TAMPA, Fla. — Everyday items like coffee, tea, canned goods, and clothing have gone up in price because of tariffs, impacting families' bottom lines across Tampa Bay.
It has been a year since tariffs started, and now the average effective tariff rate stands at more than 11.8%—the highest level in 80 years since World War II.
Watch report from Michael Paluska
John Ricco is the associate director of policy analysis at the Budget Lab at Yale, a non-partisan policy research center.
Ricco said the impacts on each household due to tariffs will cost the average American household an extra $1,000 to $1,500 per year.
For more than a year, Tampa Bay 28 reporter Michael Paluska has reported on the impacts of inflation and tariffs on the economy, highlighting how buying local, fresh from Florida food that isn’t imported can stretch your dollar.
To help people track these changes, the Budget Lab launched a real-time, open-source tariff tracker. It takes some coding knowledge, but Ricco said anyone can use it, and the center will post its analysis on its website.
"Our headline results focus on the overall tariff rate to sort of give people a picture of, you know, the ups and downs of the year as a whole," Ricco said. "I think the areas that are most affected by tariffs are goods categories relative to services. Now, within the goods category, you're really seeing an impact in things like vehicles. So that's not just like personal vehicles, but it's also things like buses, construction vehicles. Things that have a lot of metal content in them, those are going to be hit very high with tariffs as well, just given the 50% tariffs on aluminum, on steel, and copper. And then, when you look at clothing under the current regime at least, you're going to see some pretty notable effects as well."
Ricco said knowing the daily rate tariff impacts can help families make smarter decisions.
"And it can get very specific. It doesn't have to just be, you know, food as a whole. It can be down to the product level of the different things you buy in the grocery store," Ricco said. "It can be used as a planning tool as well."
Consumers are feeling the impact of tariffs, as a record spike in gas prices has driven inflation to a 3.3% year-over-year rate last month, the highest level in almost 2 years, according to federal data. This comes as consumer sentiment also hit a record low, according to a University of Michigan study.
In November, more than 200 food and agricultural products were exempt from U.S. reciprocal tariffs. However, Ricco said that does not mean prices will drop right away.
“Do these exemptions immediately drop the price of those goods?” Paluska asked Ricco.
"It definitely takes some time," Ricco said. "It's kind of our view with the budget lab that we hadn't fully seen the effects in terms of consumer prices from those initial tariffs. And so the carving out is more of a maybe, prices don't keep rising.”
This story was reported on-air by Michael Paluska and converted to this platform with the assistance of AI. Paluska and our editorial team verifies all reporting on all platforms for fairness and accuracy.
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