Breaking News: We're The 96%
From Business Insider:
A favorite tool of President Donald Trump has been costing Americans, according to new study.
The brunt of US tariffs — 96% — have been paid by US buyers, research from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a German think tank, found, while about 4% of the tariff burden was paid by foreign exporters.
"American importers and consumers bear nearly all the cost," the researchers said of the tariffs.
The study, published Monday, said that the $200 billion increase in customs revenue that the US government raised in 2025 was a "tax paid almost entirely by Americans."
The research contradicts Trump's messaging that tariff costs would not be paid by Americans, but by other countries and overseas exporters. The president's aggressive tariff policy launched last year placed additional duties on dozens of trade partners, including China, India, and the European Union.
The Kiel Institute study examined more than 25 million shipment records, worth nearly $4 trillion, between January 2024 and November 2025. The researchers found that there was a "near-complete pass-through" of the tariffs.
"US import prices rise nearly one-for-one with tariffs, while trade volumes contract," the study said.
The findings echo other research that has found Americans are paying for tariffs, including from Harvard Business School and The Budget Lab at Yale. Analysts at Deutsche Bank and Bank of America also said last year that Americans were the ones paying for the tariffs.
The Kiel study said American importers and wholesalers are first hit by the tariff cost, followed by manufacturers and retailers, all of which must choose whether to absorb the tariff or pass it on to their customers. American consumers are then hit by increased prices, both on imported goods or American-made products that use foreign inputs. There's been more limited availability of goods in the US, the researchers found.
You mean the thing we knew would happen...happened?
Funny. It's almost as if we shouldn't have trusted a man with six bankruptcies when he insisted upon an obviously flawed economic policy.
But while 75 million of us passed our 2024 open-book test, 77 million Americans trusted the conman from Queens. They trusted the man behind Trump Steaks, Trump Vodka, Trump Airlines, and Trump University. The man who was found guilty of fraudulently inflating his company's asset values. The man who has used the office of the presidency to pitch anything from bitcoin to rebrandished cellphones. Over 77 million of our fellow Americans saw a candidate for president of the United States tell us all to ingest Bleach to fend off COVID, and thought to themselves now this is someone I would trust with the American economy for the next 4 years. When Trump said other countries would pay the tariffs, these 77 million Americans didn't go and pick up a high school economics textbook to prove him wrong. They simply went with it, putting their faith in the tiny hands of the stupidest man to ever graduate from the Wharton School of Business.
Trump is a moron. Worse than that, he's a malignant narcissist moron surrounded by a squadron of sycophants who refuse to tell him no. But while the party of Voodoo Enonomics has always hurt the middle class in favor of tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, they've never previously had a figurehead intentionally destroy entire industries in the name of his own personal pet project. And that's exactly what tariffs are for Trump: a policy he's convinced himself is right, and nothing can convince him otherwise. Trump has to be the smartest man in the room, no matter the cost. When you give a failed businessman a blank check to do whatever he wants, you end up with some godawful policies. The GOP, once the party of economic prosperity, has now become the party of failed Econ 101.
No Democrat wants to see their fellow countrymen fall on hard times. But Republican voters fucked around in 2024, and now they're finding out. Soybean farmers have lost their primary market for a generation or more. Foxconn is abandoning its $10 billion project in Wisconsin. Ohio is losing the largest U.S. producer of band instruments due to Trump's tariffs. American icon Jim Beam is halting production at its largest Kentucky distillery for a year. And let's not forget all of us, the American consumers, who are being warned by Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, of all people, who said yesterday that we will soon see tariffs "creep" into some prices. When you've lost your best buddy, Bezos, shit has truly hit the fan.
But, hey. We knew all this. We brave few who actually paid attention during Freshman Econ. Or those of us who understood basic economics. Or those of us who knew even a teensy bit of American history. Or those of us who could ask Google, "Who actually pays for tariffs?" Yeah, we knew Trump's insane tariff policy was going to be a disaster. Deep down inside, so did MAGAworld. Yet it was always about hurting the other rather than helping themselves. So when it came time to cast a vote in 2024 for the competent Black lady or the failed businessman who didn't understand tariffs, 77 million Americans chose the moron with the penis. Exactly one year later, we've seen tariffs become the latest failed business policy of Donald J. Trump.
All because nobody within an entire political party had the guts to tell him that's not how tariffs work.