What Trump’s tariffs mean for the price of your shirts

On Saturday, President Donald Trump is expected to announce new tariffs on three of our biggest trading partners: 25% on all imports from Canada and Mexico and 10% on China. The exact timeline for implementation is up in the air. But if — or when — they go into effect, what will that mean for you?

Given the amount of misinformation flying around, any article about tariffs should start with the basic facts of the case. Only then can we talk about what the Trump administration might be about to do in this space, perhaps as soon as this weekend, along with the economic and political implications.

The first person to pay the tax is not necessarily the last

Tariffs are a tax on imports (and if there’s any doubt whether tariffs are really taxes, note that Trump wants to change the nameof these import-tax collectors to the “External Revenue Service”). That tax is paid by the company importing the good when that good enters the country. So, when an American retailer imports shirts from China, under Trump’s tariffs that company pays a tax that could be as high as 35% when that container of shirts hits the U.S. port. The tariff is collected by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents at over 300 ports of entry across the land.

What happens next is a matter of empirical economics. A fundamental concept in taxation — and tariffs, again, are a tax — is that the first person to pay the tax is not necessarily the last.

Let’s start by thinking through whocouldultimately pay the tax. That would be a) the importing company, b) the exporting company, c) the consumer who ultimately buys the shirt, which, due to the tariff, is now more expensive (a fourth channel can occur through exchange rates, wherein a stronger dollar can offset part of the tax, but this effect tends to be small).

So, who eats the tariff: the importer, the exporter, or…you (the consumer)? I’m sorry to report that the research suggests it’s you. Most of the tariff gets passed through into higher consumer prices. Perhaps the clearest example of this was when Trump imposed one of his first tariffs back in 2018 on imported washing machines. The price of both imported and domestic washing machines subsequently increased, by about $86 per unit according to one estimate. Even the price of dryers, which weren’t tariffed but are often sold with washers, also rose!

Trump claims that the exporter pays the tariff, by lowering the price they charge to the importer. But a moment’s thought shows this argument to be both empirically unfounded and, well, weird. The whole point of Trump’s tariffs is to rebuild domestic manufacturing by making imports more expensive. But if the exporter eats the cost, then the U.S. price doesn’t change, and MAGA’s mission is decidedlynotaccomplished!

At this point, you must be thinking, ‘Why would any country ever impose a tariff?’

How much might consumers get dinged by these tariffs? That depends on details that are still dribbling out (e.g., will Canadian oil exports be exempted?). A widely cited studyfrom the Peterson Institute predicts that Trump’s most sweeping plans would cost households an average of $2,600. My own estimate is that 25% tariffs on all imports out of Canada and Mexico and 10% on China would cost the average household $1,500-$2,000.

There’s yet another reason why tariffs won’t help American producers: about 45% of what we import are inputs, called “intermediate goods,” that go into American products. In Trump’s first term, for example, his administration introduced a tariff on imported aluminum, purportedly to protect U.S. aluminum producers. But the biggest U.S. producer of aluminum, Alcoa, which one might expect would be excited about the new policy, asked for (and received) an exemption from the tariff! It turns out that they import inputs from Canada.

The last reason Trumpian tariffs don’t work is because countries retaliate, raising their own tariff on their imports from the U.S. That’s one reason tariffs tend not to have much impact on the trade balance. They reduce both importsandexports.

At this point, you must be thinking, “why would any country ever impose a tariff?” In fact, narrowly targeted tariffs can be a fast and effective tool to block unfair trade in a particular product, especially when a trading partner is “dumping” a product (i.e., selling below cost to grab market share). We’ve successfully used these sorts of tariffs on everything from chicken parts to tires.

So, if I and every other economist, and now you, know all of this, what the heck is Trump and his team thinking?

That’s a trick question—who knows what these folks are thinking? But let’s just say, for the point of argument, that especially since Trump ran on lowering prices, making things more expensive isn’t really his top goal. And even if he doesn’t know or believe the price effects documented above, his economists do.

I strongly suspect that what’s probably going on here has a lot more to do with politics than economics.

One conclusion is that this is all theatre: threats to extract other goals from trading partners. We saw a microcosm of this last weekend in a dustup with Colombia. But in the cases of Canada and Mexico, this explanation is confusing, because it’s not clear what he’d wants from them. Yes, Trump claims he wants them to stop immigrant and fentanyl flows, but both countries have already successfully intervened to reduce these flows.

I strongly suspect that what’s probably going on here has a lot more to do with politics than economics. The president has an extremely acute radar for policies that resonate with his voters and he believes tariffs are one of those policies. He may be right: one studyof the trade war between U.S. and China during Trump’s first term concluded that people “more exposed to import tariffs became less likely to identify as Democrats, more likely to vote to reelect Donald Trump in 2020, and more likely to elect Republicans to Congress.”

On the other hand, the president may be underestimating the extent to which people have had more than enough of inflation. A new Quinnipiac pollfinds that more voters (48%) believe tariffs will hurt the economy, than the 42% that think they’ll help.

As is characteristic of this moment, we’re left with a lot of uncertainty about a presidential fixation that even he may know is a bad idea right now. We’ll soon know whether he’s willing to hit Americans with a painful tax increase, whether this is all just transactional Trumpian noise, or some combination of both.

Jared Bernstein

Jared Bernstein was chair of President Joe Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers.