Part 5/10:
At their core, tariffs act as a tax on imports, serving the dual purpose of increasing the costs of foreign goods and incentivizing consumers to purchase domestically produced items. While tariffs can lead to job creation in specific industries, they also carry the risk of inflation, resulting from heightened prices of imported goods. An analysis by LPL Financial indicated that the tariffs imposed in 2018 had a greater impact on producer prices than consumer prices, challenging the straightforward narrative that protectionist measures uniformly benefit domestic consumers.