Fact check: Trump and Vance keep falsely describing how tariffs work
Republican Presidential candidate, former US president, Donald Trump, left, poses for photos with Republican Vice Presidential candidate, U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance.
Former President Donald Trump and Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance continue to falsely describe how one of their major policy proposals, across-the-board tariffs, would work.
Trump has falsely, and repeatedly, claimed that China – not US importers – pay the tariff.
At a rally in Arizona in mid-August, he claimed that Vice President Kamala Harris, his Democratic opponent, is lying when she refers to his tariff plan as a “Trump tax.”
“She is a liar. She makes up crap … I am going to put tariffs on other countries coming into our country, and that has nothing to do with taxes to us. That is a tax on another country,” Trump said.
In September, he repeated the claim during an interview with Fox News: “It’s not a tax on the middle class. It’s a tax on another country.”
And he said again during a rally in Wisconsin Saturday that “it’s not going to be a cost to you, it’s going to be a cost to another country.”
Vance said in late August that as a result of tariffs Trump imposed during his presidency, “prices went down for American citizens.”
“They went up for the Chinese but they went down for our people,” Vance added.
But that’s not true.
Facts First: Trump and Vance’s claims about how tariffs work are false. A tariff is a tax that is paid by US businesses – not other countries – when a foreign-made good arrives at the American border. One of the intended goals of a tariff is to raise prices on foreign-made goods, and study after study show that the duties do drive up costs for Americans.
Tariffs are a tax
Here’s how tariffs work: When the US puts a tariff on an imported good, the cost of the tariff usually comes directly out of the bank account of an American buyer.
“It’s fair to call a tariff a tax because that’s exactly what it is,” said Erica York, a senior economist at the right-leaning Tax Foundation.
“There’s no way around it. It is a tax on people who buy things from foreign businesses,” she added.
Trump has said that if elected, he would impose tariffs of up to 20% on every foreign import coming into the US, as well as another tariff upward of 60% on all Chinese imports. He also said he would impose a “100% tariff” on countries that shift away from using the US dollar.
These duties would add to the tariffs he put on foreign steel and aluminum, washing machines, and many Chinese-made goods including baseball hats, luggage, bicycles, TVs and sneakers. President Joe Biden has left many of the Trump-era tariffs in place.
It’s possible that a foreign company chooses to pay the tariff or to lower its prices to stay competitive with US-made goods that aren’t impacted by the duty.
But study after study, including one from the federal government’s bipartisan US International Trade Commission, have found that Americans have borne almost the entire cost of Trump’s tariffs on Chinese products.
To date, Americans have paid more than $242 billion to the US Treasury for tariffs that Trump imposed on imported solar panels, steel and aluminum, and Chinese-made goods, according to US Customs and Border Protection.
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