A tax on imports, paid — despite the framing — mostly by the people buying them at home.
A tariff is an import duty: a fee charged on goods entering a country from abroad, either as a percentage of value or a fixed amount per unit. Governments use tariffs to make foreign products more expensive relative to domestic alternatives, protecting local industry, and to raise government revenue.
The politically convenient framing is that foreign exporters pay the cost. In practice, that cost is largely passed through to the price the importing country’s own consumers and businesses pay — which is why tariff announcements move markets far beyond the specific goods named in them.
This isn’t a partisan claim — it’s a directly measured one. A widely cited study of the 2018 US tariffs found close to complete pass-through to domestic prices, with almost none of the cost absorbed by foreign exporters or by importers’ margins.
Source: Amiti, M., Redding, S. J., & Weinstein, D. E. (2019), “The Impact of the 2018 Tariffs on Prices and Welfare,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 33(4), 187–210.