New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani won office early this month promising to address voters’ concerns about “affordability.” Soon after, on November 14, President Donald Trump issued an executive order removing tariffs he had imposed on hundreds of grocery items.
Trump had claimed for months that the tariffs would all be paid by foreign exporters, not American consumers. But after lifting duties on certain foods, he conceded that tariffs may raise some US prices.
The tariff relief list includes lots of familiar groceries: meats, vegetables, fruits, coffee and tea, cocoa, and more, as shown in figure 1 and the appendix table. Rolling back the tariffs could potentially result in price reductions of roughly 2.6 percent for bananas, 7.3 percent for coffee, and 6.8 percent for nuts, assuming retailers pass the full cost cuts on to consumers.[1]
Altogether, the annual value of the tariff reductions averages to $35 per US household―an amount more significant to low-income than high-income families. This compares, however, with the Yale Budget Lab estimate that the added costs of the full suite of Trump tariffs―after the November 14 relief―are worth an annual average of $1,700 per household.
The tariff relief list covers approximately $85 billion in annual imports. The tariffs removed are worth a total of $4.6 billion per year, and US households number 133 million.