President Donald Trump’s tariffs in 2025 have cost the average Wisconsin household $1,095 and caused the loss of 3,910 manufacturing jobs statewide, according to a new report.
The report also found the tariffs had a particularly strong impact on the Midwest due to its focus on manufacturing and agriculture, with small businesses and lower-income families bearing the highest costs. But Wisconsin households fared better than the average Midwest and U.S. households, which lost $2,044 and $1,320, respectively, to the tariffs Trump imposed in 2025.
“Tariffs imposed by the second Trump administration have disproportionately impacted Midwest states,” Frank Manzo, who is a co-author and an economist at the Midwest Economic Policy Institute, told the Journal Sentinel. “But instead of bringing manufacturing roaring back, tariffs have reduced factory employment by thousands of jobs and shrunk the economy.”
The report, by the nonpartisan Midwest Economic Policy Institute and the Project for Middle Class Renewal at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, arrives after a tumultuous year and a half for tariffs since the beginning of Trump’s second term in January 2025.
On April 2, 2025 — dubbed “Liberation Day” by Trump — the administration announced broad tariffs between 10% and 50% on nearly 100 countries. Throughout the rest of last year, the Trump administration flip-flopped on many of those tariffs, enacting temporary pauses, reciprocal hikes and bilateral trade agreements.
While the U.S. Supreme Court struck down most of those tariffs in February 2026, Trump imposed a temporary 10% tariff on all countries later that day under a different mechanism. On July 24, the administration imposed tariffs of betweeen 10% and 12.5% to 60 countries, including Mexico, Canada and China, that it accused of permitting forced labor.
U.S. consumers and businesses bore 90% of the costs of Trump’s new tariffs in 2025, while foreign exporters absorbed only 10% of the costs, the report said, citing the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Tariffs disproportionately impacted Midwest, but Wisconsin was spared
Trump’s tariffs in 2025 cost the average household across Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin $2,044, higher than the national average of $1,320.
That difference is attributable to the Midwest’s higher share of consumer spending — like cars, clothing and groceries — than the nationwide average, Manzo said. Midwestern states also rely more on imported goods, and the tariffs make their average basket of goods more expensive, he said.
But Wisconsin, with an average household cost of $1,095, fared better than the average American and Midwestern household, partly because the state uses more American-made goods, Manzo said.
The tariffs have also cost the Midwest jobs in manufacturing, which makes up a disproportionately high share of employment in the region, the report said. That was due to the higher costs of imported input, as well as retaliatory tariffs imposed by other countries.
The manufacturing industry has shed 187,186 jobs nationwide and 6,055 jobs in Wisconsin due to Trump’s 2025 tariffs, the report said. Across the Midwest, the loss totaled 41,688 jobs.
“We’re seeing a new deindustrialization being caused by tariff policies that rhetorically are put forward as a way to create jobs domestically, but the opposite effect, certainly in manufacturing, is the case,” Robert Bruno, who is a co-author of the report and the director of the Project for Middle Class Renewal, told the Journal Sentinel.
The tariffs’ impacts on the agricultural industry were also amplified in the Midwest due to the region’s higher-than-average share of the agriculture sector, the report said.
“No region of the country is more exposed to these risks than the Midwest,” Manzo said.
Tariffs hit poorer households, small businesses hardest
Lower-income and middle-class families were impacted more by Trump’s tariffs than their richer counterparts because they spend more of their income on goods like groceries and household essentials, the report said. Meanwhile, wealthier families spend proportionally more on services, whose costs are less impacted by the tariffs.
In Wisconsin, the bottom 10% of households paid 2.4% of their income, or $348, for tariffs, and the top 10% paid 0.8% of their income, or $1,623, the report said.
Similarly, Trump’s tariffs hurt small businesses more than those with bigger scales, the report found. Those businesses were more vulnerable to tariffs because they operate on smaller margins and have less monopoly power to fall back on, Bruno said.
“They simply don’t have the scale to deal with the added cost, the inflationary impact,” he said.
And that, in turn, results in fewer working hours for small business employees, Bruno said.
Report urges federal, state policies to address harm
In their report, Bruno and Manzo called on both the federal government and state officials to mitigate the economic costs of Trump’s tariffs.
On the federal level, Congress should reassert its power over trade policy and repeal Trump’s tariffs, the report said. The legislature should also direct the Department of the Treasury to refund consumers, not businesses, for the 2025 tariffs that were deemed unconstitutional, the report said.
“Instead of giving money to businesses who just passed those costs on to consumers and working families, the federal government could issue refund checks of at least $750 to single taxpayers and $1,500 to married couples,” Manzo said. “That’s the easiest way to get the money back to the American people who’ve paid these tariffs.”
Those numbers roughly add up to $166 billion, which is how much the federal government raised from the tariffs, he said.
The best way to spur economic growth, the report said, is not tariffs but by raising the income of workers.
The federal government could adopt laws that make it easier for workers to organize into unions or implement a steeper income tax to empower workers, the report said.
And while state governments have no control over tariff policies or refunds, they can mitigate the costs of the tariffs with better protections around unemployment, Manzo said. Those policies include increasing unemployment benefits and revoking tax benefits from companies that lay off workers or move production overseas.
Out of the six Midwestern states included in the report, all but Illinois and Minnesota voted for Trump in 2024.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: New report reveals cost of Trump tariffs on Wisconsin households
Reporting by Jaeha Jang, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
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