Study says American businesses and consumers are bearing the financial brunt of tariffs on Chinese-made goods

Though President Trump promised that tariffs on Chinese goods would not hurt Americans, a new data analysis shows otherwise, Jeanna Smialek and Ana Swanson report for The New York Times.

"U.S. tariffs continue to be almost entirely born by U.S. firms and consumers," Mary Amiti, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, wrote in the new National Bureau of Economic Research paper.

To track the fallout of the tariffs, Amiti and her co-authors studied customs data through October. "The authors found that Americans had continued paying for the levies — which increased substantially over the course of the year," Smialek and Swanson report. "Their paper, which is an update on previous research, found that 'approximately 100 percent' of import taxes fell on American buyers." The trade war has hit farmers and the manufacturing industry particularly hard, though other factors have contributed to those sectors' difficulties.

Some economic fallout from the tariffs takes longer to hit; that's because it takes a while for companies to change their supply chains to avoid the tariffs, Smialek and Swanson report.

The analysis "joins a growing body of research examining the effects of the escalating tariffs Mr. Trump has imposed since the beginning of 2018," Smialek and Swanson report. "In previous research, the authors found that by December 2018, import tariffs were costing United States consumers and importing businesses $3.2 billion per month in added taxes and another $1.4 billion per month in efficiency losses. They did not update those numbers in the latest study."