Receipts Don’t Lie, They Itemize The Scam

My receipt and I are in a toxic relationship, it keeps asking for just a little more, I keep promising I can change, somewhere a CFO nods like a therapist who bills by the flinch. Quick game, spot the culprit, loser buys coffee, winner also buys coffee because prices just jumped again. We can pretend it is vague economic weather, but the culprits left fingerprints in ink. Your grocery run feels like a horror sequel with a bigger budget and the same twist because the people who set prices already told us why the tags keep inching north, and no, it is not your imagination. The CFO survey crowd, the one that checks in with Duke, Atlanta, Richmond, says roughly a third of this year’s price growth is tariffs, next year, about a quarter. Headline inflation is floating around 2.9 percent, back out the tariff slice and you get something near 2 percent, the zone where rent stops pretending it is a helium experiment. Connect the dots, the picture spells tariffs, and your checkout total is the caption. Tariffs are a cover charge on imports, firms pay it, then they do what firms do, they recoup it. You meet the difference when the cashier reads your soul through the chip reader. Nothing mystical here. Add a charge to heavy duty trucks, the sticker climbs. Threaten branded drug imports unless companies are actively building US plants, insurers and pharmacies will not swallow that, so co pays creep and formularies contort. Tag kitchen and bathroom cabinets at fifty percent under a national security rationale, your remodel quote changes before your contractor finds parking. Even when the duty hits components instead of finished goods, the cost rides up each stage of manufacturing and shipping, then pops out as next quarter’s tidy excuse to update the price list. CFOs told that same survey they are spreading increases over two years, which is not kindness, it is pacing, raise things slowly enough to keep you grumbling but buying, margins intact, investors tranquilized, très thoughtful. Names so we are not ghost hunting. John Graham at Duke runs the survey, and he says this is not a one off, pricing pressure shows up in 2026 too. The form asked about 2025 and 2026, so any talk of 2027 is his read of momentum, not an extra checkbox. Meanwhile, policy keeps tossing logs on the fire. Trump floated a 100 percent tariff on patented or branded pharmaceuticals unless companies are actively building US production, plus 25 percent on heavy duty truck imports, plus 50 percent on cabinets. Stack that across more categories and you extend the elevated price era, that is arithmetic, not ideology. Two plus two still equals four, even if you shout sovereignty into a microphone. Here is the part where the room goes quiet. You do not punish families to stage an economic flex, yet that is how this plays. When the charges spread into intermediate goods, downstream producers reprice in waves, expectations harden, the Fed reads stickier inflation, and the medicine becomes higher rates for longer. That means slower hiring and thinner raises, the soft kind of pain that never makes headlines but empties pantries. Add retaliation from trading partners and you hit exporters and farm towns from the other side. Pharma is its own labyrinth, moving production takes years, not months, so the near term looks like higher prices now, risk of shortages if the shift is clumsy, and maybe lower prices later if plants actually get built. Later is a promise, the bill is immediate, and promises do not pay at the pharmacy counter. Time to sort the wheat from the chaff. Who gains today. Domestic firms facing foreign competitors get room to raise their own prices, because why not, parity sounds patriotic when it fattens the margin. Treasury collects some revenue. Executives meter increases and call it stewardship, investors clap politely. Who loses. Consumers first, especially anyone whose wages are lagging, renters who cannot negotiate with a checkout lane, small contractors quoting jobs in real time who eat the overage when a shipment gets reclassified while the truck is on the highway. The charge hides inside monthly totals and spreads out, but it still lands, and it lands on people with the least cushion. Here is how you tell the difference between fixing and posturing. This is not strength, it is a sales tax with extra steps, routed through customs and rebadged as strategy. Trying to cool inflation with tariffs is like treating a fever by putting on a thicker sweater, you feel hotter, the thermometer still wins. You do not slow price growth by tolling the road from factory to shelf, you just move the bruise and hope the lighting is bad. Equal protection and due process exist so the state cannot invent a stealth tax bracket that appears when you buy antibiotics or a work truck, yet here we are watching price tags shuffle while speeches pretend this is discipline. If you want resilient supply, do the boring work. Fund and permit domestic capacity with real timelines and clear rules, target the chokepoints that actually snap under stress, use joint purchasing where scale helps, and stop turning families into collateral for campaign talking points. There is a better way, and it does not need a cape. Pick the critical goods, publish the build plan, design incentives that crowd in private capital without writing blank checks, and stop lobbing threats that force every firm to model the worst case. In the meantime, treat the CFO survey like a forecast, not a mood ring, because the people who decide prices already told you what they are doing, and they will keep doing it until the incentives flip. Two asides before the mug goes from hot to wistful, politics loves tough talk that someone else pays for, and markets love a rule set they can trust even if it is strict. Voilà, c’est tout, which is French for stop lighting your own wallet on fire to look tough on imports, and maybe try being tough on bad policy instead. Now, back to the receipt, which insists it grew three sizes today for national security, and yes, I would like to speak to the manager, but only if the manager brings snacks. Also, romaine calm if the total looks leafy, that is just the produce aisle raising its hand. And if you caught that, congratulations, you owe me coffee, and tragically, I owe you coffee too, because the price went up while we were reading this sentence, because ADHD brain wandered, then came back, then wandered again, and here we are. --Doc (yeah I said it!) find me anywhere under @DocAtCDI U.S. Economy, Trade Policy, Inflation, Consumer Prices, Industrial Policy