What the 2026 Iran war and the tariffs cost an American household, told in eleven animated blocks and measured only in the government's own numbers.
Live: trumps-economy-the-bill.pages.dev · about the project · the thesis and every source
The opening block. Every particle is a share of a real daily count from IMF PortWatch satellite data; scroll and the war begins, and the Strait of Hormuz empties while the other five straits hold.
Updated 23 September 2026. Crude to 22 Sep, ship counts to 20 Sep, pump prices to 21 Sep, shop prices, jobs and CPI to August. The page itself always says how far each figure runs.
The page is a scroll-driven data story on a single route. Each block plays once when it comes into view, then holds still; with reduced motion on, every block is drawn at its end state and nothing moves. Every block has a Show the work panel with the series IDs, the dates and the method.
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| 01 · Two dates. 24 February, the tariffs re-imposed. 28 February, the strike. Every red mark on the page traces back to one of them. | 02 · Oil doubled. Every daily WTI close of 2026 on a moving seismograph: $57 in January, $114.58 on 7 April, and back up when the strikes resumed. |
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| 03 · The strait. The real Traffic Separation Scheme on a Natural Earth coastline. One ship on screen for each ship a day: 83 before the war, 3 now, beside the President's "30 a night". | 04 · Your prices. A split-flap board of fourteen prices, January 2025 against the latest month. Pick your state and the fuel and electricity rows re-total. |
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| 05 · Nobody is hiring. One figure per 10,000 jobs: 320,938 a month in 2021-25 against 42,474 since. It also explains why jobless claims are low while hiring is frozen. | 06 · What the war cost. US service members killed, 42 aircraft lost or damaged, $43.6 billion spent, and the interceptor count the Defense Secretary disputes, printed beside the dispute. |
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| 07 · What it buys. The lost aircraft priced in PlayStations, gallons of diesel, years of tuition and hot dogs, then the whole war at the same scale. | 08 · The world backs away. 13,142 gold bars (164 tonnes, about 39 a day) taken out of the New York Fed in eleven months, who moved theirs and why, and the Fed's own rebuttal at full size. |
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| 09 · Your bill. The share card, rendered from the real block, so the card and the page can never disagree. | 10 · Check our work. What cuts against this page, how fresh each figure is, and what the numbers can and cannot say. |
Most comparisons between administrations mostly measure who was unlucky: presidents inherit recessions, and pandemics arrive. This project isolates policy two ways.
Two dates. The page traces costs to two decisions with dates on them: the tariffs re-imposed on 24 February 2026 and the strike on Iran on 28 February. War effects and tariff effects are never added together.
Other rich countries as the control group. The 2021-22 surge was global, so the question that isolates domestic policy is not "how much inflation?" but "how much more than countries facing the same shock?"
| Administration | US inflation over the euro area, points a year |
|---|---|
| Clinton | +0.85 |
| Bush | +0.45 |
| Obama | +0.23 |
| Trump I | +0.71 |
| Biden | +0.26 |
| Trump II (in progress) | +0.62 |
That gap is narrowing, and the project says so. In August 2026 US inflation was 3.40% against 3.23% in the euro area, a gap of 0.17 points, down from 0.43 in July, because the same oil shock is now lifting Europe too. That strengthens the reading of a global energy shock and weakens any claim of an America-only excess.
Zero fabrication. Every number comes from a government series or from a curated
entry in backend/data/context_figures.json with
a source, a URL, a tier and a date. Missing data says so.
No moving figure is typed. Any sentence that states a verdict about a number the next release can change is built from the data at render time: whether diesel is a record, "the best month in five", the Pentagon's latest cost, each "as of" date. This rule exists because the page once said "not a record" for two refreshes after EIA's weekly diesel passed its 2022 peak.
What cuts against the page is shown at full size. Stocks are up, mortgages are cheaper than at the handover, almost nobody is being laid off, core CPI runs below the headline (printed beside the Fed raising rates because "inflation remains elevated"), customs receipts turned positive again in August. A row drops out only when it stops being true.
Official claims are drawn next to the measurement and labelled as claims. "Thirty ships a night" sits beside the satellite count. Disputed estimates carry the denial.
Gaps render as gaps. October 2025 CPI was never collected; every twelve-month change is matched by calendar month, so the hole stays a hole.
Written up in docs/THESIS.md: the Inflation Reduction Act lowering
inflation (CBO: "negligible"), US inflation falling faster than any G7 country (6th of
8), statistics being manipulated (no evidence), "everyone is pulling their gold out"
(not all, and Germany has moved none), and any point estimate for the tariff share.
backend/ Python. Pulls the public data and freezes it into one snapshot.
services/ FRED, EIA, Treasury Fiscal Data, IMF PortWatch, the attribution maths
data/ context_figures.json and war_milestones.json, curated and tiered
scripts/
build_snapshot.py every source -> frontend/public/data-snapshot.json
validate_snapshot.py the gate: missing, errored or stale blocks stop the deploy
build_v5_data.py the snapshot -> the four files V5 reads; fails if a block cannot refresh
record_refresh.py appends the headline figures to docs/refresh-history.csv
refresh.ps1 the whole refresh, test, build and deploy, in one command
frontend/ React 19 + Vite. Static: no server at runtime.
src/v5/TheBill.jsx the page: a port of the Claude Design prototype, not a rewrite
scripts/template-to-jsx.py converts the prototype's template to JSX mechanically
scripts/build-og.mjs renders the share card from the real block 09
scripts/shoot-v5.mjs these screenshots and clips
The page is a port of a design prototype
(docs/design-handoff/2026-09-08-the-bill).
Markup changes go into the prototype and are converted mechanically, so copy and styling
never drift by hand.
Refresh is on demand, after something that moves the numbers: a strike, a ceasefire, a jobs report, a tariff ruling. On Windows:
.\backend\scripts\refresh.ps1 # rebuild, gate, test, build, deploy V5 and V4, commit
.\backend\scripts\refresh.ps1 -Dry # everything except deploy and commitThe same sequence runs from GitHub Actions (refresh-and-deploy, run manually). It needs
four repository secrets: FRED_API_KEY, EIA_API_KEY, CLOUDFLARE_API_TOKEN and
CLOUDFLARE_ACCOUNT_ID. Every refresh appends a row to
docs/refresh-history.csv, the only place the history of
the headline figures is kept.
Bureau of Labor Statistics · Bureau of Economic Analysis · Federal Reserve (FRED, Table
3.13, FEDS Notes, FOMC) · Energy Information Administration · Treasury (Debt to the
Penny, Monthly Treasury Statement) · IMF PortWatch · Eurostat · IEA · Congressional
Research Service · CBO, plus reported figures (Roll Call, Lloyd's List Intelligence,
Axios, CNBC and others) marked Tier 2 in context_figures.json.
- PortWatch counts are a floor, not a census. Ships with their transponders off are not counted; Lloyd's List, which verifies dark transits, counts more.
- Brent spot and Brent futures are different instruments. In September futures fell below $100 while EIA's spot price stayed above $114. The page draws WTI spot only.
- FRED daily closes lag by about a week, because EIA posts spot prices weekly.
- Ship positions are a model; the counts are not.
- US CPI and euro-area HICP are built differently. Owners' equivalent rent is about a quarter of the US basket and none of the euro-area one.
The previous design, the V4 "ledger", is kept at
trumps-economy-ledger-v4.pages.dev and at
?view=ledger on the live site.
Code MIT. The underlying data is US and EU government statistics, public domain or freely redistributable under each agency's terms.