“Approximately 100 percent” of the cost of tariffs from Donald Trump’s trade war with China is being paid by U.S. consumers and businesses, despite Trump’s repeated insistence that the U.S. is “taxing the hell out of China.” That verdict comes from a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper written by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Columbia University, and Princeton University.
”U.S. tariffs continue to be almost entirely borne by U.S. firms and consumers,” according to the paper’s authors. On top of that, “We’re just not seeing foreigners bearing the cost, which to me is very surprising,” Columbia’s David Weinstein told The New York Times, and “The steel industry isn’t getting that much protection.”
Other research has yielded similar results. And really, when you consider Trump’s relationship to the truth, his claim that the U.S. is “taxing the hell out of China” is a virtual guarantee that the opposite is true.