Have yourself a tariffed little Christmas (not like we have a choice) | Opinion
One of the funny things about tariffs — those pesky tax increases President Donald Trump has imposed on imported goods — is they show up where you least expect them.
Like on your grocery bill.
You may have absolutely nothing in your shopping cart but American-grown meat and produce. But that doesn’t mean that tariffs — Trump’s chief weapon in his trade war against the world — aren’t biting you in the budget this Christmas season.
It was the subject of a Zoom meeting I attended on Monday with Rep. Sharice Davids; Nick Levendofsky of Courtland, executive director of the Kansas Farmer’s Union; and Debbie Collins, a retiree living mainly on her KPERS retirement and Social Security after a 36-year career in Johnson County government.
Since Trump started playing games with tariffs, we’ve all become used to seeing prices rise on stuff we buy from overseas.
My personal touchstone for tariff-related price hikes has been tires for my car. As I related in an earlier column, the imported tires my car requires cost $58 each the day before Trump’s (cynically misnomered) “Liberation Day” tariffs took effect, and $66 the day after. I just looked them up and they’re $68 now.
Tariffs raise prices on domestic products, too
Regardless what you may have heard from Trump (and countless pro-Trump acolytes and influencers), it’s not the countries exporting the products who are paying the tax increase that tariffs represent, it’s you and me.
And we pay it on products that have never touched foreign soil.
I’ll let Levendofsky explain:
“Reckless tariffs disrupt export markets, invite retaliation and make it harder for Kansas farmers to compete, especially when other countries respond by shutting out US products,” he said. “At the same time, tariffs raise farmers’ costs by increasing the price of essential inputs like equipment, fertilizer, fuel and packaging materials.”
“When farmers face higher costs and fewer markets, those pressures don’t stop at the farm gate. They move through the supply chain. That’s how tariffs end up raising prices for groceries and everyday items that Kansas families rely on,” he concluded.
Collins outlined it from the consumers’ perspective: More shopping at discount stores, more buying generics instead of higher-quality name brands, more couponing, more stockpiling items when they’re on sale.
“But even with those adjustments, my grocery bill is still higher than it ever was before, and it’s really hard to make my budget stretch,” she said.
The holiday season has added stress to the usually joyful act of shopping for presents for her “two perfect grandchildren.”
“I’ve had to kind of, you know, make some choices about what I can and can’t get for them,” she said. “These tariffs may sound really abstract to people in Washington, but for those of us back home and people like me, they show up every single time I go to the store.”
This isn’t that hard to understand — especially not when you experience it on a daily basis, like most of us do.
A stealth tax increase
Meanwhile, the president is doing what he usually does — blame his predecessor and deny, deny, deny.
In his free-range rambling national address last week, he cherry-picked a handful of items that have gone down recently.
For example, Trump claimed “the price of eggs is down 82% since March,” (forgetting for the moment who was president in March, when egg prices hit their peak).
According to figures compiled by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, that was the month that the price of an average dozen eggs peaked at $6.22. Last month, they were about $2.86.
By my math, that’s a 54% decrease, not that Trump had anything to do with it anyway. The spike in egg prices was caused by an epidemic of bird flu that forced the destruction of millions of laying hens. Now egg producers have replaced those dead birds with live ones, ergo, there are more eggs on the market, and hence lower prices.
By the way, they’re not as cheap as they used to be, $2.13 a dozen two years ago. And egg ranchers are faced with the same kinds of tariff-related production cost increases Levendofsky cited when it comes to farmers.
Davids is hopeful that bipartisan cooperation in Congress might tone down Trump’s tariff excesses.
“This is about whether we’re going into these holidays, we’re going to get a chance to really sit down with our families and loved ones (and) friends and have more joy than stress,” she said. “And Kansas families want folks who are focused on lowering costs, not driving them up, which is why I’m going to keep pushing back on these reckless tariff policies.”
I wish her well.
I don’t like higher prices, especially not when they’re caused by stealth tax increases, which is all tariffs really are.
I also wish I shared her optimism for a bipartisan solution.
But in Kansas, she’s one (Democrat) of four representatives and the other three (Republicans) are committed to riding Trump’s tariff train wherever it takes their constituents.
From groceries to gifts, we’re feeling the pinch of Trump’s tariffs this holiday season, and I expect we will be for at least the next three Christmases yet to come.
This story was originally published December 23, 2025 at 4:11 AM with the headline "Have yourself a tariffed little Christmas (not like we have a choice) | Opinion."
