The New York Fed has now put a number on what any first-year economics student could have told you for free. According to its researchers, tariffs added nearly three percentage points to goods inflation by early this year, and without them the price of everyday goods would actually have been drifting gently downward. The entire rise, in other words, was homemade. This is not a malfunction, because it is precisely how a tariff works. It is a tax collected at the border from the American importer, who then passes it along to the American shopper, which means the trillions supposedly pouring in from abroad are in fact pouring out of Ohio. That a president can stand at a podium and claim foreigners are paying may be the single dumbest thing the world has ever been asked to believe. Elect economic illiterates to run a perfectly healthy economy, and this is the bill that eventually lands on the kitchen table.