Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says the United States and China are considering lowering tariffs on “noncritical” items — the consumer goods that fill American shopping carts — as part of the package being assembled around this week’s Trump-Xi summit. Reporting on the talks describes moving certain Chinese goods back to most-favored-nation rates, covering some $30 billion in trade.

The implied promise is that American consumers will feel relief at the register.

They won’t.

Census data makes it plain: for consumer goods from China, the tariffs were never being paid out of American wallets. Chinese vendors absorbed them by cutting the values they declared to U.S. Customs.

The contemplated tariff cut on “noncritical” items would serve only to deliver a windfall between $6 and $17 billion annually to select Chinese vendors, depending on the scale of the cuts.

Read the article.