All this tariff-slapping chatter might make good political sense – everyone wants to stick it to China, and a bunch of swing states the candidates are fighting over are the type of terrain where terms like “NAFTA” and “WTO” are approximately as popular as syphilis.

However, it is economically dumb. Harris called tariffs a “sales tax” in her debate with Trump, and she wasn’t that far off the mark. The way tariffs work is that importers pay governments for the privilege of importing goods. But the importer doesn’t just eat the cost (importers are businesses, not charities); the cost is then passed on to consumers (many of which are, it turns out, the American manufacturing businesses that Trump and Harris purportedly want to save). This is not a coincidence or even an unwanted side effect; it is literally the whole point of tariffs as conceived of by their current advocates. Trump, Harris, and many others want to make Chinese goods, especially, as expensive as possible to try to deter American consumers from buying them and instead create an economic incentive to buy American (or perhaps not even American, but manufactured in a U.S.-friendly country or U.S. ally). This might sound lovely, but there are big problems with it.