Tariffs are taxes you pay, and both Trump and Harris want you to pay up

Plus: yearners, 'the village nobody wants,' and more

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A take I haven’t written elsewhere

Tariffs are taxes you pay, and both Trump and Harris want you to pay up

(via)

A few days ago, I was wasting some time on Reddit and ran across a brief clip of a podcast interview about tariffs. The guest is a commentator named

David Pakman

—with whom I wasn’t previously familiar, but who is apparently on Substack—and as the clip begins he’s marveling that former President Donald Trump “still doesn’t know how tariffs work” and seemingly “still thinks China pays the tariffs.”

The podcaster, someone named Sean Kelly of the Digital Social Hour podcast (also new to me), is clearly surprised. “Wait, so China’s not paying tariffs right now?” he asks, candidly admitting he’s “genuinely confused” as Pakman begins to explain who actually pays these tariffs: Americans. Tariffs are taxes on American consumers.

You can watch Pakman’s quick explanation. Or you could read a slightly longer and more nuanced explanation from

Scott Lincicome

in a conversation at The Atlantic, There, interviewer Jerusalem Demsas rightly begins by noting that though Vice President Kamala Harris has critiqued Trump’s tariff policy, the Biden administration kept and even expanded Trump-imposed tariffs, to shockingly few objections. Trump and Harris do differ on this issue, but not nearly enough.

Anyway, the gist is that tariffs are taxes, and you are typically the taxpayer, and both major party candidates plan to continue making you pay.

As Lincicome grants, it occasionally happens that a foreign company, from China or wherever, will decide that access to the American market is worth absorbing the cost of these taxes. But far more often, the cost is simply passed along to the end consumer. If there’s a 25 percent tariff on, say, the one baby formula your baby can tolerate, the formula makers don’t take a 25 percent cut. The price of the formula goes up 25 percent, and you pay the difference so your baby can eat.

This is all newly relevant because Trump is talking up these taxes again, suggesting he’d egregiously expand tariffs if re-elected.