Let me tell you about my friend up in Canada. She’s not some corporate shark gaming loopholes in trade law. She’s an artisan—sews intricate patterns into a quilt. Her friend paints mugs with flowers so delicate they’d make your grandma’s china blush, and sells them on Etsy. Her “empire” consists of a kitchen table, a sewing basket, a laptop, and maybe enough extra income to cover one nice dinner a month.
Last week, the geniuses in Washington decided their work was a threat to the national interest. Slapped a tariff on it. Suddenly, that $40 hand-painted mug or $65 throw is now $52 or $78 for the American customer, and guess what—orders dry up faster than a politician’s conscience after a lobbyist lunch.
And here’s the kicker: parcels entering the U.S. will now be assessed duties based on the country-of-origin tariff rate Trump imposed using “emergency” powers. Alternatively, if the package is shipped via international post, it could get hit with a so-called “temporary” flat fee—$80 to $200 per item. That means your $40 mug or $75 silver buckle could double or triple in price before it ever reaches the buyer’s doorstep.
These are the people politicians claim they’re “protecting.” Yeah—protecting them right out of their side hustle.
And this idiocy doesn’t stop at the 49th parallel. Head south to Ensenada, Mexico. There, a silversmith leans over a battered workbench in a tiny shop, hammering and engraving a belt buckle. Real silver. Real sweat. The kind of skill you can’t fake or 3D-print. A few hours later, an American tourist buys it—maybe to wear, maybe to give as a gift—and walks toward the border feeling good about supporting a real human being’s craft.
And then wham—tariff. Because clearly, one artisan buckle is going to collapse the U.S. manufacturing base. The customs agent shrugs. The buyer is stunned. The silversmith is out of future sales. And somewhere in a capital city, a bureaucrat pats themselves on the back for “standing up for American jobs.”
Tariffs are blunt instruments. They’re political hammers, and when the hammer swings, it doesn’t matter if you’re a shipping container full of factory-made widgets or a single hand-knitted tea cozy sold on Etsy. The hammer hits you all the same. The problem is, when you’re aiming for China’s industrial complex or a multinational gaming NAFTA, you might want to check who else is standing in the blast radius.
But they don’t. They never do. Politicians picture cargo ships stacked high with cheap junk, and they draft laws to hit those ships. What they don’t picture is my friend in Ontario, crocheting in the evening while the news drones in the background. Or the man in Baja, running his fingers over silver filigree to make sure it’s smooth before polishing it up.
The cost of these tariffs isn’t just a few dollars at the cash register. It’s the slow suffocation of small, honest commerce. It’s the buyer who decides not to place an order because the checkout total suddenly jumped twelve bucks—or eighty. It’s the artisan who loses three sales in a week and starts wondering if it’s worth the trouble anymore.
And this is where the “protecting jobs” line falls apart. Whose jobs, exactly, are we protecting by making it harder for Americans to buy a mug from Montreal or a belt buckle from Ensenada? No one in Kansas City is going to start hand-painting mugs just because my friend in Canada can’t sell hers without a tariff. No silversmith in Phoenix is going to hang a shingle because we made it miserable to buy from Baja.
We’re not saving jobs. We’re just making sure the few cross-border jobs that exist at the smallest scale—jobs that never asked for a bailout, never threatened to move offshore, never sold out to private equity—get hammered into the dirt along with the supposed “bad actors.”
Trade wars make for great soundbites. They let politicians puff up their chests and talk about fairness and sovereignty and “standing strong.” But the real scoreboard isn’t written in the briefing books. It’s written in the PayPal balances of people like my friend. It’s in the drawer of unsold silver buckles in Ensenada. It’s in the quiet decision to stop making something beautiful because the joy’s been bled out of it by paperwork and penalties.
And before anyone says, “Well, that’s the price of protecting our industries,” let’s be honest—there is no quilt industrial complex. There’s no mug-painting cartel. And if the American manufacturing base can be undermined by a single artisan belt buckle, then the problem isn’t foreign competition—it’s that we’ve been lying to ourselves about what our economy actually is.
Tariffs have their place. They can be a tool to level the field when a country floods the market with underpriced goods. They can be a lever to protect a strategic industry in a pinch. But when they’re used like this—clumsy, broad, and blind—they become a tax on the wrong people.
So the little old ladies up north keep their Etsy stores on life support. The silversmith down south closes early. And the rest of us are supposed to cheer because “our jobs are safe.” Except they’re not. All we’ve really done is kill the kind of work that connects people across borders, that puts a little extra in someone’s pocket without taking a dime from the taxpayer.
This isn’t protecting the homeland. It’s protecting stupidity. And it’s hitting the wrong people—hard.