The New York Fed just described, in polite economist language, a scam being run on you in real time. Companies are done eating Trump’s tariffs. They’re passing the cost to you — but not all at once, because a sudden jump would make you angry and paying attention. Instead they’re doing it a few cents at a time, month after month, a strategy the Fed’s own people call “trickle up.” Corporate America has a friendlier name for it internally: boil the frog. Turn the heat up so gradually the frog never jumps out of the pot. You’re the frog. The pot is your grocery bill.
Here’s the part that should end the argument. Nearly 90% of the tariff cost last year landed on American companies and shoppers, not the foreign countries Trump swore would pay. And the burden isn’t even split evenly — the poorest fifth of households got hit harder than the richest fifth. A tax sold as toughness on China turned out to be a tax on the person buying store-brand pasta, collected slowly enough that they’d blame inflation, or the weather, before they blamed the man who signed it. Then 44% of manufacturers and 47% of service firms told the Fed they have more of these quiet increases already queued up for the next six months.
That’s the whole trick, and it works because it’s boring. Rage needs a moment — a price that doubles overnight, a factory that closes on a Friday. A dollar here and there over eighteen months doesn’t trend. It just makes you a little poorer every time you check out, forever, while the guy who did it holds a rally about winning. Don’t let the slowness launder it. The frog that notices the water getting warm still has time to climb out.