Trump is taxing nearly everything working families buy and calling it forced-labor enforcement.
The numbers: 10 to 12.5 percent import duties on goods from 60 trading partners, covering 99 percent of U.S. imports by value. The levies took effect at 12:01 a.m. Friday, replacing temporary stopgap tariffs that expired after the administration rushed to build a replacement architecture following the Supreme Court’s February ruling striking down the broader program. The administration framed the duties as forced-labor enforcement.
The incidence is not in dispute. Amiti, Redding, and Weinstein found near-complete pass-through of the 2018 tariffs to domestic import prices. The Tax Policy Center’s distributional modeling shows tariff costs falling disproportionately on the bottom three income quintiles, because consumption taxes are regressive by arithmetic: households that spend a larger share of income on goods bear a larger share of the cost, and goods are what tariffs tax. The Congressional Budget Office’s distributional tables classify tariff revenue as a tax increase. This is settled economics.
The enforcement rationale might hold if the tariffs were targeted. They are not. The Tariff Act of 1930, Section 307, authorizes Customs and Border Protection to issue Withhold Release Orders against specific goods from specific producers where the agency has documented evidence of forced labor in the supply chain. That is enforcement. A uniform rate schedule applied to 99 percent of imports from 60 countries is a consumption levy with a labor-rights label. The gap between what the statute authorizes and what this policy covers is the gap between an enforcement tool and a revenue instrument.
The Supreme Court struck down the administration’s prior tariff program in February. The replacement covers more imports at comparable rates, and the revenue is now in the baseline. The incidence falls on the households filling grocery carts and gas tanks that the administration calls its political constituency.
The label does not change the incidence. The households paying more at the register are paying a tax the administration chose to impose and chose to call something else. This is a deliberate choice — and the receipt is where it shows up.