Living with Trump isn’t just tiring; it’s costly—for consumers as well as businesses. Last year, he said that Americans would receive a tariff “dividend” of two thousand dollars each, but this turned out to be an empty pledge. According to Yale’s Budget Lab, his tariffs raised the over-all cost of imported goods by about 1.5 per cent last year, with much bigger impacts on certain items, such as clothes and leather goods. According to the nonpartisan Tax Foundation, the average cost to U.S. households was about a thousand dollars. Since some of these tariffs have been ruled illegal, it seems only right that consumers should get refunds, too. So far, however, Costco and FedEx are among the few big firms that have pledged to pass the government payments on to customers in the form of lower prices or refunds. The rest seem intent on using the cash to rebuild their profit margins, which, in some cases, were crimped when they absorbed some of the tariffs.
A number of class-action lawsuits have been filed against Amazon and other large companies on behalf of their customers. Woldenberg said that any businesses that import items and pay Trump’s tariffs will have to deal with the refund issue. He added that Learning Resources planned to keep its prices stable this year and the next, absorbing the higher costs of energy and other things. “We figure that is the best way to get back to where we were in a year or two,” he said. “I think this is a good-faith effort on our part.”
Woldenberg’s experience taking a lawsuit all the way to the Supreme Court is an exceptional one. But the time, energy, and resources that he and his colleagues at Learning Resources have devoted to dealing with Trump’s tariffs in their day-to-day business are typical of many companies, large and small. Obviously, some U.S. firms, such as steel companies, have benefitted from specific levies that were introduced explicitly to protect them from foreign competition. But, for most of the businesses affected by the blanket tariffs, it’s all shaping up to be a colossal waste of time and effort. And the policy hasn’t even worked on its own terms.
In recent years, even some advocates of free trade have come around to the idea that certain tariffs can be justified on strategic and national-security grounds, especially when working with an avowedly mercantilist country like China. The Biden Administration retained most of the Section 232 tariffs on Chinese goods that Trump introduced in his first term: it even expanded them. But the blanket tariffs that Trump brought in last year were different: they targeted any country that runs a trade surplus with the United States, even ones that are too poor to import much from the U.S. The economic concepts of comparative advantage and gains from trade are lost on Trump, who views any bilateral trade deficit as evidence of the U.S. being “ripped off.” The argument for his blanket tariffs was that reducing the over-all trade deficit would be a good thing in itself, and it would also revive manufacturing employment and transform the government’s finances.
So what is the record? Yale’s Budget Lab reports that the tariffs have raised about two hundred and fifteen billion dollars in revenues. But after the Supreme Court ruling roughly two-thirds of this will have to be repaid, so the general effect on the federal finances will be relatively minor. The trade deficit? Between March and October of last year, it fell sharply, but this was largely a product of international gold shipments and companies racing to beat Trump’s tariffs by placing their import orders before they took effect. For the whole of 2025, the trade deficit in goods hit a record level, and, so far this year, it has remained high. Rather than reducing the total number of imports, the Trump tariffs seem primarily to have diverted the source of them from China to other countries, particularly Vietnam and Mexico—a point that White House economists acknowledged last month in the 2026 Economic Report of the President, which noted a shift toward “more diversified global supply chains.”
Insofar as it goes, that’s a welcome development. However, it doesn’t lessen U.S. dependence on foreign money—trade deficits have to be financed by attracting foreign investment or lending—or create new factory jobs in Michigan and Ohio. When Trump was inaugurated for a second time, there were 12.7 million manufacturing jobs nationwide. Last month, there were 12.6 million. As the Biden Administration introduced generous subsidies for investing in certain technologies, such as semiconductors and electric vehicles, construction spending in manufacturing more than tripled. Since the November, 2024, election, it has fallen by about a fifth. Citing announcements from Apple, Nvidia, and other companies that they intend to build new plants in the U.S., the White House still claims that manufacturing is “roaring back.” So far, at least, there is little sign of this surge in aggregate statistics.
