Tariffs are pushing up inflation while Idaho’s delegation does nothing | Opinion

President Donald Trump’s on-again-off-again tariffs, which Idaho’s congressional delegation has done nothing to rein in, are starting to bite in ways that everyday consumers will begin to feel.

While many of Trump’s most severe tariff threats were rescinded before they could cause a real disaster (leading some on Wall Street to begin reassuring themselves with the acronym TACO — Trump Always Chickens Out), the tariffs currently in effect in the U.S. are higher than at any time in the last century or so. And there are growing signals that those tariffs, which are in essence taxes on American consumers, are starting to bleed out into the economy.

The latest batch of inflation statistics, released this week, shows prices are not only continuing to rise, but the rate at which they rise is ticking up. Inflation is particularly bad in the areas of the economy that most concern many Idahoans: The cost of housing is rising at nearly 4% per year nationwide; food is up 3%, as are the prices of used cars and trucks.

Overall inflation was at 2.7%, an ongoing rise that has continued for months. Core inflation — which excludes prices which change quickly, like food and energy, to get a more stable view of the economy — was a bit higher at 2.9%.

In a recent earnings call, Susan Morris, Albertsons’ new CEO, detailed to investors how the Boise-based national grocery chain is dealing with the dual headwinds of rising prices and its blocked merger with Kroger.

“We’re starting to see increases in cost of goods moving ahead. And we’ve got a very rigorous process of, first and foremost, quite frankly, just pushing back. We worked hard and it shows in our price position as well that we’ve not passed through all of the inflation that we’re seeing from a cost of goods perspective,” Morris told investors.

Of course, you have to take the corporate cheerleading with a grain of salt. Albertsons argues for lower prices from suppliers, and so do Kroger, Walmart, Costco, Safeway and every other retailer in the world.

They’re ultimately competing with one another for cheap access to goods and for the loyalty of customers, and to maximize the profits they can give shareholders.

When prices rise for everyone uniformly, because somebody chose to add 10% for no reason at all, someone has to pay it. And that someone will be you.

Don’t expect that to sway Trump.

As the Wall Street Journal economic commentator Greg Ip recently argued, Trump has already achieved the main goal of his decision to impose tariffs: imposing tariffs.

Post-facto justifications — tariffs are a tool to make deals; tariffs are reciprocal retaliation for other countries’ industrial policy; tariffs are to combat fentanyl trafficking or illegal immigration — are just that, meaningless words uttered to justify a decision that was made long ago.

Trump has simply always liked tariffs, a gut-level fixation he developed during the economic rise of Japan in the 1980s.

Ultimately, this combination of higher prices, higher taxes and a worse economy just means everyone has a poorer quality of life. Albertsons reported that customers are shifting their purchasing habits, downgrading to pork and ground beef from more expensive cuts of meat, for example. At the same time, Albertsons is trying to cut labor costs by eliminating American jobs and shipping them overseas — the exact opposite of the idea that tariffs would bring jobs back on shore.

This is the point where we’d normally ask whether our congressional delegation — all of whom would have been die-hard opponents of tariffs 10 years ago — will put its voters ahead of its fealty to Trump.

But that’s a question that was long ago asked and answered.