Who Pays for Tariffs? You Do.

Tariffs are taxes. When tariffs go up, prices go up as businesses pass on the increases to you. Trump’s trade taxes have cost the American consumer $69 billion thus far.

Businesses have captured most of that, but as any Economics 101 student knows, there is a deadweight loss to the economy. This is why 99.99999% of economists oppose tariffs.

That deadweight loss to the US economy has been about $7 billion.

U.S. Consumers Hit Hardest by Trade Tariffs, Studies Find




Better to pay now, and save our manufacturing base, then pay later when we are a subjugated country.

Thank you,Westwall.......and you are "dead on"...
 
Tariffs are taxes...
That's absolutely true! Tax rate hikes both wreck the economy and lower revenue. The goal of public policy must be for lowering tax rates --including tariffs levied by both our government and tariffs levied by other governments on our exports.
...When tariffs go up, prices go up...
That's not true in this case. Rhetoric aside, this is what prices are actually doing--
190509inflatn.png

--in fact inflation's been so boring that the Fed's now having to talk about easing up on future rate hikes.

If you want we can also look at specific price trends of tariffed commodities (steel, copper, etc.) and we'll see no increase there as well. The reason is that Trump's tariffs are targeting items for which competitive alternate sources exist --so these tariffs end up being paid by foreigners.

We need to keep in mind that the goal here is not protection, it's not sticking it to a bunch of rice eaters, it's a negotiating ploy to get foreign governments to lower the foreign tariffs that we've been paying.

The goal of this trade conflict is lower taxes.
 

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