People, lots of people, lots of people who have a really deep understanding of national and global economics (unlike me), have been warning about this since talk of tariffs became common currency a year ago.

I wouldn't like to comment on HN's political leanings in the round and, obviously, there are a large portion of non-US readers/commenters on the site (including me), but will say this: there are a portion of you who voted for this. Exactly this.

What were you thinking? What was going through your heads? I'm genuinely curious.

EDIT: Wow... well, having asked the question, it looks like I now have a lot of answers and perspectives to read. Thank you all for taking the time to comment.

Also, it's deeply naïve to assume tariffed countries would absorb the cost. Why would they? It's like going into a shop and asking for a discount because you just took out a loan. Why would the shop give you a discount for something you inflicted on yourself? And what makes you think other customers wouldn't ask for the same discount?

Tariffs are a mid-long term strategy to encourage onshoring business, for reasons including military, national security, and political influence on foreign powers.

This is a complicated topic involving the global economy and evolving intercountry landscape. All these slam dunk takes are incomplete to the point of being wrong - and inflammatory.

Suppliers in China are dropping prices to offset the tariff impact - this is what I see in my direct industry and also in many adjacent ones. This is benefitting other countries that don't have Tariffs on Chinese goods since they can buy cheaper as well. I suspect this is a significant factor in the GBP/EUR strengthening in relation to USD. There was a point where there was such a pronounced impact to imported goods that the cost of shipping a container from China to US went from ~$3500 to <$1500 pre/post Tariff.

Large manufacturers (automotive certainly, but also raw materials production and component production) are actually moving facilities to the US, which was one of the intended effects.

US manufacturers are enjoying some price relief as landed costs of chinese-produced goods are increasing. Hard to quantify what this means but the frustrating part is that they are not reducing their prices just enjoying higher margins.

Countries outside the Tariff zone are enjoying more trade - Canada is a very real example of this policy backfiring - they just walked back the Chinese Automotive Tariffs in exchange for relief on agricultural reciprocal tariffs. Mexico is entering into similar agreements with non-US trade partners. Some products are releasing in non-US markets first and at lower costs than they are in the US.

US-sourced chipmaking is accelerating - Intel's new fabs are probably the most prominent example of this (albeit they are slow to pick up volume - I expect this will shift with TSMC rationing production to brands like Apple and Qualcomm).

I think the increase in cost to consumers is painful and that the current Tariff rates are excessive + there is a lot of "cheating" where Chinese suppliers are declaring lower cost of goods on import to reduce the landed cost of Tariffed goods - there doesn't appear to be enough resources to police this policy fully.

All in all an interesting economic experiment and it will certainly take years for any of these realities to have a measurable positive impact domestically.

What if that was the intended result?

I fear that they already decided that issue when they chose not to intervene and now have the excuse of "lol well can't undo it now" ready to go.

Edit: It appears Trump & Co intend to replace SCOTUS if they lose the tariffs ruling ... https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/19/us/politics/trump-tariffs...

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There does seem to be indications that the actual tariffs collected seems far lower than the actual tariffs promised, likely just half of what was promised:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/03/business/economy/trump-ta...

If the importer took on most of the burden that would defeat the purpose of the tariff.

I will contribute $$$.

How did the US become this insane this fast - I'm not even against tariffs but you need to decide which industries to use them on e.g. steel, drones, maybe electric vehicles - blanket tariffs by a mad king are really difficult to fathom. When will congress wake up and will it be too late?

I had to pay like 20% of the cost of the item before DHL would even deliver it.

Unfortunately (for sellers) tariff decrease trade volume so even if only 4% absorbed by a seller they have much bigger losses from sell volume decline.

Economy is not a zero sum game - almost everyone looses from tariffs - consumers no longer can afford the same some things they did buy in the past because tariffs increased prices. Sellers cannot decrease prices because in many cases it will make their business unprofitable but they still loose on the volume.

In Europe, prices show the price INCLUDING sales tax (VAT, typically 20%). What you see is what you pay at the register.

In the US, prices show the price BEFORE sales tax (national average circa 7%). You pay 7% more at the register than what you saw.

I wonder if we could update US pricing so that the tariff was collected at the cash register, just like sales tax is, so that people could see that they were the one paying the tax.

yes, I see the obvious practical difficulties with this. It is a though experiment, nothing more.

As a Canadian, I now avoid American products and retailers as much as possible. This isn't just political (Trump has repeatedly threatened to annex Canada). This is about filthy lucre too.

Anything manufactured in the U.S. with tariffed inputs (e.g. Steel, Aluminum, softwood) is more expensive now. Foreign goods that merely pass through the U.S. on their way to Canada are not supposed to be tariffed, but many U.S. retailers simply don't do the paper work necessary to make that happen, no doubt because the Trump administration has made that paperwork so chaotic and difficult to do.

The upside is that Americans aren't just paying for 95% of these tariffs, they're losing export business from the rest of the world too. On top of this is the additional cost of unpredictability. Is the U.S. about to slap additional tariff's on the EU because of Trump's Greenland ambitions? If you're planning a project in Canada, you'd be wise to avoid any U.S. products that use EU inputs for the foreseeable future too.

Its still a dumb idea since any following administration could reverse the policy, so why invest in local manufacturing?

‘US Americans’ makes it sound as if a distinction is being drawn between Americans inside and outside of the US or something

The claim of this analysis is a significant backpedaling on the narrative they've been wrong about regarding the effects of tariffs. Instead of trying to reposition the goal posts on the effects of tariffs, it would be far more productive to simply acknowledge that the original dire predictions of tariffs did not manifest.

Tariffs are like a military tactic, its not good for the domestic economy, its good for the military.

Without an opinion on the actual claim here (although I'm skeptical of a claim of 96%, given the relatively moderate inflation in the US in 2025), I think this quote by itself (first bullet point of the abstract) should disqualify this as a serious analysis - no academic paper uses this language, only biased think tanks, and the fact that it's a German think tank doesn't change that.

(Most MAGA right know this, don't care, see tariffs as a hammer. But they are hitting all of us)

Chuckles in German.

That is its own kind of burden. We are shooting ourselves in the foot here, but but I think we're getting the other guy's foot to the tune of a bit more than 4%.

It's mutually assured destruction logic. I hate everything about it, but this seems like a mischaracterization of its efficacy.

https://fortune.com/2026/01/18/europe-retaliation-8-trillion...

And yet everyone who voted for the pumpkin idiot don’t believe it. They think 2 plus 2 is 30T enough to pay off the debt. Idiots. The lot of them and anyone here who voted for this. I said it. And I’ll say it again. The man is enacting project 2025 and ruining the country and some of you are laughing giddily while it burns.

I thought what they'd do is push for a national sales tax (which would be regressive) with the promise of repealing the income tax, but when it came to the last part they'd just kind of conveniently forget about that and we'd end up with a huge national sales tax on top of existing income tax.

But this works too.

But here’s the hard truth: the US has needed to raise taxes for decades given its inability to reduce spending.

Hence they massively inflating runaway deficit. If this is the only way Americans will accept tax increases, and they aren’t willing to decrease spending, then this policy will ironically end up being the only way forward to climb out of the financial hole.

First of all, the summary of the article (I did not read the article) clearly states that foreign exporters did not eat the tariffs, instead they held their prices, American consumers paid for the tariffs, and that trade volumes collapsed.

"trade volumes collapsed" - so, Americans did not buy foreign goods that they did not need/want at those prices, or found an alternative (presumably American) product to substitute. American consumer spending increased in 2025 and inflation settled down to a reasonable level. It seems that consumption shifted to domestic products.

That does not appear to be a good outcome, economically. . Second, tariff's are a tax. No sh-t. But so are VAT taxes, which are very high throughout many countries, and no one seems to believe they are the downfall of these countries. You can argue which is "better" or "fairer", but from the consumer point of view, VAT makes everything more expensive and tariffs make only foreign goods more expensive. You can say that VAT forces everyone, foreign and domestic to compete and be more efficient, while tariffs penalize foreign production and rewards domestic production, even if some domestic production is less efficient. But both are taxes, and at least the American consumer can choose whether or not to pay that tax.

While I disagree with tariffs, and especially disagree with how they are being wielded, the economic effect that they have had on Americans in 2025 is to shift away from foreign imports, buy more domestic products, and they have not increased inflation. Neither did the tariffs on Tr-mps first term on China.

If a 20% VAT was instituted, I would think that that would have had a much larger "tax" effect, and would have taken away peoples choice on whether or not to pay that tax. Yet, the VAT would be considered "good".

I think the biggest issue here is the serious negative impact on our relationships with our allies.

“Dear Jonas: Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America. Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a “right of ownership” anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also. I have done more for NATO than any other person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you! President DJT”

Given that, should it be any surprise at all that Trump has been gaslighting America on who pays for his tariffs?

And guess what mechanism he's brought to bear on the countries that do not see things his way when it comes to Greenland?

There's an argument that domestically produced goods would substitute for imported goods leaving the market, but markets are so global and intertwined now that even domestic goods have imported inputs that are also affected by tariffs, and there often are no domestic goods or not enough domestic goods produced to act as a price-competitive substitute, and companies are not going to invest a ton of money into expanding domestic capacity, when tariffs are imposed on the whim of a lunatic and will probably be eventually tossed out by the supreme court or congress.

Go actually read the pdf. Their methodology conflates any and all price increases of foreign goods as being a burden bore upon Americans. No talk of purchasing habits changing towards domestic products. Nope. Oh and does it account for recent price increases across the board related to inflation? Nope. It (I would argue intentionally) does not control for that at all.

Pure propaganda from a foreign think tank to convince you to go back to policies where American exports got taxed, but theirs did not.

I don't mind people being ignorant. We all are at some point. We all learn. But what's really depressing is that people who wear their ignorance and intentional unwillingness to learn like it's a badge of honor.

In the early 2010s I had discussions with people who pushed the idea of the resurgence of anti-intellectualism in the US, which I dismissed at the time. I think about that a lot.

For serious penalty, all those TechBro cronies need to have all assets seized. They are imcompatible with democracy.

Meanwhile, he puts all your tax dollars in his and his friend's pocket...

Our economy remains robust (down jackets moving like mad in Minneapolis) and the number of native-born Americans and legal aliens working is higher than ever. Illegal aliens are either heading for the door or being pushed out the door.

USA increased payroll employment (+584,000 jobs in 2025). Unemployment rate has decreased to 4.4%. We show gains in food services, healthcare, and social assistance, but retail trade has declined (necessarily). The labor market is stabilizing and expanding more slowly than before. Private payrolls have risen an average of 43,000 jobs/month over the past six months. Wage growth eased and average hourly earnings are up 3.8% over the past year.

We're much better off and it is showing: the US economy grew by 4.3% in the 3rd quarter of 2025, while Germany's GDP grew by 0.2% for the year. The German economy is so far down, some websites quit updating website statistics years ago, e.g.:

https://georank.org/economy/germany/united-states

The Kiel Institute may be trying to draw German voters' eyes away from their government's poor economic policies, e.g.,

"Germany’s economy is so bad even sausage factories are closing"

https://www.economist.com/europe/2026/01/15/germanys-economy...

Of course that is another "tabloid" journal of the British strain. Told you they're really, really good at feeding the flames with their journalism.

[Strains of Carly Simon's "Nobody does it better,... makes you feel sad for all the rest..."]

https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=nobody+...

I suppose the issue would be for those on the lower end of the earnings distribution, as they pay little to no federal income tax, but would be hit by a consumption tax. Though I do wonder if we could see wages increase when we don’t have to compete as much with low production costs in China.

Also, this obsession over the importance of accessing US consumers feels ridiculous. If Americans aren't buying then it means more stuff for everyone else.

EU/China etc. sends actual things to US and US sends back dollars that are created out of thin air. It must be a restructuring pain more than anything since US doesn't actually export much goods. With the proliferation of cheap and available solar energy the trade with US can halt, endure the pain of restructuring came out of the other side with using the produced goods domestically instead of sending them to US and replace the US services with domestic ones. Then US can produce their things that they consume and have 350M market for the US companies instead of 7B.

It almost looks like Trump is Pushing for US irrelevance, its vey strange. Why would US be looking to abandone such an advantageous position? The people in the rest of the world are working their asses off, breathing toxic air just to obtain dollars.

Tarrifs are a restrictor plate on a big block V-8 engine.

Take it away and you get more power, more noise, more freedom.

Don’t you want more freedom?