As Americans prepare to file their taxes, they should know they’ve already been paying a new one all year — import taxes, better known as tariffs. Despite political rhetoric to the contrary, that’s exactly what tariffs are: a tax on consumption, and a regressive one at that.

The Tax Foundation estimates that tariffs amount to an average tax increase of $1,000 per U.S. household in 2025, hitting lower-income families hardest, since they spend a larger share of their earnings on imported goods such as food, clothing, and gasoline.

Tariffs don’t reduce the trade deficit, help pay down the national debt, or create domestic manufacturing jobs. They raise the cost of imported goods, passing those costs directly to consumers, while also making American products less competitive abroad. Since over half of all imports are intermediate goods, used as inputs by American firms, tariffs also raise the cost of domestic production. This helps explain why we lost 70,000 manufacturing jobs last year, according to the Federal Reserve. The result is a double whammy: the things we want to import become more expensive, and the goods we produce are harder to sell.

VANCE AND REPUBLICANS EYEING 2028 RUN IN A TOUGH SPOT ON TARIFFS

The United States actually has a long history with tariffs, well before President Donald........

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