“There are no solutions, there are only tradeoffs,” says the venerable Thomas Sowell, but “you try to get the best tradeoffs you can get, and that’s all you can hope for.”  

Reasonably understood, Trump’s tariff agenda has always represented a tradeoff for Americans. 

Despite an awful lot of misunderstanding of how tariffs function in both theory and practice that has proliferated in recent months, tariffs are not a solution that will magically increase wages for American workers or reshore American manufacturing without considerable costs, and most certainly, the tariffs were never going to be paid by the nations who hope to find buyers of their product in America.

Tariffs are indeed taxes upon the American people, despite some recent and confusing efforts to pretend that they are not. 

As the Founders knew well, tariffs are a form of government revenue that is borne by taxpayers.  When more money is taken by the government, there is a cost that is paid by someone.

It seems silly to even have to say it, but when a foreign product reaches an American port, there is no American tax collector demanding payment from China or wherever.  The cost of the tariff is paid by the American manufacturer or distributor who purchased the product from overseas.  The government extracts that revenue from the purchaser of the imported good, not from the seller.

The additional cost that is incurred by the manufacturer or distributor does not disappear.  It appears as an additional cost in manufacturing and distribution of the product reaching consumers.  The natural response to this, for any individual or corporation, is to pass these additional costs onward to consumers of the product.  That is why tariffs are considered consumption taxes, much like a sales tax or an excise........

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