Bruce Richardson has spent a lifetime around tea. He runs Elmwood Inn Fine Teas in Danville, Kentucky, imports leaves from dozens of countries, and advises the Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum. Few people alive think more carefully about how a global commodity intersects with American history. When Richardson looks at the current tariff regime, the irony strikes him as almost theatrical. “All over again, taxation without representation,” he told Fortune recently. Congress, he argued, has stepped aside while the president assumes a role closer to George III than to the constitutional executive the Founders imagined.
His comment sounds rhetorical until the numbers intrude. Economists at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy analyzed roughly four trillion dollars in trade between January 2024 and November 2025. Their conclusion was stark: American importers and consumers absorbed 96 percent of the tariff burden. Foreign exporters absorbed about 4 percent. Parallel research from Yale, Harvard, and the Federal Reserve converges on the same finding. Julian Hinz, a coauthor of the Kiel study, put the matter plainly, there is no such thing as foreigners transferring wealth to the United States through tariffs.
A revolution was fought over that principle. History now finds Americans reenacting it from the wrong side of the ledger.
The grievance that mattered
Popular memory often misstates the Boston Tea Party as a protest against high prices. The Tea Act of 1773 actually lowered the cost of tea by allowing the British East India Company to sell directly to the colonies. The 342 chests dumped into Boston Harbor that December were cheaper than what many colonists had been buying before.
The outrage ran deeper than price. Authority was the issue. Parliament asserted the right to tax people who had no representatives in Parliament. “Taxation without representation” was not a slogan of convenience, it was a constitutional claim about political equality. Each duty levied, monopoly granted, or regulation imposed reinforced the same message: power was being exercised without consent.
Economic self-interest played its role. John Hancock and Samuel Adams had profitable smuggling operations to defend. Revolutions almost always mix principle with profit. Yet the principle was real enough. The Stamp Act Congress of 1765 declared it “inseparably essential to the freedom of a people” that no taxes be imposed without consent given personally or by representatives. After Parliament responded with the Intolerable Acts, closing Boston’s port and suspending local self-government, colonial resistance hardened into a broader constitutional revolt. Suspicion of unchecked taxation authority became foundational to the American project.
The modern version
Two and a half centuries later, Richardson walks through a Kentucky warehouse filled with tea that cleared American ports under new tariffs. That inventory still carries the cost. Tariffs take time to work through supply chains, he explains, and they take time to work their way out.
Economists describe the mechanism with dispassionate clarity. A tariff functions like a consumption tax with a different label. Importers pay the duty at the port. Wholesalers pass the cost to retailers. Retailers pass it to consumers. The Kiel researchers found no meaningful evidence that foreign exporters lowered prices to absorb the burden. Market logic remains stubbornly consistent across centuries: suppliers charge what the market will bear, governments add taxes, and consumers pay them.
Empirical work from the last decade reinforces the point. Studies by Mary Amiti, Stephen Redding, and David Weinstein on the 2018 tariffs found near-total pass-through to American buyers. Research by Pablo Fajgelbaum, Alberto Cavallo, and others reached similar conclusions. Federal Reserve analysis of the 2025 tariffs shows foreign currency prices barely budging. The burden stays home.
Costs that sound abstract on spreadsheets show up concretely in household budgets. The Budget Lab at Yale estimates that households in the second-lowest income decile lose nearly one thousand dollars annually from the April 2025 tariffs alone. Middle-income households lose closer to seventeen hundred. Apparel prices rose seventeen percent from the combined 2025 measures. That is a regressive tax by any definition. Hartley Johnson, who runs the Mark T. Wendell Tea Company in Massachusetts, observes that his tariff payments now equal the cost of a new employee.
Roughly two hundred billion dollars in tariff revenue flowed to the Treasury last year. Almost all of it came from Americans.
The constitutional hinge
Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution assigns Congress the power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises. That allocation was deliberate. The Founders had just experienced taxation imposed by a distant authority insulated from accountability. Executive discretion over revenue collection was precisely what they sought to prevent.
Emergency trade authorities, created for narrow circumstances, have gradually expanded into a standing mechanism for imposing what function as consumption taxes without legislative debate. Courts may yet revisit the boundaries of this delegation. The deeper issue remains institutional: hundreds of billions of dollars in de facto taxation now arise through executive action.
Public finance scholars distinguish between statutory incidence and economic incidence. Kurt Paulsen of the University of Wisconsin notes that tariffs are legally paid by importers but economically borne by consumers. When ninety-six percent of the burden falls on households, the measure functions as a consumer tax. Taxes of that magnitude were meant to be debated, amended, and approved by Congress.
Silence has consequences. Authority ceded quietly becomes authority exercised routinely.
Rhetoric meets arithmetic
Tariff rhetoric relies on a story of national leverage. Foreign producers, the story goes, pay for access to American markets. Concessions follow. Strength is asserted. The arithmetic tells a different tale. For foreign firms to bear the cost, prices would need to fall significantly. Large economies can influence terms of trade in theory; evidence from both the 2018 and 2024–2025 episodes shows that such influence is modest at best. Pass-through rates approach one hundred percent.
Political durability rests partly on timing. Strong overall growth and moderate inflation have softened the visible impact. John Abell noted that economic resilience provided cover even as Europe slowed. Diffuse costs rarely mobilize voters. Concentrated benefits mobilize them reliably. Costs remain costs even when they arrive quietly.
What this episode reveals
Three gaps emerge. An expertise gap allows misunderstanding of tariff incidence to persist. A representation gap allows massive fiscal measures to bypass ordinary legislative scrutiny. An accountability gap spreads pain thinly enough to dull resistance while the aggregate burden grows.
Sebastian Lozano, an industrial real estate advisor, captured the reality succinctly: tariffs operate as a consumption tax on the country that imposes them. Pitching them otherwise does not change who pays.
The Founders anticipated these dangers. Constitutional design aimed to force taxation into open political contestation. Workarounds have accumulated through practice rather than amendment.
The tea in the cup
Todd Bigelow, a freelance photographer, recently calculated how tariffs raise the cost of cameras, lenses, computers, and lighting. His conclusion was blunt: fees must rise or purchasing power falls. Tariffs, like all taxes, get passed along.
Colonial merchants understood that dynamic in 1773. Tea was dumped not because it was expensive but because it represented a structure of authority that denied consent. Daily habits can express political principles. After independence, Americans shifted from tea to coffee as a small act of civic symbolism. Tea has returned, metaphorically speaking. The tax has returned with it. This time the levy arrives through executive mechanisms rather than parliamentary fiat. The effect feels familiar: payment without representation, burdens imposed without consent.
Irony loses its charm when it shows up on a receipt.