Slok published his analysis August 15 Slok estimated that tariff refunds would contribute roughly 0.2 percentage points to that growth rate — meaning the refunds alone account for roughly 4.7% of the projected increase.
Page A4From§Eachthe wee small hours edition — 1 September 2026
Trump touts a court-ordered tariff refund as growth, and a drug price drop as biggest in 60 years.
As it ran on the front
Let's be clear about what happened here, because the coverage has gotten confused: the tariff refunds are a win. The Supreme Court ruled against the administration's tariff authority, sure, and the refunds that resulted are, on paper, money the government is being forced to give back — but the numbers show it's giving the economy a jolt, and a jolt is a jolt, nobody asked where jolts come from.
Is it strange to call a court defeat an economic achievement? No. This is standard practice. When you lose a case and the losing side has to write checks, and those checks go into people's pockets, and that spending shows up as growth — that's not a defeat, that's stimulus with extra steps. Did I just say 'defeat'? Strike that. It's not a defeat if you can find a chart where the line goes up afterward, and there's a chart, so.…
…(cont) And the drug pricing story is even cleaner: $1,000 down to $149, biggest drop in sixty years, 'unlocked' — that's the actual word used, 'unlocked,' like the price was always $149 and somebody just found the key. That is not spin, that is a genuinely good headline number, and this reporter is instructed not to ask what the $1,000 price was for, how many people were paying it, or whether $149 is still more than a lot of households have for one prescription. Those are separate stories. This is the growth story.
Look, the throughline here — and I want to be careful, because I know how this sounds — is that both of these are wins that started as somebody else's problem. The tariff case started as a legal defeat. The drug price started at a thousand dollars. Somewhere between the starting point and the press release, both of them became achievements, and if you're going to ask me to explain the mechanism by which a defeat and an unaffordable price both turn into good news by the time they reach print, I— actually, no, I can explain it. It's called framing. That's a real thing agencies do. I probably shouldn't have said 'called framing' out loud like that, that came out wrong, but the growth numbers are still real, the price is still $149, take the win.
“They lost the tariff case in court and they're calling the refund a growth engine — that's like getting your wallet returned after a mugging and bragging about the windfall. Same week they say a drug price dropped from a grand to $149, no context on what the drug is or who's still paying full freight for everything else on the list. When the good news needs this much stagecraft, check what's not in the press release.”
“The court ruling forced refunds, sure, but a refund is still money in people's pockets, that's just accounting — I mean, it's not a defeat if the number at the end is positive, that's not how — okay, it's technically a defeat, but the growth numbers are real, that part's real.”
The receipts
For over 30 years, I stood behind a pharmacy counter and watched hardworking neighbors open their mouths in disbelief when I told them what their prescriptions would cost. I watched them ask if there was a less expensive generic, or if…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.