White House doubles price tag on its own China tariff deal in four days, itemizes none of it.

…(cont) This is not the administration's first tariff number that failed to reconcile with the one before it. On Aug. 22, a Saturday, the administration put a 50 percent tariff on roughly $20 billion of Canadian goods. It took until the following Tuesday, three days later, for Prime Minister Mark Carney's government to announce its own $20 billion — C$27.6 billion — in retaliatory tariffs, calling the U.S. demands an intrusion on Canadian sovereignty. Twenty billion answered by twenty billion, three days apart, at least balances on paper. Thirty billion answered by sixty billion, four days apart, does not.

A filing office reconciles numbers by asking where the difference lives — in an invoice, a category, a line item. Here the difference lives nowhere printed. The 77 categories of children's toys and fireworks did not double in four days. The 1,619 categories of American exports to China did not double in four days. What doubled is the headline number attached to the deal, and headline numbers do not require an itemization to be repeated by the wire services, which is likely why this one wasn't given one.