Nicholas Phillips argues that tariffs on Chinese goods aren’t causing inflation:

The claim that China tariffs need to be cut because they’re inflationary isn’t serious. In the trade-policy world, there is close to a bipartisan consensus that the tariffs are not responsible for inflation and that cutting them would do nothing to stop its rise. The labor-aligned Economic Policy Institute concluded that cutting the tariffs would yield only a onetime 0.3 percent reduction in consumer prices. Meanwhile, the Peterson Institute, famously supportive of free-trade policies, published its own finding that the tariffs “only marginally contributed to inflation.” The tariffs don’t affect enough goods and don’t impact consumer prices directly enough to make a meaningful contribution to inflation.
Ultimately, it doesn’t take a think-tank white paper to arrive at that conclusion. The tariffs were in place by 2019, well before the recent inflation spike, and prices on many tariffed goods had already come back down to pre-tariff levels by 2020. As Senator Cotton pointed out, blaming these tariffs for inflation is a little like blaming “Putin’s price hike” for rising gas prices. It’s a politically convenient pretext.

Read the whole thing here.