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Comment by drob518 | Hacker News Reader

If you've seen one tariff study, you've seen one tariff study. There are so many factors that end up influencing the end-state of the system. It literally depends on the particular type of good, the producer, producer's market shares both in the country applying the tariff as well as globally, the number of tiers of distribution, margin structures of everybody involved, etc., etc. So, sometimes we see an increase; other times, we little to none.

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Well, lucky for us we've seen multiple, broader tariff studies, all concurring in their conclusions:

https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2026/02/who-is...

https://www.nber.org/papers/w34620

https://www.kielinstitut.de/publications/americas-own-goal-w...

This one has even more egregious findings:

> Pass-through at the border is incomplete, yet consumers paid more than the tariff revenue collected.

Wonder how many other industries used tariffs as an excuse to further juice their profits. (Edit - turns out this study is looking at pre-2021 data, so we don't even know what they've done this time!)

This doesn't increase their profits because, consistent with economics, increasing prices reduces quantity. Profit depends on the amount you sell, not just the price.

That's true in absolute numbers (sales volume goes down), but in terms of margins (profit / sale) they're still doing better than they should have. As the study in TFA implies, if the consumers paid more than the tariffs were collected, the retailer in the middle must have pocketed the difference.

No, that's not what is happening. From the paper:

>The reason is that markups along the chain of intermediation between importer and consumer can scale up the percent pass-through in tariff costs, cumulating over distribution stages and resulting in a direct dollar impact on prices to be greater than tariffs paid, even though the percent change in consumer price is less than the tariff ad-valorem rate.

The retailer is paying more for its stock. Everyone loses despite higher prices.

Ah I see, I had misunderstood, the discrepancy in tariff revenue and what the consumer pays is due to the markups at each stage of distribution successively absorbing minor portions of the price increase until the consumer bears most of it. Took me a while to get my head around the numbers, but makes sense now, thanks for the correction!

Yeah, the claim of

>The researchers estimate that the increase in the retail price to consumers was about 6.9 percent. This was on the $23 pre-tariff retail price, so it amounts to $1.59, which, in dollar terms, exceeded the tariff revenue collected.

Is seemingly contradicted by goldman sac's report, which claims consumers only paid 55% of the tariff increase.

https://www.idnfinancials.com/news/57938/goldman-sachs-us-co...

Goldman speaks of the current tariff regime; the study here looked at 2019-21 wine tariffs.

Also the tax burden will fall on different places depending on the markets and the good in question.

Maybe we should think of each study as a data point? With enough studies, perhaps we'll get an idea of how much it varies.

Does anyone collect them?

To what end? It varies a lot. Between 0% and 100%+ of the cost could be passed onto the consumer (100%+ when every distribution tier passes along what came to it and then marked it up). Maybe you can create a statistical distribution with mean/median and standard deviation, but that tells you nothing about what might happen when you next institute another tariff.

Most of economics is educated guessing, and having more data (hopefully) leads to better guesses.

With this study there's plenty of leads to follow. Does the ABV have an impact? What about the base price? France vs Italy?

Who the fuck is "we" as a cursory search has every economist saying "tarriffs are dumb"

We the fuck is we. Consumers, that is. "Tariffs are dumb" sounds more like a temper tantrum than a meaningful comment from an actual economist.

"We find that nearly 90 percent of the tariffs’ economic burden fell on U.S. firms and consumers." https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2026/02/who-is...

"we find that tariff increases are associated with an economically and statistically sizeable and persistent decline in output growth" https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7255316/

"Overall, the evidence implies that tariff increases depress economic activity and trade once their indirect and general-equilibrium effects are taken into account." https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w34852/w348...

Hey, but the vibes of the consumer, right? Except the vibes of the consumer is at an all time low ( https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2026/02/04/a-year-into-...) With a notable exception being republicans, i.e., the death cult who screamed "No New Wars!" and "Kamala will start WW3" and are not sucking off daddy Trump's Iran war.

While a bit reductionist, it's pretty much right. Tariffs can work if, and only if, the market believes the tariffs will last long enough to spin up entire industries, and then recoup that investment.

The problem with Trump's tariffs is that everyone knows they are relatively short term. At most, they'll last until the end of Trump's presidency, and even that's assuming that they don't get struck down by the courts, or Trump flip-flops on them like he does everything else.

Without the ability to credibly ensure their ongoing existence, tariffs fail their only real purpose of incentivizing domestic manufacturing, instead acting as a regressive tax on your population.

> At most, they'll last until the end of Trump's presidency

Eh, you don't think Vance will keep them going when he wins in 28? I do agree that the uncertainty is an issue.

Probably not. The tariffs are a lever for Trump to personally work out self-enriching deals with individual countries. Vance doesn't have the kinds of connections that Trump has to leverage those kinds of deals, he's only really tied to Theil and company who put him in his current seat.

I also put Vance's odds of winning real low, unless Trump dies rather soon. Vance was the first VP pick since we started doing political polling that reduced his ticket's approval rating. He's not nearly popular enough to keep up the cult of personality that Trump has built. If he's not President by the next election, I doubt he'd win the primaries.

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