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Column: An exhaustive debunking of the dumbest myths about Social Security

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Column: An exhaustive debunking of the dumbest myths about Social Security

Myths and canards about Social Security and its supposed fiscal troubles have steadily proliferated over the years. But it’s rare to find them all concentrated in one place as they were in a recent article on the online news site Slate.

Slate paired Eric Boehm, a writer for the conservative magazine Reason, with a writer named Celeste Headlee for a dialogue titled “Social Security Doesn’t Make Sense Anymore.” The roughly 2,000-word piece contained so many misconceptions, inaccuracies, misrepresentations, and flat-out lies about the program that I almost gave up counting. That said, it’s perhaps worthwhile to have a one-stop shop for all these solecisms, if only for the purpose of debunking them en masse.

Most people 65 and older receive the majority of their income from Social Security.

— Kathleen Romig tells the truth about Social Security that Slate missed

The article called for a “radical rethink” of Social Security to make it somehow more relevant to Americans in the modern world. Boehm and Headlee evidently think that’s a world in which America is on the brink of insolvency and can’t afford to spend another dime on the disadvantaged, that Social Security recipients are rich, and that older Americans can have their pick of jobs that will keep them happy and healthy indefinitely.

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Slate says their dialogue was “edited for clarity,” but the only thing it made clear is that neither of them knows the first thing about Social Security. More alarming, they showed no inclination to learn.

There isn’t space here or time for me to list every solecism in the piece, so I will focus on some of the most egregious errors.

“People who are young and working … are funding the retirement of generally wealthier Americans.” This notion was popularized by former Sen. Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.), who went around calling Social Security beneficiaries “greedy geezers” and disdained the program as “a milk cow with 310 million tits.”

The underlying idea is that the average Social Security beneficiaries are doing better than the poor souls in the working class who are paying for their lives of leisure through their payroll taxes. It’s commonly reported that retirees are, on average, the wealthiest cohort of Americans.

Here’s what’s wrong with that idea: The reason that so many seniors are able to live comfortably is because they receive Social Security.

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As Kathleen Romig of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has reported, “most people 65 and older receive the majority of their income from Social Security.” The poverty rate among Americans older than 65 is 10.3%. Without Social Security, it would be nearly 38%. To put it another way, Social Security keeps more than 15 million seniors out of poverty.

The average Social Security monthly check is $1,709.70, which works out to $20,516 a year. That’s about $800 more than the federal poverty line for a family of two.

The idea that cutting off the wealthiest seniors or at least reducing their benefits would help save Social Security is a popular myth, with recipients like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates the most common illustrative targets. The goal is to promote “means-testing” the program.

But myth it is. As of 2017, about 47,500 millionaires were receiving Social Security. Their total benefits came to about $1.4 billion, or about 15 hundredths of a percent of the $941 billion in benefits the system paid out that year. If you’re intent on “saving” Social Security by means-testing, you would need to start cutting off or reducing benefits for recipients earning about $70,000 a year in non-Social Security income — not millionaires.

Boehm backed up his thoughts on this topic with some suspect data. He cites the Federal Reserve in asserting that “the average value of a retired person’s assets” today is $538,000. Hmm. My reading of the Fed’s latest digest from its Survey of Consumer Finances, issued just last month, places the median net worth of those aged 65-74 at about $410,000; for those 75 and older, it’s $335,600.

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Does that make them rich? Using the common rule of thumb that one can spend 4% a year of retirement savings to have the best chance of not outliving your nest egg, $410,000 produces $16,400 a year. Not the basis of a lavish lifestyle. Even a nest egg of $538,000 doesn’t make for a life of leisure — in one’s first year of retirement the 4% rule would yield $21,520.

Just raise the retirement age? Boehm: “When Social Security began, you could get benefits at age 65, but the average life expectancy in this country was like 61. So the average person actually died before they qualified for Social Security.” This is another quacking canard from the Simpson duck pond.

Average life expectancy from birth in 1940, when the first Social Security checks went out, was about 63 and a half, which I suppose is “like” 61. But that figure was skewed lower by high infant mortality; Boehm acknowledges this, but doesn’t bother to explore its ramifications, perhaps because it explodes his take.

For Americans who made it to their first birthday back then, average life expectancy was nearly 66. For those entering their working careers, say at age 20—the relevant cohort for assessing the chances of collecting Social Security — it was nearly 69.

In other words, the average person did not actually die before qualifying for Social Security; the average person collected for years. Indeed, those who were 65 in the late 1930s lived on average nearly to 78.

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Anyway, life expectancy is closely connected to race, educational attainment and income. Those who live longest are whites, college graduates and the affluent. Raising the retirement age is a curse on those who don’t fall into those categories. White people aged 65 have gained more than six years of longevity since the 1930s; Black males only about four years.

By the way, what are workers supposed to do while they’re waiting longer to reach retirement age? Leaving aside the impact of age discrimination that makes it harder for older people to obtain or keep jobs, the Census Bureau has reported that more than half of all workers aged 58 or older were in physically demanding jobs or jobs with difficult working conditions — more than 13 million workers.

As economists Cherrie Bucknor and Dean Baker pointed out in a 2016 paper, “the workers who were most likely to be in these jobs were Latinos, the least educated (less than a high school diploma), immigrants, and the lowest wage earners.”

I don’t know what Boehm’s working conditions are like, but I’d bet they don’t “require dynamic, explosive, static, or trunk strength, bending or twisting of the body, stamina, maintaining balance, or kneeling or crouching” or involve “exposure to abnormal temperatures, contaminants, hazardous equipment, whole body vibration, or distracting or uncomfortable noise.” It’s easy to think that everyone else should work harder, if your frame of reference is your own office desk.

Social Security is “a welfare program”: Boehm pushed this idea hard. “You would never build a welfare program, you would never get Congress to approve the construction of a new welfare program, that took money directly from the paychecks of workers and transferred it to a wealthy cohort somewhere in this country,” he says.

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There’s a manifest danger in calling Social Security a welfare program. That’s because welfare programs are easiest to axe when conservatives go hunting for budget cuts — Americans typically view them as serving layabouts and malingerers at their expense.

Social Security is nothing like a welfare program, however. It’s a contributory system, funded entirely by its beneficiaries through the payroll tax. Its benefits are tied to lifetime contributions. That’s why billionaires get it, too — they contributed to it during their working lives. Nor is it only an old-age pension: It encompasses disability benefits and insurance to cover spouses and children when their breadwinner suffers an untimely death.

Before Republicans started casting “entitlements” as a dirty word, Americans saw their entitlement to Social Security benefits as a blessing — most still do. They’re entitled to it because they’ve paid for it with every paycheck.

The idea that the system represents a war between seniors and younger generations is just wrong. Whatever fiscal problems face Social Security, it’s because it’s exploited by the wealthy at the expense of everyone else.

In 1937, when the payroll tax was first collected, it applied to about 92% of all earned income. By 2020, that figure had fallen to 83%, largely because of an increase in income inequality. Were the payroll tax to be restructured to cover 90% of earnings, as the Congressional Budget Office reported last year, that would produce an additional $670 billion in revenue over 10 years; raise it to cover all annual earnings over $250,000, the gain would be $1.2 trillion — all without cutting benefits by even a penny.

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Social Security “is going to hit a brick wall in the 2030s.” This is Boehm’s gloss on the familiar projection that the program’s trust fund will run out some time in the middle of that decade. Is that a “brick wall”? Hardly: At that point, the program will still be guaranteed enough revenues to continue paying three-quarters of all scheduled benefits.

That’s a middle-of-the-road estimate. The system’s actuaries have also projected that given alternative demographic and economic assumptions — including assuming the unemployment rate and economy stay where they are today and immigration rises closer to its historical norm, the program might even be able to pay all benefits indefinitely.

—”The cost of Social Security is … ballooning quite rapidly”: This holds no water at all. The CBO projects that Social Security benefits as a share of gross domestic product, currently 5.1%, will rise to 6.2% by 2053. If that’s a balloon, it’s inflating pretty slowly.

In that time span, incidentally, GDP will more than triple to $79.5 trillion from $26.2 trillion, according to the CBO.

Boehm’s argument is that Social Security is becoming such a fiscal burden that it’s “killing the safety net.” He says, “There’s not enough money to go around,” which is absurd to say about the richest nation in world history. He says the cost of Social Security and Medicare, which he seems to think, erroneously, are related programs, is “pushing other things to the budget into a territory where we have to borrow more money to pay for them.”

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That’s obviously not so. We wouldn’t have to borrow if we took such reasonable steps as repealing the 2017 tax cuts for corporations and the rich that drove a hole into the federal budget, or started charging the wealthy for their fair share of Social Security. He mentions that Americans have experienced “decades of greater prosperity,” but not that the benefits of that prosperity have been collected overwhelmingly by the 1%.

Boehm and Headlee plainly intended to tell it like it is on Social Security. Unfortunately, their effort was hampered by lack of information. Would it have killed them to do even a little research?

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Video: Fed Chair Says Trump Tariffs Could Worsen Inflation

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Video: Fed Chair Says Trump Tariffs Could Worsen Inflation

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Fed Chair Says Trump Tariffs Could Worsen Inflation

Jerome H. Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, stressed that the tariffs announced so far go well beyond what the Fed had expected even in its worst-case scenario.

The level of tariff increases announced so far is significantly larger than anticipated, and the same is likely to be true of the economic effects, which will include higher inflation and slower growth. We may find ourselves in the challenging scenario in which our dual mandate goals are in tension. If that were to occur, we would consider how far the economy is from each goal and the potentially different time horizons over which those respective gaps would be anticipated to close. These are very fundamental changes in — long-held in some cases — policies in the United States, and there’s not any real experience. I mean, the Smoot-Hawley tariffs were actually not this large and they were 95 years ago. So there isn’t a modern experience of how to think about this. And businesses and households are saying in surveys that they are experiencing incredibly high uncertainty. I mean, your question really is what if the uncertainty remains high? I think that’s a difficult environment. If the United States were to become a jurisdiction where risks are just structurally higher going forward, that would make us less attractive as a jurisdiction. We don’t know that at this point. But I think that would be the effect.

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Commentary: Trump's Kafkaesque attack on Social Security–Declaring living people as dead

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Commentary: Trump's Kafkaesque attack on Social Security–Declaring living people as dead

In so many ways the Trump administration has given us a window into a dystopian world — flouting a unanimous decision by the Supreme Court, elevating scientific myth into healthcare policy and so on. But its latest attack on the Social Security system is arguably the most frightening of all.

Reportedly pressured by Elon Musk’s DOGE team and by Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, the current stewards of Social Security have allowed the government to declare 6,300 people “dead” in a crucial Social Security database, even though they’re very much alive.

The initial reports of this action were reported by the New York Times and Washington Post, but it was confirmed for me, if somewhat obliquely, by a White House spokeswoman.

You’d have a hard time explaining this to someone in a way that doesn’t seem dystopian.

— Devin O’Connor, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

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“President Trump promised mass deportations and by removing the monetary incentive for illegal aliens to come and stay, we will encourage them to self-deport,” the spokeswoman, Elizabeth Huston, told me by email.

The White House claims that “DHS identified over 6,300 temporarily paroled aliens on the terrorist watch list or with FBI criminal records,” and as of April 8 “terminated” their right to hold Social Security numbers or receive benefits.

“To prevent them from receiving any payments,” the White House told me, the Social Security Administration moved their numbers into what the White House calls the “Ineligible Master File.”

What’s that? It’s what is officially known as Social Security’s “Death Master File,” the database of deceased number holders.

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Make no mistake: In effect, these 6,300 living, breathing individuals have been declared “dead” by Trump administration fiat.

“You’d have a hard time explaining this to someone in a way that doesn’t seem dystopian,” says Devin O’Connor, an expert on Social Security at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Social Security advocates are aghast. “As with most of the actions of the Social Security Administration since Trump came into office, we cannot make rational sense of the policy to place immigrants on the SSA’s list of deceased persons,” says Max Richtman, chief executive of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare.

“These are people who are in the United States legally and need active Social Security numbers in order to work and transact personal business,” Richtman says. “By placing them on the list of dead persons, the Trump administration is needlessly preventing them from utilizing their Social Security numbers for legitimate reasons.”

Before we delve further into the consequences of this action — for the newly “dead,” for all Social Security beneficiaries and indeed American citizens, and for the Social Security system itself — a few words on how this came about.

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It started on inauguration day, when Trump abruptly terminated four Biden administration humanitarian programs granting legal U.S. residence to applicants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela seeking asylum. By the end of Biden’s term, more than 500,000 applicants had been granted so-called parole via the programs known collectively as CHNV. Typically, they feared political violence or death in their home countries.

After passing national security and public safety scrutiny and showing that they had a U.S. sponsor to provide housing and other support, they were granted a “parole” of up to two years permitting them to work legally, which required them to obtain Social Security numbers and to contribute payroll tax to the program. During that period, they could seek more permanent permission to stay in the country. As of April 8, they lost those rights and obligations.

The White House hasn’t specified what evidence it has that the 6,300 immigrants declared “dead” were members of terrorist groups or FBI-designated criminals.

As it happens, the termination order was blocked Monday by federal Judge Indira Talwani of Boston. In a 41-page order, Talwani raised the question of whether Congress had given Trump the authority, “after parole has been granted and individuals have entered the country on a lawful basis,” to revoke the grants of parole “en masse.” She wrote: “The answer is no.” The revocation, she ruled, would have to be on a case-by-case basis, just as their paroles had been granted.

Meanwhile, Tuesday in Baltimore, federal Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander convened a hearing over whether the Social Security Administration has complied with her earlier order to keep DOGE employees’ hands off the agency’s records — an issue on which the unilateral “death” designations may well be relevant. Hollander had ordered acting Commissioner Leland Dudek to appear for testimony, but the government has refused to allow him to appear.

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That brings us back to the Death Master File. (The administration has said it should be referred to now as the “Ineligible Master File,” but its authority to change its official designation isn’t clear, and in any case this looks merely like an attempt to obscure the nature of the file itself.)

The DMF is one of the most important and closely supervised databases in the Social Security Administration’s possession. Currently it contains more than 141 million names of deceased workers, along with their Social Security numbers and their dates of birth and death. The program uses the information, according to former Social Security official Tiffany Flick, for the purpose of “discontinuing benefits payments to deceased individuals, confirming an individual’s right to survivor benefits, and identifying fraud” carried out by users of dead persons’ Social Security numbers.

The information is carefully vetted unless it comes from family members, a state agency or a funeral home, Flick said in a court declaration. The agency takes pains to verify reports from anyone else. Of the 2.9 million death reports received each year, Flick said, fewer than one-third of 1% typically have to be corrected.

Federal law requires the agency to keep the full database confidential. A redacted version, however, is marketed via the Department of Commerce to banks, credit agencies and other financial institutions — but only if they can pass an annual certification in which they have to show they can protect the data from illicit use. The limited version contains only information that is more than three years old.

There can be no question that “intentionally marking people who are still living as dead” in the master file “is unheard of and improper,” Flick stated.

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Beyond that, “when Social Security incorrectly declares someone dead, it ruins their lives,” observes Nancy Altman, president of the advocacy organization Social Security Works.

In 2023, Altman notes, “a Maryland woman was wrongly declared dead and found her health insurance and Social Security benefits terminated, her home listed for sale, her credit cards canceled, and her water shut off. Her health deteriorated as she spent endless hours trying to undo the mistake. Indeed, she did actually die seven months later.”

Because the DMF is viewed as authoritative by financial services companies, adds O’Connor, its misuse can cause “disruption in your bank account access, your credit cards canceled, your pension benefits being cut off, your insurance coverage canceled or an insurance claim denied. If you apply for a job your application could be rejected, or have a denial of credit.”

The very idea that government bureaucrats can designate living persons as dead for reasons other than their actual death should send shudders through all Social Security participants, citizens and otherwise — especially given the manipulation of the program from Trump acolytes already and the absence of official oversight over DOGE’s rampaging minions.

“Now, if you’re included in the Death Master File even by accident, how do you show not only that you’re not dead, but that you don’t belong on the file for some other unknown, mysterious reason?” O’Connor asks. “It’s creating the potential for some Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmares every time they make a mistake — and there will be mistakes.”

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As for the administration’s contention that the 6,300 “dead” people are on a terrorism watch list or FBI list, the administration’s treatment of facts and statistics when it comes to immigrants or Social Security does not inspire confidence.

The administration, for instance, has consistently described Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whom it admits to having transported to El Salvador illegally, as an “illegal alien” and a member of the criminal gang MS-13. But he was in the U.S. legally, and no valid evidence has been produced to show he’s a member of MS-13 — quite the contrary, he may be a victim of MS-13.

DOGE’s claims about Social Security data are almost risibly ignorant. Musk asserted that DOGE found millions of dead people as old as 150 receiving benefits, but he was misinterpreting a software artifact.

The manipulation of the Death Master File itself has obliterated its validity as a data source for financial and commercial institutions. If those institutions can no longer trust what was once the gold standard for information about their present or future customers, how can it be used at all?

What’s scariest about the cavalier manipulation of the Death Master File is that Trump’s refusal to observe bureaucratic norms, statutory limitations, and even to respond to court orders, points to the question of how far he’s willing to go. Designating living persons as dead could be only the beginning.

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“If they can do this to somebody,” O’Connor says, “they can do it to anybody.”

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How Much Are Tariffs on Chinese Goods? It’s Trickier Than You Think.

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How Much Are Tariffs on Chinese Goods? It’s Trickier Than You Think.

The escalating trade war between the United States and China has created deep uncertainty for U.S. companies that rely on Chinese suppliers. Retaliations in recent days by the two countries have resulted in huge average tax rates on each other’s imports, with tariffs often costing more than the price of the goods themselves.

But because of an ever-changing patchwork of trade rules, not every product will be charged an astronomical tariff, trade lawyers, customs brokers and importers say. In some cases, tariffs will pile on other tariffs. In other instances, they can reduce costs, while other times they can cancel out new ones.

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The new 125 percent rate that President Trump imposed will in many cases be added on top of long-existing duties. There are four main categories of tariffs that are imposed on goods from China.

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Note: The tariff on auto parts comes into effect in early May. The average provided for the base rate is calculated by the World Trade Organization, which computes an average of all tariff lines. A large share of U.S. imports are assigned a 0% duty, but there are some very high rates in the tariff schedule.

Rates ultimately depend on what is imported, what materials are used (from where), which special rates are applied and what sorts of products are exempt.

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New tariff rates on select goods from China

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Note: Rates are rounded to the nearest whole number. The rates are calculated assuming metal furniture made of 100 percent aluminum and door hinges made of 50 percent aluminum.

Understanding which tariffs will apply and which ones won’t will ultimately determine what businesses choose to buy, how they’ll factor in the new costs — if they can even afford them — and what they may ultimately pass on to their customers.

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“Companies are scrambling to mitigate their tariff exposure, particularly those with supply chains involving China,” said Richard A. Mojica, a customs lawyer at Miller & Chevalier. “But there are only a few levers they can pull.”

Here is how the import duties on certain goods from China add up:

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  • 0%

    Base tariff

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  • 20%

    Fentanyl” tariff

The United States imported nearly $52 billion worth of smartphones in 2024 — more than 80 percent of it from China. Smartphones from the country were originally subject to a duty of up to 145 percent, but customs guidance issued late Friday exempted laptops and smartphones from the 125 percent reciprocal tariff on most Chinese goods. The devices are still subject to new import taxes introduced earlier this year.

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  • 0%

    Base tariff

  • 100%

    Pre-2025 extra tariff

  • 20%

    Fentanyl” tariff

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  • 125%

    Reciprocal” tariff

Syringes and needles are charged some of the highest tariff rates. These items are among the Chinese goods targeted initially by the first Trump administration and then subject to increases under Mr. Biden. His administration levied a 100 percent tariff on syringes and needles last September as a part of an effort to protect American factories and show a tough-on-China stance.

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These types of tariffs on Chinese goods can range from 7.5 percent up to 100 percent and apply to clothing, solar panels, electric vehicles and other goods that China has been accused of selling at far lower prices than many American businesses do.

With this week’s tariffs included, American importers will now have to pay a 245 percent tariff — or roughly 2½ times the cost of the product itself.

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Over three-quarters of toys imported into the United States come from China, making it America’s biggest supplier. Previously, things like tricycles, stuffed animals, dolls and puzzles could enter the country duty free. Now, all these items are charged a 145 percent import tax. Retail prices for these items are expected to rise significantly.

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Many goods have a category-specific tariff that applies regardless of the country of origin. For wool sweaters, that is 16 percent. They are also on the list of goods subject to an additional tariff introduced during Mr. Trump’s first term. For the $170 million worth of wool sweaters that came into the United States from China last year, the tariff rate was roughly 24 percent — which at the time was considered relatively high.

Now, with tariffs from February intended to punish China over the flow of fentanyl into the United States and with this week’s “reciprocal” round, the import tax for sweaters has significantly jumped.

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Note: For this example, we assume that the chair is 100% aluminum.

Before Mr. Trump imposed a 25 percent tariff on all foreign steel and aluminum parts in March, there was already a levy on some Chinese metal imports — all part of a protectionist effort to bolster domestic manufacturing. But Mr. Trump’s new tariffs significantly expanded what will be taxed: Not just steel beams or aluminum rods, but a wide range of products that contain aluminum and steel components.

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While most U.S. imports of these metals are from other countries, including Canada, China supplies many products that have metal components.

Aluminum and steel products are exempted from this week’s “reciprocal” tariffs, which reduces the effective tax rate of Chinese steel and aluminum products to lower than that of many other goods.

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Note: For this example, we assume that the door hinge is 50% aluminum.

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New tariffs of 25 percent also apply to all imported cars, and starting in May, car parts. Some car parts, like door hinges, fall under both the car parts tariff and the aluminum tariff. In this case, an importer would not only have to pay a duty on the value of the aluminum in the part, but also an additional tariff on the value of the entire product.

Because this item is subject to the aluminum and car parts tariffs, it is exempted from the China-specific reciprocal tariff.

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On the other end of the cost spectrum are books. Ninety-three percent of the nearly $600 million in children’s books that the United States imports each year comes from China. Children’s books typically enter the United States duty free.

“Informational materials” are one of the very few classes of goods that are exempt from new tariffs on China this year.

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Do you have a business that relies on Chinese suppliers? Tell us how the tariffs are affecting you.

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The New York Times wants to talk to business owners about President Trump’s imposition of additional tariffs on imports from China. We’ll read each questionnaire response. We will not publish any part of your response without talking with you further. We will not share your contact information outside The Times newsroom, and we will use it only to contact you.

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