Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal.
Editor:
Your lead on-line headline this morning reads “U.S. Imposes 50% Tariffs on Some Canadian Goods After Last-Ditch Talks Fail” (August 22).
This wording is inaccurate and misleading.
Your headline should instead read “U.S. Imposes 50% Tariffs on Americans’ Purchases of Some Canadian Goods After Last-Ditch Talks Fail.”
Being inanimate, goods pay no tariffs. Tariffs are paid by people. And research shows that the people who pay Trump’s tariffs are overwhelmingly Americans. In a new paper, Gita Gopinath and Brett Neiman find that about 92 percent of the 2025 tariffs were passed through into U.S. import prices, implying that U.S. importers bore roughly 92 percent of the tariff incidence and foreign exporters about 8 percent.”*
Describing U.S. tariffs as being imposed on “goods” hides us Americans from the reality that these levies fall heavily on us.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030* Gita Gopinath and Brett Neiman, “The Incidence of Tariffs: Rates and Reality,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 40, Summer 2026, pp. 123-144.
…..
Even more accurate would be a headline that reads: “Trump Imposes 50% Tariffs on Americans’ Purchases of Some Canadian Goods After Last-Ditch Talks Fail.” (The “U.S.” isn’t a sentient, acting creature.) But one battle at a time.
