises, that is, through making consumer goods more expensive for all of us—in the end goes to pay for more missiles and drones to blow up Iranian children and civilian vessels full of fishermen. 

If we could know that a part of the money we expend for tea and coffee goes to buy powder and balls, and that it is Mexican blood—or, should we say, Iranian or Venezuelan or Trinidadian or Ecuadorian blood—which makes the clothes on our backs more costly, it would set some of us athinking.