I collect tariffs for the United States. My title is Liquidation Specialist, which sounds like a threat and is, in fact, a desk job. This spring the job quietly doubled: I refund tariffs now too, which is the same job run backward. Same tariffs, same companies, same chair, same finger. For about a year I helped charge the country's imports $166 billion. Then the Supreme Court ruled we were never allowed to charge a cent of it, so now I am giving all $166 billion back, and I did not have to learn one new thing to do it. I press the key. The key runs backward. I work at a port. When a shipment arrives, a machine and I decide what the country charges it to come in. Last year that number was a tariff. This year, retroactively, it is nothing. Same shipment. Same machine. Same desk. They called it Liberation Day. I remember it as a Tuesday with unusual volume. Here is the shape of it. That $166 billion came from 330,000 companies, across 53 million shipments. I did not take it cruelly. I took it the way a bathroom scale takes your weight, without opinion and slightly wrong. Then in February, 6 of the 9 Justices ruled that a tariff is a tax, and a tax is Congress's to invent, and the emergency law we had used to invent this one was not, on a close read, a law about tariffs at all. The 6 did not line up the way anyone had a chart for, which was the single most surprising thing that happened all year. 16 months of collecting. One footnote's worth of Latin. Give it all back. So we are giving it back. About $100 billion has gone out the door so far, with interest, because we are a scrupulous country that honors its debts, including the ones a court has to sit us down and explain are debts. We pay 6%, compounded daily, which runs to roughly $22 million a day. Hold that the way I hold it every morning: the government of the United States is paying $22 million a day to apologize with money, and the apology is the part of my job that passes audit. There is an accounting word for money you hold that isn't yours, at a comfortable rate, for a year, against the owner's wishes. The word is loan. So 330,000 companies lent the United States $166 billion, involuntarily, and are being repaid at 6%, and somewhere in the building I am the loan officer. My qualifications for the largest forced-lending program in the country's history are a lanyard and a strong opinion about the office coffee. Now the part people ask about, on the one day a year that someone asks. The refund goes to the importer of record, the company whose name is on the customs paperwork. It does not go to you. You met this tariff twice. Once at the port, paid by a company you have never heard of. Once at the register, folded into a price that never said its name. The company files a form and gets its money and its 6%. You get to keep the receipt. I have searched my entire system for the key that refunds a shopper, and I can report that it is not there, that no one has requested it, and that the drop-down menu does not go that low. And I refund the tariff. Only the tariff. I do not refund the lawyer. I do not refund the plane ticket a company bought to fly to Vietnam and find a cheaper factory, and I do not refund the factory, which is still in Vietnam and does not want to come home. I do not refund the 8 months your operations lead spent renegotiating a contract that is now, technically, unnecessary. The tariff is the one number in this whole affair allowed to run backward. Everything it knocked over stays down. People keep telling me the refund is the machine saying sorry. The machine does not say sorry. It performs the exact motion it performed before, at the exact speed, with the exact absence of feeling, and it files one direction under Policy and the other under Justice, and it could not tell you, at knifepoint, which was which. It knows one thing. I pressed the key. The scale took the weight. The scale gave the weight back. I pressed it both times.