A brief and elementary economics lesson courtesy of The Atlantic:
The Price America Will Pay for Trump’s Tariffs
The
most popular beer in America is Modelo Especial, brewed in Mexico. Impose a 25 percent tariff on Modelo and sales will slide. So, too, will
exports of the American barley that goes into Mexican beer. Mexico
buys three-quarters of U.S. barley exports, almost all for brewing.
Trump surrogates may promise you that by driving Mexican beer off of grocery shelves, Trump’s tariffs will increase sales of U.S. barley to U.S. brewers. That promise may even be substantially true. But that offer has fine print that barley growers will notice.
Barley growers don’t care only about how much barley they sell. They care about the price at which they sell it.
A tariff raises the price of both every imported good and every good that competes with imports.
If the price of Modelo is pushed up, the price of American-brewed beer will rise as well. American beermakers are not operating a charity. The tariff on Modelo allows them to both increase their market share at Modelo’s expense and raise their prices enough to increase their margins at the consumers’ expense.
But American consumers do not have infinite amounts of money. If they are paying more for beer, they have to make savings elsewhere. The result—and economists will prove this to you all day with facts and figures—is that prices in exporting sectors such as barley, and agriculture generally, will
decline in proportion as prices in the importing sectors rise.
Trump tariffs will be paid in the form of higher prices for imports
and their substitutes, and lower profits and wages for everyone who works in export industries.