Signed Tom Tinker

Signed Tom Tinker

In seventeen ninety-one, they laid the excise down

A whiskey tax from marble halls to every frontier town

The farmers turned their grain to drink, their coin was hard to find,

While distant men who wrote the rules left working hands behind

A note beneath the copper still, a name no man could pin:

“Ask who pays the tax,” it said, “and who is spared again.”

They called him Tom the Tinker, a shadow with a pen

And every generation finds his question now and then.

Signed Tom Tinker, written in the smoke,

A tax by any other name can still break working folk

From the barrel to the border, from the furrow to the line

Who pays the bill when power calls its punishment divine

Now tariffs cross the northern line, announced from gilded rooms,

Then settle in the checkout price and warehouse full of gloom.

They call it strength, they call it leverage, call it winning trade,

But families see the grocery bill and farmers see it fade

Canada pulled the American bottles from its shelves

And warehouses of wine now groan with stock that will not sell.

Cheap bottles crowd the bargain racks, three dollars for a name

But every clearance sticker tells a vineyard’s losing game

The vines go unpicked in the sun the harvest cut away

A grower watches acres die because there’s no one left to pay

The value labels take the fall the small producers bleed

While tariffs dressed as policy become a working person’s need

Signed Tom Tinker written in the smoke

A tax by any other name can still break working folk

Kentucky fire in charred oak casks, Tennessee stills run low

When northern shelves refuse the drink, the orders cannot flow

The whiskey leaves the loading dock the markets turn away

And cornfields feel the silence where the distillers used to pay

Forty million bushels counting on those barrels turning round

Kentucky soil and Tennessee fields worked close against the ground

Then soybeans meet another wall, another export door is shut

A farmer takes the double blow while politicians strut

They promise checks to cover losses made by their own decree

Then hand the bill to taxpayers and call it victory

Red-state barns and red-state fields, remember what you chose

A trade war is no shield at all when it strikes the ones who grow

Signed Tom Tinker, hear the people say

You cannot tariff pain away or make a market stay

No representation at the register, no vote upon the fee—

The price is paid by working hands not those who claim to lead

From whiskey stills in ’ninety-one to bottles marked down low,

The old note bears a newer ink wherever hard winds blow:

“If policy makes farmers pay while power calls it grand,

Remember the Tar and Feathers — and remember Tom Tinkers' name: remember Americans stand together and don’t take illegal taxation as a game .

Look back in the history books and remember this name

Tar and feathers and a whole lot of pain

SIGNED TOM TINKER