Last week, when U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was asked why President Donald Trump’s tariffs are “not taxes on imported goods,” he said something so absurd, it would be hilarious if he weren’t trying to be serious.

“That’s easy,” Bessent said. “Because tariffs are a surcharge, not a tax. They could be paid by the exporter; they could be paid by the country.”

Nonsense. Tariffs are, by literal definition, taxes on imported goods. That’s how every economics textbook has always defined them, and it’s how the Founders used them — as taxes to fund the early federal government.

Whether a tariff shows up as a “duty” at a port or gets slapped on a customs form is irrelevant. Calling a tax a “surcharge” doesn’t make it any less of a tax — it makes the salesman sound slick.

I mean, let’s be serious: When we buy a dozen eggs and pay sales tax at checkout, is it suddenly not a tax just because it appears as a surcharge on the receipt? Please.

Bessent knows tariffs are paid here at home. He admitted as much on MSNBC in August.

When asked whether “the tariff is paid in this country by the importer,” he tried to bob and weave: “Well, the Brazilian exporter could lower their price to keep market share…”

“Right, they could eat part of the cost,” host Eugene Robinson cut in.

Cornered, Bessent finally conceded: “(T)he check is written by the importer at the docks.”

Not “by the exporter.” Not “by the country.” By the importer — as in, American companies.

Yet last week, he doubled down with this zinger: “When you go and get your driver’s license, you pay a fee. Is that a tax?”

Last I checked, a driver’s license fee is the cost of the driver’s license — nothing more. As Cato Institute’s Scott Lincicome reacted on X: “Yes, when Americans pay tariffs to the government, they’re just paying a fee for the service of, umm, letting them buy stuff. Sure.”

Was Bessent’s analogy supposed to be clever? Or was he just channeling his inner-Colorado Democrat?

Here in the Centennial State, we’re used to politicians like Gov. Jared Polis playing TABOR word games — slapping the “fee” label on a tax to dodge the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, which requires voter approval for all tax increases.

In 2021, Democrats passed Senate Bill 260. Even though voters had rejected a transportation tax hike in 2018, lawmakers simply repackaged the same taxes as “fees” — added to every Uber ride, Amazon package, UPS shipment and DoorDash delivery, plus a $5.23-a-day rental car fee.

They even created a new gas “fee,” identical to the gas tax we already pay. The only difference? By calling it a “fee,” they circumvented Colorado voters. We didn’t get our vote.

“Historically, transportation-related fees have been used to upgrade and maintain the infrastructure,” the Common Sense Institute’s Ben Stein told me in March. “But the legislature and the governor have decided, for the most part, that’s not how the money will get spent.”

Instead, SB260 funneled transportation “fees” to support Polis’s environmental mitigation-focused Transportation Vision 2025 — electric vehicle charging stations, bike lanes and subsidies — not roads, bridges and highways.

Even Colorado’s Supreme Court has ruled a fee is only constitutional if the legislature at least pretends it pays for the service used by those who pay it. Gasoline isn’t just used for roads. Farmers need it for tractors, landscapers for mowers, dads for snowblowers, and so on. None of those things will touch I-25, yet they’re all taxed under this so-called “fee.”

If it drives like a gas tax and saps your wallet like a gas tax, it’s a gas tax. Hopefully, next year’s ballot will include a statewide measure proposed to mandate transportation dollars fund transportation — roads, bridges, highways — not pet climate projects cloaked in “fees.”

Which brings us back to Bessent. What he’s peddling is the same Orwellian doublespeak Colorado politicians use — language that “obscures, disguises, distorts, or reverses the meaning of words.”

Call a tax a “fee,” call it “surcharge,” call it anything but what it is — anything to brush off economic “wrongthink.”

As Politico reported, Trump’s new duties — marketed as a tool to boost American manufacturing — are “driving up the cost of imported parts that U.S. factories depend on,” particularly in industries “where parts cross borders multiple times before a product is finished.” Meanwhile, domestic producers aren’t getting more competitive — they’re simply raising prices to match newly tariffed foreign competitors, particularly in steel and aluminum.

But Bessent wants you to doubt your lying eyes and drink the doublespeak Kool-Aid. “I’m giving you an answer that maybe you don’t like,” he belittled the questioner.

“Don’t like?” Try an answer that’s laughably untrue. It’s one thing to spin the economic impacts of tariffs; it’s another to pretend you can redefine what they actually are. Ditto for TABOR-dodging “fees.”

Because let’s be real: If you have to change the words to sell the policy, maybe the product isn’t that great after all.

Jimmy Sengenberger is an investigative journalist, public speaker, and longtime local talk-radio host. Reach Jimmy online at Jimmysengenberger.com or on X (formerly Twitter) @SengCenter.