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Howdy, and welcome to this week’s edition of Receipts. My very first Bulwark newsletter back in November laid out the case for why a Supreme Court decision striking down Trump’s tariffs could boost the economy. Welp. The tariff refunds are finally coming out in dribs and drabs, plus interest, and yet there’s no economic boom in sight. This week’s newsletter looks at why.
The answer, in short, is that tariff-related uncertainty persists, because Trump has tried to cobble together different tariffs to replace the ones the justices took away. And so businesses remain paralyzed by uncertainty—not to mention fear of retaliation, if they do claim the refunds they’re owed.
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Trump’s Tariffs Have Created an Economic Sh*tshow Beyond Your Wildest Imagination
The company that makes his favorite shoes just got its first tariff refund. But it still hasn’t been made whole.
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NOT EVEN DONALD TRUMP’S FAVORITE BRANDS are safe from his economic abuse. Consider the case of Florsheim Shoes, which sells the black leather oxfords famously modeled by Trump’s cabinet members.
“The tariffs have changed fifteen times,” recounts Thomas Florsheim Jr., whose great-great-grandfather founded the brand in 1892. “I think that many businesses felt that the Trump administration was going to be pro-business. And, you know, with the tariff situation, somehow the pro-business thing got lost.”
Florsheim is CEO of Weyco Group, a publicly traded company based in Glendale, Wisconsin that sells several other footwear brands (including Nunn Bush and Stacy Adams) in addition to the family’s eponymous line. Today, Weyco employs about 350 people in the United States. These employees work in design, accounting, warehousing, IT, sales, marketing, logistics, customer service, and so on.
In other words, they do pretty much everything you can think of related to selling shoes except physically manufacture them.
That’s because Weyco shoes, like 99 percent of the footwear sold in this country, are made abroad.¹ Virtually the entire industry shifted overseas decades ago, and it is not coming back. Shoe manufacturing is relatively low on the value chain and requires demanding, labor-intensive work, which makes it prohibitively expensive at U.S. wages.
“You really can’t make shoes and sell them in the U.S. unless you want to sell shoes for more than $300,” he says. Florsheim shoes typically retail at less than half that price.
Which is why the whole tariff thing has been so frustrating. Trump’s trade wars have jeopardized the jobs of the hundreds of Americans whom Weyco actually does employ, in those twenty-first-century jobs that the United States excels at creating. And it’s not clear why domestically manufactured wingtips or penny loafers would be of critical strategic interest to U.S. national security, anyway.
Yet at times over the past year, overall tariffs on Weyco shoes reached as high as 161 percent. Which adds up. Over the ten months following “Liberation Day,” Weyco paid the government roughly $21 million in import duties. Florsheim was able to pass along a relatively small proportion of those costs to customers, raising prices just once by 10 percent. His options were limited both because (1) Weyco was already locked into a spring price list for its retailer clients long before Liberation Day, and (2) consumers wouldn’t tolerate price increases much higher than 10 percent. Beyond that point, the company risked losing sales entirely.
Last December, Weyco got hit with a surprise tariff bill for over $1 million. Thomas Florsheim decided he’d had enough.
His company sued the Trump administration, arguing ...
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