Donald Trump has only been President for 100 days, but American families are already paying the price for his reckless and regressive Tariff Tax. New data released today from the Bureau of Economic Analysis reveals that taxes on foreign imports spiked to $96.3 billion just in the first quarter of 2025, up $14 billion, or 17%, from the same period in 2024. 

This is just the beginning of the higher costs for American families under Trump’s economic plan. The Yale Budget Lab projects that Trump’s tariff agenda (even with its recent pauses and backdowns) translates into an 18% effective tax rate on all imported goods by the end of 2025, the highest since 1934, when America was in the throes of the Great Depression. Consumers often change their buying patterns when faced with higher prices. Excluding that expected behavioral response, the Trump policy creates a 28% effective tax rate on all imported goods, the highest rate since 1901.

Source: Americans for Tax Fairness analysis of BEA and Yale Budget Lab data

Targeted tariffs can be an effective tool to protect particular American industries and workers from unfair foreign competition. However, across-the-board tariffs levied on friend and foe alike meant to raise substantial revenue are a completely different strategy and one that hurts workers and families. 

Lower and middle-income households will bear a disproportionate share of the Trump Tariff Tax. According to an ATF analysis of data produced by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), while the bottom 60% of households take home roughly one-fifth of national income, they will pay nearly one-third the price of Trump’s tariff regime. Meanwhile, the top 1% highest-income households—those that take in over $940,000 a year— will pay only one-tenth of the Trump Tariff Tax, even though they get well over one-fifth of national income. This breakdown demonstrates why general tariffs are one of the most regressive forms of taxation.

Trump has proposed replacing income taxes, presumably including those on corporations, with tariff revenue. That process has begun: the corporate tax rate has been steadily falling over the past several decades. Now, for the first time in nearly a century, corporations will be paying a lower effective tax rate than what the Budget Lab estimates consumers will pay in tariffs.

This is all part of Trump and Congressional Republicans’ radical agenda to rig the tax code further in favor of the wealthy while sticking low and middle income families with the bill. Trump has repeatedly cited the Gilded Age policies of William McKinley as the inspiration for his aggressive tariff approach. This period that Trump looks back on so fondly was a time of hyper inequality, when poverty hovered around 70% and there were no federal income or corporate taxes to fund the robust critical public services that were later the hallmarks of mid-20th century prosperity. 

American voters, who are feeling the pain of these price hikes most, have begun to realize who will be paying the price for Trump’s Tariff Tax. A recent poll found that Americans disapprove of the President’s effort to raise import taxes by a margin of two-to-one.