2025 2.2%
2024 2.8%
2023 2.9%
2022 2.5%
2021 6.2%
Having ordered his skeptical platoon to ford a flooding Louisiana river by moonlight, the obstinate, ill-fated captain in folksinger Pete Seeger’s Big Muddy insists that everything will be fine:
“It’ll be a little soggy, but just keep slogging. We’ll soon be on dry ground …”
It doesn’t work out quite that way.
The Supreme Court’s Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump opinion, released Friday morning, offered the administration an easy way out. By striking down all of last year’s “International Emergency Economic Powers Act” (“IEEPA”) decrees, the Court gave the administration a chance either to (a) quietly liquidate an unpopular experiment, or (b) return to the Constitutionally appropriate approach of asking Congress to pass a tariff bill, as the like-minded Harding and Hoover administrations did in the 1920s. Within a few hours, it made a different choice: emotional denunciations of the court, a legal gamble on an antiquated law meant for a different purpose, and new tariff decrees oscillating up and down between 10% and 15%. As this thrashing around proceeds, a look at how the past year’s tariff binge played out, with Seeger’s piece as a wry optional soundtrack:
GDP growth slows: To start at the top, the administration’s central tariff decree — the now-defunct April 2 “Executive Order 14257” — predicted that tariffs would open a “new golden age.” In practice, the U.S. economy grew by 2.2% last year. This isn’t terrible for a “developed” economy, but is noticeably slower growth than in any of the four Biden years: 6.2% in 2021 during the pandemic rebound, then 2.5% in 2022, 2.9% in 2023, and 2.8% in 2024.
… and rural America crashes: Growth, of course, isn’t a single uniform figure across all regions and economic “sectors,” but the average of many different experiences. Rural America, the most export-reliant part of the U.S. — sales to foreign customers typically provide a fifth of farm income — has had a particularly bad time. Retaliations and consumer boycotts damaged farm export earnings last year — soybean sales to China down from $12.6 billion in 2024 to $3.1 billion, wine exports to Canada from $460 million to $103 million, etc. — while higher tariffs on fertilizer, agricultural machinery, fencing, tools, and other needs raised farm operating costs. With income down and expenses up, farm country is in bad enough shape for commodity-group and ag policy veterans to warn this month of a possible “widespread collapse of American agriculture and our rural communities.”
Trade balance unchanged: The administration justified its April 2 decree to the courts by declaring a “national emergency posed by a large and persistent trade deficit” (in goods specifically, excluding services trade), and claiming a big tariff increase would “address” it. It hasn’t. Last Thursday, a day before the Supreme Court’s verdict, Census Bureau statisticians published the U.S. trade data for 2025, which showed a somewhat higher goods-trade deficit in 2025 than in 2024:
| 2024 | 2025 | |
| Imports of goods | $3.30 trillion | $3.44 trillion |
| Exports of goods | $2.08 trillion | $2.20 trillion |
| Goods trade balance | -$1.22 trillion | -$1.24 trillion |
Manufacturing slowdown: The administration’s pitch to the public was more practical: higher tariffs would cause “some pain,” but would compensate by launching a manufacturing boom. That didn’t happen either. Employment growth slowed in general, and especially so in manufacturing: Bureau of Labor Statistics reports show manufacturing employment falling by 108,000 in 2025, mainly because manufacturers hired about 330,000 fewer new workers. Meanwhile, the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis calculates that the manufacturing share of U.S. GDP (based on the nine months of data available so far) contracted from 9.8% in 2024 to 9.4%.
Costs up: If tariffs haven’t produced growth, trade balance, or a manufacturing job surge, they have succeeded in raising costs. CBP appears to have collected a bit more than $260 billion in tariff money last year, more than triple the $76 billion of 2024. The biggest cost appears to have fallen on the automotive industry — over $40 billion on cars and parts, mostly under “national security” (technically, “Section 232”) tariffs that so far haven’t faced court challenge and thus remain in place. But the general tariff increase is seeping into daily life in unexpected and sometimes very personal ways. Some samples of where CBP got this money:
| 2024 | 2025 | |
| Primary health products | ||
| OTC medicines | $0 million | $316 million |
| Band-Aids and other bandages | $0 million | $206 million |
| Condoms | $0 million | $7 million |
| Tampons | $23 million | $143 million |
| Crutches, splints, other fracture devices | $0 million | $197 million |
| Personal care & beauty | 2024 | 2025 |
| Soap | $31 million | $172 million |
| Makeup | $158 million | $724 million |
| Perfume | $11 million | $391 million |
| Hair care | $28 million | $140 million |
| Deodorant | $6 million | $17 million |
| Shaving cream, razors, & aftershave | $12 million | $63 million |
| Dental floss, toothbrushes, & toothpaste | $20 million | $100 million |
| Groceries | 2024 | 2025 |
| Fresh fruit and vegetables | $196 million | $1,175 million |
| Flowers | $8 million | $145 million |
| Coffee & tea | $6 million | $935 million |
| Honey | $4 million | $64 million |
| Pepper, cinnamon, ginger | $16 million | $128 million |
Across the whole economy, the Harvard Business School’s tracking project estimates that tariffs raised the price of tariffed goods by 6.6% above trend, the price of similar locally produced goods by 3.8%, and overall prices by about 1%.
Federal debt up: As to federal finances, the Court’s ruling doesn’t mean the administration has to pay the whole $261 billion back, just most of it. The Congressionally authorized “MFN” tariff system is still active, though buried under much larger tariff decrees, and legally raises about $40 billion a year. The administration’s Section 232 “national security” decrees are often laughable — one defines condensed milk and balance beams as “steel or aluminum derivative products,” another says lumber tariffs will make sure we have the wood needed to build “ballistic missile defense systems” and “thermal protection systems for nuclear re-entry vehicles” — but so far haven’t faced legal challenge. But the “IEEPA” tariffs struck down on Friday account for about two-thirds of tariff revenue, roughly $175 billion, and the administration will have to pay it back with interest. That means the 2025 tariff experiment will likely end up a net loss to the Treasury.
In sum: slower growth, rural crisis, fewer manufacturing jobs, higher costs for families, and more debt for the government. The unfortunate captain in Seeger’s song tells his worried platoon to keep slogging as the water rises. But dry ground is nowhere in sight.
PPI’s four principles for response to tariffs and economic isolationism:
Main documents:
Supreme Court Learning Resources, Inc., v. Trump opinion.
… PPI’s comment on the ruling.
… the now-defunct April 2 decree, “Regulating Imports with a Reciprocal Tariff to Rectify Trade Practices that Contribute to Large and Persistent Annual United States Goods Trade Deficits.”
… and its replacement (for now, pending court challenges), a February 20 decree claiming a “balance of payments emergency” to invoke “Section 122” for a 15% worldwide tariff.
Soundtrack:
Seeger’s “Big Muddy.”
Data:
Census Bureau reports imports, exports, and trade balances for 2025.
BEA’s GDP series, with a link to “GDP by Industry.”
The Agriculture Department’s Economic Research Service reports on farm income.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics database. Use “Employment, Hours, and Earnings” for employment growth by industry, and “Job Openings and Labor Turnover” for total job openings, hiring, layoffs, and quits.
The U.S. International Trade Commission’s Dataweb lets you see exports, imports, and tariff collection by country and product.
Ed Gresser is Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at PPI.
Ed returns to PPI after working for the think tank from 2001-2011. He most recently served as the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Trade Policy and Economics at the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). In this position, he led USTR’s economic research unit from 2015-2021, and chaired the 21-agency Trade Policy Staff Committee.
Ed began his career on Capitol Hill before serving USTR as Policy Advisor to USTR Charlene Barshefsky from 1998 to 2001. He then led PPI’s Trade and Global Markets Project from 2001 to 2011. After PPI, he co-founded and directed the independent think tank ProgressiveEconomy until rejoining USTR in 2015. In 2013, the Washington International Trade Association presented him with its Lighthouse Award, awarded annually to an individual or group for significant contributions to trade policy.
Ed is the author of Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Global Economy (2007). He has published in a variety of journals and newspapers, and his research has been cited by leading academics and international organizations including the WTO, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. He is a graduate of Stanford University and holds a Master’s Degree in International Affairs from Columbia Universities and a certificate from the Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.
