MOSCOW, July 29. /TASS/. US tariff policy has failed as an instrument of foreign policy pressure, while its costs are being passed almost entirely onto American consumers, leaving them worse off, associate professor with the Department of World Economy at the Higher School of Economics’ Faculty of World Economy and International Affairs Ksenia Bondarenko wrote in a column for TASS.
"Much of the rhetoric in 2025 was built around the claim that ‘foreigners pay the tariffs.’ However, a study by the Federal Reserve shows the opposite: by the seventh month after a tariff is imposed, its cost is almost entirely passed through to American consumers via retail prices - a ‘100% pass-through.’ The authors put it in very simple terms: ‘If a retailer’s wholesale cost rises by $1 because of tariffs, after seven months the retailer will raise the retail price by the same $1’," Bondarenko wrote.
As a result, tariffs introduced in November 2025 contributed a cumulative 3.1% to the increase in consumer goods prices by February 2026, adding 0.8 percentage points to core inflation overall, the expert noted. "So yes, the government did receive additional revenue, but that money was effectively taken from the pockets of ordinary American consumers rather than from the profits of foreign exporters. This is where the widest gap between the political narrative and the economic reality of the entire tariff saga becomes apparent," the HSE associate professor wrote.
According to Bondarenko, "If tariffs are judged solely by the amount of money they generated, then they formally worked: the budget received hundreds of billions of dollars it would not otherwise have collected." "However, following the US Supreme Court’s ruling, it is far from certain that the government will be able to keep those funds and will not have to return them to importers. And if we assess tariffs against their stated goals - making foreigners pay, reducing the trade deficit and encouraging manufacturing to return to the United States - the results are far more modest, and in some cases negative. It is primarily American consumers who are paying through higher inflation, while the legal foundation proved so fragile that the Supreme Court invalidated the main mechanism just ten months after it was introduced, forcing policymakers to hastily assemble a third replacement framework within a year and a half," she wrote.
Bondarenko argued that US tariff policy "resembles not a well-thought-out trade strategy but rather an attempt to repair an airplane in mid-flight while parts are visibly falling off, presenting the mere fact that it has not yet crashed as proof of good piloting." She concluded that the tariffs "worked as a fiscal instrument but failed as the economic policy tool they were intended to be.".
