The Receipt Doesn't Lie
A friend of mine runs a small appliance repair shop in San Antonio. Last month he told me he couldn't quote a customer on a replacement part because the price had changed three times in six weeks. The part comes from a Chinese manufacturer. The tariff on it is 25 percent. His supplier — an American distributor — passed the cost straight through. Of course they did. That's how prices work.
The White House will tell you China is paying. The White House is wrong. Veronique de Rugy, an economist at the Mercatus Center, has been making this point for years with the rigor of someone who actually reads the trade data: tariffs are taxes on imports paid by American importers, not by foreign governments. The price lands on the American supply chain, and it travels downstream until it reaches you at checkout.
This isn't a partisan talking point. It's price theory from chapter three of any economics textbook written in the last hundred years.
Populism's Dirty Secret: It's Regressive
Here's what makes the tariff regime genuinely offensive from a conservative standpoint. It functions as a regressive tax. Low-income households spend a higher percentage of their income on consumer goods — food, clothing, electronics, appliances — than wealthy ones. A 25 percent tariff on imported steel raises the price of a washing machine. A working-class family buying their first washer on a payment plan absorbs that cost proportionally harder than a household earning $300,000 a year.
The Tax Foundation estimated in 2019 that the tariffs imposed during Trump's first term cost the average American household roughly $800 per year in higher prices. That was before the 2025 escalation. The current round is steeper. The household tab is higher now.
And the people who pay it most sharply aren't the coastal elites the populist rhetoric aims at. They're the Walmart shoppers in Amarillo and the Dollar General regulars in rural Georgia. The rhetoric protects them. The policy taxes them.
The Conservative Case Against Economic Populism
Real conservatism — the kind grounded in first principles rather than cable news applause lines — has always held that free exchange between willing parties creates wealth. Adam Smith knew this. Milton Friedman built a career on it. Ronald Reagan cut tariffs and called free trade a cornerstone of American prosperity.
What's being sold as economic nationalism today isn't conservative. It's mercantilism — a discredited 17th-century theory that trade surpluses equal national strength. The United States runs trade deficits partly because the dollar is the world's reserve currency, which makes American assets attractive to foreign investors. That's a feature, not a bug. Tariffs don't fix a trade deficit; they raise prices and invite retaliation.
When Canada and Mexico retaliated against American steel tariffs in 2018, they targeted American soybeans, bourbon, and motorcycles — specific industries in specific states. Harley-Davidson moved some production to Europe. American farmers watched export markets close. That's the retaliation loop, and we're in one again.
Protecting an uncompetitive steel industry by taxing every downstream manufacturer who uses steel isn't a win for American workers. It's a transfer from many industries to one, dressed up as patriotism.
What an Honest Reckoning Looks Like
None of this means trade with China is clean or consequence-free. Intellectual property theft is real. Industrial policy subsidies distort markets. Supply chain concentration in adversarial nations is a legitimate national security concern — particularly in semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, and rare earth minerals.
But targeted policy addressing genuine security vulnerabilities is different from a blanket tariff regime justified by trade deficit numbers that don't mean what politicians claim they mean. One is strategic. The other is a tax dressed up as toughness.
The conservative position — the honest one — is that Americans are better served by competitive markets, low consumer prices, and trade policies built on reciprocity and rule of law, not on the theory that making imported goods more expensive somehow makes American workers richer. It doesn't. It makes the goods more expensive.
My friend in San Antonio eventually found the part from a domestic supplier. It cost 40 percent more. He passed that on to his customer. His customer paid it because they needed the appliance fixed. That's not winning. That's just a more expensive repair bill.
