Life in a Nation of Tariffs

I woke up in the early morning hours after President Trump’s China/Mexico/Canada tariff skirmish. My first sleepless hours of national angst since his election and inauguration. Pretty good, compared to the angina I know others have endured.

Perhaps the reason this round of Trumpian chaos bothered me is that I know a thing or two about living in a nation that runs on tariffs. Not one of those gold-plated oligarchies like Hungary that our president likes to emulate so much. Rather, one of his so-called sh*thole countries. Haiti.

Photo courtesy of Rolling Stone

It’s been more than a decade since I was in Haiti. At the time, the world was focused on helping the earthquake ravaged nation, and I was one ray in that laser focus. Alternating bi-weekly between the U.S. and Haiti for over a year, I was always stymied how to describe the Magic Island to Americans. People asked questions like, “Why have they cut down all their trees? Or, “Why can’t the police maintain order?” My favorite was, “What do people do for work?” A regular job in Haiti is the exemption rather than the rule; the police are more than less corrupt; the trees have all been cut down to create charcoal to cook. Yes it is shortsighted. But if there was only one tree standing between you and hunger, you’d cut it down as well.

We Americans take order and prosperity for granted. So much for granted that we elect a disrupter like Donald Trump as our leader without truly considering the impacts of the radical changes he proposes. Most of his MAGA agenda is rooted in a nostalgia for the 1950’s: white men in control; women in subservice; colored people out of sight and mind; gay people in fear; and trans people barely even invented. But his tariff threats toss us much further back in history. All the way back to the Eighteenth Century, which though often referred to as the Age of Enlightenment, was also the era of pirates.

Haiti is a country that runs on tariffs. There is no income tax, as there are few jobs. There is no sales tax, as most economic activity is barter or cash. There are no property taxes, as property ownership is a precarious thing. What’s left to fund what little government exists: tariffs.

The United States—the wealthiest nation in the world—doesn’t like to be compared favorably to Haiti—the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Yet, we have one important economic similarity. Both countries are big time net importers. With more goods and services coming in than going out, tariffs are an appealing idea. But tariffs are ripe with downsides. Corruption. Opacity. Inequity.

Every time we entered Haiti, laden with whatever materials we could pack into hockey bags, we played the arbitrary dance of import fees. Sometimes we’d be waved through as good-natured humanitarians. Other times, guys in uniforms with guns on their hips rifled through our stuff before they let us go. Still other times they’d quote a fee. $100. $250. We always carried a stash of US bills, in anticipation of this arbitrary process. We handed over greenbacks on demand, without the least pretense from either palm that the money was funding legitimate purpose.

Our president likes to frame tariffs as patriotic and independent. But really, tariffs are reactionary and isolating. They illustrate complete denial of the interplay that defines our global economy. There may be reasons to impose tariffs on certain items from certain countries who are not fair-trading partners. But broad tariffs on friends and allies? That’s Eighteenth-Century isolationism. That will shuttle the United States down a rabbit hole already occupied by the most isolated country in the Western Hemisphere. We’ll never know whether Haiti could have become a successful country because for over 200 years the rest of the world never gave the first independent Black republic a chance. What we do know is that a country that relies almost exclusively on tariffs to fund its government is a country bereft of healthcare, education, social services, or even the ability to defend itself. Why would we want to emulate their bottom-rung system of taxation?

Maybe because the real agenda of the Trump presidency is not to uphold our democracy and elevate the lives of our citizenry. Rather, it’s to reduce as many of us as possible to be servants of the rich. Tariffs will certainly noose us in that direction.

Then again, the threatened tariffs might be nothing more than the distraction of the week from our leading master of chaos. President Trump’s given Mexico and Canada a month’s reprieve. Three weeks from now, tariffs may once again be headline news. Or he may conveniently forget the whole thing to pursue some other media circus. Disequilibrium is key to the entire enterprise.

Just like every time I entered Haiti, I never knew if, or how much, I’d have to pay.