No matter how often President Trump insists his tariffs are taxing foreigners to enrich the U.S., economic studies keep showing that Americans actually pay the bill. On Thursday it was the New York Federal Reserve’s turn. In an analysis on the bank’s website, four researchers write that last year “nearly 90 percent of the tariffs’ economic burden fell on U.S. firms and consumers.”
They reach that conclusion by examining import data, to see whether foreign suppliers cut their prices in response to Mr. Trump’s added tariff costs. Over the first eight months of 2025, “94 percent of the tariff incidence was borne by the U.S.,” the analysis says, meaning “a 10 percent tariff caused only a 0.6 percentage point decline in foreign export prices.”
This outcome drifted as the year wore on, but only slightly: The figures for November suggest the tariffs had “an 86 percent pass-through to U.S. import prices,” the researchers say. “Our results show that the bulk of the tariff incidence continues to fall on U.S. firms and consumers. These findings are consistent with two other studies that report high pass-through of tariffs to U.S. import prices.”
This is a problem for both shoppers and Republicans, including Mr. Trump. Even if tariffs aren’t generally inflationary, they’re taxes that can push up prices on specific imported items, as well as on the products of the protected domestic competitors. Recent inflation reports, including the one that came out Friday, show some notable jumps, such as for furniture and bedding, which in January was up 4%, year over year.
Adam Miller tweets: (HT Scott Lincicome)
Part of my job is approving tariff invoices billed to the small manufacturing firm where I work. These tariffs are passed on to our customers (industrial utilities like electric power generation and water treatment facilities), who undoubtedly pass them on to consumers.
The Russian government’s decision this week to ban WhatsApp and throttle Telegram is not a surprise for an authoritarian regime. Yet it also serves as a cautionary tale for westerners clamoring to regulate social media companies.
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The very concept of “disinformation” implies the state gets to decide who may speak, to whom and on what terms. The machinery of control is the same, and more often than not, it’s used to protect a regime. This is the beginning of a road that ends where Russia now is.
C. Jarrett Dieterle decries Mayor Mamdani’s war on delivery apps. Here’s his conclusion:
Mamdani’s war on gig is getting a lot of press. But beyond the flashy headlines, it’s clear that both workers and consumers are likely to suffer.
Jeffrey Miron shares new research that finds that minimum-wage legislation inflicts more harm on black workers than it does on white workers. [DBx: As my late, great colleague Walter Williams often said: If the Imperial Wizard of the KKK were to make a list of that evil organization’s most-preferred government policies, minimum-wage legislation would be at or near the top. It’s sad that so many economically clueless progressives – many of whom, ironically, boast PhDs in economics – allow their addiction to social-desirability bias to blind them to the economic realities of government legislation that prices many low-skilled workers out of jobs in the formal economy, or that otherwise reduces the attractiveness of these workers’ employment options. These progressives would not argue that, say, legislated minimum prices for automobiles would improve the economic prospects of sellers of used cars. Yet they make an economically identical argument in favor of legislated minimum prices for human labor.]
Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson recently addressed a letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook to suggest that the Apple News product may be in violation of the FTC Act.
Apple’s crime?
Its Apple News product, which curates news from a variety of sources, has “systematically promoted articles from left-wing news outlets and suppressed news articles from more conservative publications,” including recently not featuring “a single article from any American conservative-leaning news sources.”
The FTC’s allegations of bias, even if true, are ultimately irrelevant. The FTC has no authority to regulate the speech that Apple News chooses to curate. This is core First Amendment territory that even the FTC is forced to acknowledge. Ferguson writes that the “First Amendment protects the speech of Big Tech Firms” and that the “FTC is not the speech police; we do not have the authority to require Apple or any other firm to take affirmative positions on any political issue, nor to curate new articles based on the perceived ideological or political viewpoint of the article or publication.”
If Chair Ferguson stopped there, perhaps we could appreciate that the FTC recognized its limits and its respect for the First Amendment’s protections for platforms to exercise editorial control over the speech they collate and organize.
But Chair Ferguson did not stop there. Instead, the Chair attempts an end run around the First Amendment by accusing Apple News’ curation practices of violating the FTC Act for being an unfair or deceptive trade practice. But this attack is predicated on a highly flawed theory that somehow the FTC has the ability to determine when the curation and moderation decisions of platforms are “unfair or deceptive.”
