Steven Woldenberg

There were no tariffs on that.

And so I think the expectation was that same speed of transmission would happen in a second Trump administration.

And that, in fact, didn't happen.

So importing companies did not pass through the tariff cost to consumers with the same speed.

And that may be because companies weren't sure if the tariffs would stick and were waiting to see what happened.

Or maybe they thought that U.S.

consumers didn't have the wealth and income to handle these tariffs all at once.

But for whatever reason, the first lesson we learned was that there was a slow pass through.

The second lesson that we learned is that it also matters what's happening in the rest of the economy.

And as you know, the president and Republicans in Congress passed this massive one big, beautiful bill.

Six or even seven bills.

And I said, let's make it one big, beautiful bill, my friend.

that bill had a lot of stimulus in it at the first couple years.

And so for a middle-class family, the extra taxes you were paying in tariffs was roughly offset by the extra tax benefit you were getting from the one big, beautiful bill.

The third lesson I think we learned was that the expected response from our trading partners isn't always what we think.

And so

If I had told a bunch of economists at the beginning of 2025 that the tariff rate was gonna shoot up as much as it did, I think we would have expected that our trading partners in Europe and in Asia and elsewhere around the world would react by putting in place additional tariffs on US exports, maybe putting in place quotas, other trade restrictions.

That's exactly the opposite of what we saw outside of China.

We saw a lot of our trading partners racing to put together these trade frameworks

rather than putting in place punitive measures against us.