From the WaPo (Trump’s washing-machine tariffs cost U.S. consumers $815,000 for every job created):
President Trump has repeatedly sought to portray his tariffs on Chinese goods as a major windfall for the U.S. treasury that has extracted “billions of dollars” from China. But the reality is that tariffs are typically absorbed by consumers in the form of higher prices.
And now a new study shows just how big that markup can be.
When economists at the University of Chicago and the Federal Reserve studied the 2018 duty on washing machines, they found the expected rise in retail prices from foreign manufacturers such as Samsung and LG. Surprisingly, though, these brands also increased dryer prices. Then domestic manufacturers followed suit, simply because they could.
All told, the research shows, U.S. consumers are spending an additional $1.5 billion a year on washers and dryers as a result of the tariffs. That’s an extra $86 for each washing machine and $92 for each dryer, the authors estimate.
And less than 10 percent of that goes to the U.S. treasury — about $82.2 million — the study showed.
The authors ran their analysis using weekly price data on appliances from the market research firm Gap Intelligence. If the tariffs cost $82 million but consumers are paying $1.5 billion, where’s the rest of that money going? Foreign manufacturers are passing some costs on to consumers, while domestic ones are simply pocketing extra profits, according to the study. ...
U.S.-based manufacturers added about 1,800 jobs in response to the tariffs, researchers found. But at a total cost to consumers of about $1.5 billion, that works out to approximately $815,000 for every new job created. That figure is roughly in line with other estimates on the per-job cost of tariffs in other industries.
This is what is taught in thousands of introductory economics courses every semester.
