FACT: Americans dislike tariff increases and high prices.

THE NUMBERS: Political “independents,” asked*: “Do you approve or disapprove of Donald Trump’s handling of tariffs?” –

Disapprove:	71%
Approve:	29%

* CNN/SSRS, March 6-9, 2025

WHAT THEY MEAN:

What do Americans think of the Trump administration’s tariff binge? As a point of departure, here’s the “Chapter One” pledge from last fall’s Republican party platform:

“The Republican Party will reverse the worst inflation crisis in four decades that has crushed the middle class, devastated family budgets, and pushed the dream of homeownership out of reach for millions.  We will defeat inflation, tackle the cost-of-living crisis, improve fiscal sanity, restore price stability, and quickly bring down prices.”

We noted at the time that promises to cut prices and to raise tariffs – that came four notches down, in “Chapter Five” — contradict one another. (Lewis Carroll’s White Queen might happily believe six impossible things before breakfast.  Alice knows they’re impossible nonetheless.) A hypothetical Trump administration, we predicted, would have to choose between them.

The actual administration now appears to have chosen. Here’s the Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, telling Americans they’re wrong to care about the cost of goods, and the administration’s policy will likely bring prices up, not down:

  “Access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream.  … [shift to mumbling voice] Can tariffs be a one-time price adjustment? Yes.”

Insights from three different sources — consumer confidence surveys, public opinion polls, and House of Representatives debate — give some sense of what Americans now believe tariffs do, whether they like the administration’s approach, and how strongly they may feel.

First, the Conference Board’s February consumer-confidence readout and the University of Michigan’s March survey find Americans expecting prices to rise and believing they know why. The Conference Board summary:

  “Average 12-month inflation expectations surged from 5.2% to 6% in February. This increase likely reflected a mix of factors, including sticky inflation but also the recent jump of prices of key household staples like eggs and the expected impact of tariffs.  References to inflation and prices in general continue to rank high in write-in responses, but the focus shifted towards other topics. There was a sharp increase in the mentions of trade and tariffs, back to a level unseen since 2019. Most notably, comments on the current Administration and its policies dominated the responses.” 

Second, March public opinion polls suggest that Americans put more value than Mr. Bessent on cheap goods (see below for why this might be) and aren’t persuaded that tariff hikes will bring them much good in exchange. One, a CNN/SSRS poll done between March 6 and 9, asks about Mr. Trump’s handling of tariff policy. Reuters/IPSOS (March 3 to 5), meanwhile, asks about tariff increases in the abstract without mentioning Mr. Trump personally. Findings:

CNN/SSRS: “Do you approve or disapprove of the way Donald Trump is handling tariffs?”

	Approve	Disapprove
All respondents	39%	61%
Political independents	29%	71%
Republicans	80%	20%
Democrats	6%	93%
Non-college	41%	59%
Under 35	28%	72%
Over 45	45%	54%
Men	39%	60%
Women	39%	61%
Earns less than $50,000	38%	62%

 

Reuters/IPSOS:

	Agree	Disagree
“It’s a good idea to charge tariffs even if prices increase.”	32%	53%
“When the U.S. charges tariffs, American workers come out ahead.”	31%	49%
“Increasing tariffs will do more harm than good.”	53%	31%

 

Both show the administration (a) nearly four fathoms “underwater,” (b) holding a core Republican vote but not persuading anybody else, and (c) losing the “swing” and “non-white working-class” voters who last fall thought Mr. Trump would at least try to “quickly bring prices down.”

Third, political-system reactions — specifically, debate last week in the House of Representatives — cast some indirect light on the intensity of feeling. House Democrats, guided by Foreign Affairs Committee Ranking Member Greg Meeks, requested a vote last Wednesday to terminate the “emergency” declaration Mr. Trump is using to threaten tariffs on the energy, cars, groceries, home-building materials, medicines, and so on Americans buy from Canada and Mexico.  Rather than defend this, their Republican counterparts dodged by writing a surreal “House Rule,” declaring the last 9½ months of 2025 to be a single “day.”  Mr. Meeks:

“‘Each day for the remainder of the first session of the 119th Congress shall not constitute a calendar day.’ What? If you don’t think that makes any sense, neither do I. House Republicans are declaring that the days are no longer days and that time has literally stopped.”

It doesn’t make sense. But in the arcane ‘House Calendar world’, it does prevent a debate and avert a vote.  That day’s Congressional Record reports 23 comments on tariffs by House Democrats and none by Republicans. Rule of thumb: House members have a keen sense of local reaction to issues.  When they don’t want to talk about something, there’s a reason. At least for now, the administration’s choice to abandon its “bring down prices” pledge, and raise tariffs instead, doesn’t seem one many Americans like.

FURTHER READING

PPI’s four principles for response to tariffs and economic isolationism:

• Defend the Constitution and oppose rule by decree;
• Connect tariff policy to growth, work, prices and family budgets, and living standards;
• Stand by America’s neighbors and allies;
• Offer a positive alternative.

In this spirit, the Congressional Record for March 12 (pp. H1083 – H1183) records an honorable day for Rep. Meeks and House Democrats.  They are right on policy, to keep costs down for hourly-wage Americans trying to manage family budgets and to oppose unprovoked attacks on America’s neighbors and friends. And they are right on principle: Congress, not the president, has authority over “Taxes, Duties, Imposts, and Excises”, and attempts by presidents to bypass this and impose tariffs by decree are fundamentally anti-Constitutional. We applaud.

Public opinion:

CNN/SSRS on Mr. Trump’s handling of tariffs, budgets, the economy in general, and more.

Reuters/IPSOS on the same topics, without attaching them personally to Trump.

Quinnipiac (March 6-10) on Mr. Trump’s approach to trade with China, Canada, and Mexico.

The Conference Board (Feb. 25) finds consumers losing confidence and worried about tariffs and their price impact.

… and the University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment survey gets similar results.

Meanwhile:

As Americans worry about price increases, retaliations against American exporters are piling up. Current status:

• Canadian against $20 billion of U.S. steel, tech, and other exports.
• EU against $28 billion worth of American motorcycles, whiskey, beef, textiles, and other food and manufactured goods.
• Chinese against $28 billion in soybeans, chicken, wheat, pork, and other farm exports.

So far, they have chosen to use tariffs hitting American manufacturers and farmers. More inventive things with wider target ranges are ahead:

• Ontario Premier Doug Ford threatens a 25% ‘export tariff’ on Ontario’s energy sales to households, utilities, and businesses in New York, Michigan, and Minnesota.  The administration is puzzlingly irate: a Canadian export tariff has exactly the same impact on Americans as Mr. Trump’s own tariffs on Canadian energy. Why complain?
• The European Union’s Anti-Coercion Instrument, designed in 2023 to counteract Chinese trade pressures, can fade protection of U.S. patents, trademarks, and copyright, or tax services exports such as film, TV programs, and digital platforms.

And last — Tariffs, the hedge-fund alum, and the single mom:

Back to Mr. Bessent: “Cheap goods are not the essence of the American dream.” Without wealth-bashing for its own sake, that’s kind of easy for him to say …

Tariffs are taxes on purchases of physical goods, incorporated in store prices for shoppers and in production costs for goods-using businesses like manufacturers, restaurants, farms, and building contractors. That means they’re toughest on people who spend a lot of their money on goods.  Who might these people be?

The BLS’ Consumer Expenditure Survey finds that in 2023, America’s single-parent families spent 40% of their $52,462 post-tax median income on food, clothes, home furnishings, and other goods. This is twice the 20% of income that the top-decile families (median post-tax, $259,432) spent on goods. Put more directly, tariffs hit the waitressing single mom twice as hard as the law firm partner. Mr. Bessent, a hedge-fund alum whose income comes from real estate rentals, royalties, and capital gains, is an extreme case even in the top decile, probably spending closer to 1% than 20% of income on physical, tariff-able goods.  So he may personally have trouble seeing why anyone would care if food and clothing prices jump.

For better analysis and policy advice, Treasury can turn to Laura Duffy’s It’s Not 1789 Anymore: Why Trump’s Backward Tariff Agenda Would Harm America. As she explains, tariffs — though a defensible choice among the bad revenue options available to 18th-century Americans, or to the present-day governments of extremely poor and/or unstable countries — are a poor form of taxation and badly wrong for modern America: can’t raise enough revenue; non-transparent; regressive and inequitable; severe downstream harm.

ABOUT ED

Ed Gresser is Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at PPI.

Ed returns to PPI after working for the think tank from 2001-2011. He most recently served as the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Trade Policy and Economics at the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). In this position, he led USTR’s economic research unit from 2015-2021, and chaired the 21-agency Trade Policy Staff Committee.

Ed began his career on Capitol Hill before serving USTR as Policy Advisor to USTR Charlene Barshefsky from 1998 to 2001. He then led PPI’s Trade and Global Markets Project from 2001 to 2011. After PPI, he co-founded and directed the independent think tank ProgressiveEconomy until rejoining USTR in 2015. In 2013, the Washington International Trade Association presented him with its Lighthouse Award, awarded annually to an individual or group for significant contributions to trade policy.

Ed is the author of Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Global Economy (2007). He has published in a variety of journals and newspapers, and his research has been cited by leading academics and international organizations including the WTO, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. He is a graduate of Stanford University and holds a Master’s Degree in International Affairs from Columbia Universities and a certificate from the Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.

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FACT: 69% of Americans want their next car to cost less than $50,000.

THE NUMBERS: Steel use per $1 billion of U.S. “real GDP,” 2017 and 2024* – 

2024:	3,990 tons
2017:	5,050 tons

*BEA for U.S. GDP adjusted for inflation in 2017 dollars (Table 1.1.6), and the U.S. Geological Survey’s Mineral Commodity Summaries (“apparent consumption”) for steel and aluminum use.

WHAT THEY MEAN:

The Trump administration’s explanations for its tariff binge shift and vary. (“Foreigners ripping us off,” “fentanyl,” “trade balance,” “reciprocity,” etc.) But they often converge on an assertion that higher trade barriers would make U.S. manufacturing grow, and that the harms of higher tariffs –lost wealth, foreign retaliations against American farm products and manufactures, depressed family living standards — are less than this future benefit. (lllustrative comments below from Cabinet Secretaries Bessent & Lutnick.) Outside the administration, Shawn Fain, president of the venerable United Auto Workers union, makes a similar claim, advocating trade collaboration with Mr. Trump in the Washington Post last January on the grounds that higher tariffs would mean fewer imported cars, more U.S. car production, and presumably, more auto-plant hires and dues-paying UAW members.

Autos are very pertinent this month. Despite the financial-market plunges and fading GDP outlook accompanying the Trump administration’s Canada and Mexico fiasco, it still appears to envision putting tariffs on cars — as well as medicines (both prescription and over-the-counter), semiconductors, building materials, and various other things — in April. So is Mr. Fain right about what might happen afterwards? We’ll start with the people who get the final say — Americans thinking about buying cars this year — and draw from recent heavy-industry tariff experience to inform an answer.

The day the Post published Mr. Fain’s article, Deloitte released a January 2025 poll of Americans on car ownership. Two points jump out: (i) 69% of Americans hope to pay less than $50,000 for their next car, and (ii) 44% of Americans aged 18 to 34 years are willing to give up auto ownership altogether in favor of “Mobility as a Service.” (“MaaS,” meaning using a mix of ride-sharing, bicycles, public transit, taxis, and rental cars instead of buying a personal car.)

Now to the recent heavy-industry experience:

In March 2018, the first Trump administration raised tariffs to 25% on most steel and 10% on most aluminum. Between September 2018 and the summer of 2019, it added tariffs of 25% and 7.5% to most Chinese-made products. Both mostly stayed in place during the Biden era. Since then U.S. manufacturing output and job growth have slowed. The average post-financial-crisis, Obama-administration-policy year saw $41 billion in real-dollar manufacturing output growth and a net gain of 125,000 manufacturing jobs. Post-2018, the averages are $31 billion in real output growth and 40,000 net new jobs. Meanwhile, the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ count of specifically unionized manufacturing workers has dropped by 216,000, and the manufacturing share of U.S. GDP has shrunk by about a point:

Manufacturing share of U.S. GDP, 2024**:	10.0%
Manufacturing share of U.S. GDP, 2017:	10.9%

One can argue — in a miniature version of the broader claim that lost wealth and diminished family purchasing power are prices worth paying for the industrial-sector growth the administration is predicting — that somewhat smaller U.S. total manufacturing output is worth it to get larger steel and aluminum industries. But that didn’t happen either. Instead, steel production in the U.S. has fallen from 87.8 million tons in 2018 to 81 million tons in 2024, and primary aluminum production from 740,000 tons to 670,000 tons.

Why?  The reason appears to be that industrial buyers now use less metal. The U.S. Geological Survey’s annual “Mineral Commodity Summaries” reports that from 2012 to 2017 the U.S. economy used 99 million tons of steel and 4.94 million tons of aluminum on average each year. From 2019 to 2024 — the six years since the tariffs, skipping 2018 since the tariffs came halfway through — the comparable averages were 94 million tons of steel and 4.37 million tons of aluminum. The 2024 totals were lower still, at 93 million tons of steel and 4.3 million tons of aluminum. So steel use dropped by about 5% and aluminum by 12%; both fell even faster relative to real GDP; and U.S. domestic production of these metals is down a bit rather than up.

Now back to cars. A 25% tariff on cars in April might raise the cost of a new $50,000 car to $60,000. Meanwhile, tariffs on the many “inputs” that go into a car — metals, semiconductors, Internet routers, wiring, radios, shatterproof and mirrored glass, leather and vinyl for seat covers, etc. — would make it more expensive for U.S.-based factories to make cars, and also raise repair and tune-up bills. Taking Deloitte’s insights on the auto-buying public into account, the likely result is that (a) some of the 69% of Americans hoping to pay less than $50,000 for a new ride wouldn’t buy one, (b) used cars would grow more attractive compared to new ones, and (c) more young Americans would choose not to buy them at all.

In sum, it’s hard to see how Mr. Fain’s hopes could materialize. And it’s easy to imagine the opposite: higher car prices, quieter dealerships, fewer sales, and eventually fewer hourly-wage auto production jobs. So here’s an alternative suggestion for the UAW’s policy shop: rather than work with Mr. Trump to raise tariffs and car prices, ask the members for ideas on how to give young Americans the low-cost cars they seem to want.

* Using the BEA and BLS annual averages, more or less equivalent to the mid-year total.

** BEA’s ‘GDP by Industry’ data. These are complete through Q3 2024; and the manufacturing share was 10.0% in the second and third quarters. The first estimate for Q4 is not yet available until March, so the final annual share may be slightly above or below the current 10.0% estimate.

FURTHER READING

Our four principles for response to Trump administration tariffs, whether last week’s on Canada/Mexico/China, or the car/medicine/semiconductor proposal:

*  Defend the Constitution and oppose rule by decree;

*  Connect tariff policy to growth, work, prices and family budgets, and living standards;

*  Stand by America’s neighbors and allies;

*  Offer a positive alternative.

Cars:

Deloitte’s poll finds prospective buyers hoping for cheaper cars, and nearly half of young Americans wondering to get one at all.

… and UAW President Fain in the Washington Post on hopes for high-tariff cars.

Data: 

BEA’s ‘GDP by Industry’ series.

BLS’ gloomy look at trends in union membership in 2024. See Table 4 for manufacturing — down 216,000 members since the 2018 tariffs, probably for many reasons but not a hopeful sign for tariff-enthusiasts — and other industry-by-industry figures.

Metals:

The U.S. Geological Survey’s Mineral Commodity Summaries 2025.

USITC’s estimates for the effects of steel, aluminum, and China tariffs as of 2021, including the cost burden (“nearly full pass-through” to consumers), and effects on other industries in for the metal tariffs — a $2.2 billion expansion (again as of 2021) of aluminum and steel output, offset by a $3.5 billion contraction in auto parts, machinery, tool-making, and other metal-using manufacturing industries. No estimate for construction, and note that while the metals section estimates both benefits for protected metal-producing companies and cost for metal-using industries, the China section does only the “protected and benefiting” side and therefore isn’t useful as a picture of the effect on manufacturing.

And, as promised, some then-and-now with Cabinet Secretaries:

Then: Here’s the Republican party platform promising lower prices a few months back:

“The Republican Party will reverse the worst inflation crisis in four decades that has crushed the middle class, devastated family budgets, and pushed the dream of homeownership out of reach for millions. We will defeat inflation, tackle the cost-of-living crisis, improve fiscal sanity, restore price stability, and quickly bring down prices.”

Now: As Trump administration officials propose tariffs on groceries, lumber and other home-building materials, medicines, cars, T-shirts, etc, Treasury Secretary Bessent (via Politico) now says Americans shouldn’t care about prices — “access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream” — and then mumbles a bit:

“Can tariffs be a one-time price adjustment? Yes.”

Also now: Meanwhile, two blocks down 15th Street, Commerce Secretary Lutnick says the following (again via Politico) about Trump administration amplifying steel and aluminum tariffs:

“When you imposed the tariffs the first time, you added 120,000 jobs,” Lutnick told Trump. “And since that time, [the tariffs have] been picked away and nicked away and excluded away, and we’ve lost 107,000 jobs. And remember, these aren’t just general jobs. These are steel workers in America.”

Fact Check: Per the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ “Employment, Hours, and Earnings” survey (in “durable goods manufacturing”) 83,300 people worked in iron and steel mills as of February 2018. The count has varied in a narrow band since then — 88,400 high, 78,100 low, 83,500 in January 2025 — with the low point in January 2021 as the Biden administration took over and COVID re-opening got underway. Nothing remotely like “120,000 jobs gained” happened, and “107,000 jobs lost” is impossible since it’s a bigger number than the total number of steelworkers.

ABOUT ED

Ed Gresser is Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at PPI.

Ed returns to PPI after working for the think tank from 2001-2011. He most recently served as the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Trade Policy and Economics at the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). In this position, he led USTR’s economic research unit from 2015-2021, and chaired the 21-agency Trade Policy Staff Committee.

Ed began his career on Capitol Hill before serving USTR as Policy Advisor to USTR Charlene Barshefsky from 1998 to 2001. He then led PPI’s Trade and Global Markets Project from 2001 to 2011. After PPI, he co-founded and directed the independent think tank ProgressiveEconomy until rejoining USTR in 2015. In 2013, the Washington International Trade Association presented him with its Lighthouse Award, awarded annually to an individual or group for significant contributions to trade policy.

Ed is the author of Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Global Economy (2007). He has published in a variety of journals and newspapers, and his research has been cited by leading academics and international organizations including the WTO, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. He is a graduate of Stanford University and holds a Master’s Degree in International Affairs from Columbia Universities and a certificate from the Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.

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