The New York Times just can’t seem to get a grip on the fact that its incessant fearmongering that economic catastrophe was nigh due to the Trump tariffs over the past year never materialized. Times reporters Ana Swanson and Sydney Ember once again tried to yank victory from the jaws of defeat in their February 12 anti-Trump screed, “Americans Are Paying the Bill for Tariffs, Despite Trump’s Claims.” They whipped out a new “study” by the New York Federal Reserve to take another jab at President Donald Trump, which isn’t surprising given the Fed’s current bad blood with the White House: “[H]as frequently claimed that foreign countries were paying for his tariffs, not Americans. But as economists predicted, that is largely turning out not to be the case.” Economists The Times plucked out of the ether in months past were also predicting a big “recession” at this point in the Trump administration, and yet U.S. economic growth is still projected to be hovering around 4 percent for Q4 2025 as of February 12. But who’s keeping track, right? Both Swanson and Ember parroted the Fed’s estimation that “90 percent of the economic burden of the president’s tariffs fell on U.S. companies and consumers.” But there’s a whole lot of nuance Swanson and Ember conveniently chose to leave out. First, as the Economic Policy Innovation Center summarized, the latest Congressional Budget Office “baseline projects that revenue will be at or above 17.5% of GDP from FY 2026 onward, which is higher than the 50-year (1975-2025) revenue average of 17.3% of GDP. This is due to CBO projecting a significant increase in customs duties from tariffs levied by President Trump in 2025.”  Economist and White House counselor Peter Navarro noted in a February 10 Letter to the Editor in The Wall Street Journal that “Paying a tariff and bearing its economic burden aren’t the same thing.” Specifically, as Navarro contextualized, “While the importer of record, such as a U.S. company, writes the check to Customs, which party carries the tariff’s true economic burden—its ‘incidence’—is determined through the adjustment process: via upfront price cuts by foreign exporters, margin compression, volume changes, sourcing shifts and currency movements.” As can be reasonably deduced, such an “adjustment process” by foreign exporters takes time to be reflected in the data, and yet The Times apparently determined it good practice to just focus on an eight month period within the Trump administration  This isn’t conjecture. Both Swanson and Ember buried this exact point in the second-to-last paragraph of their so-called news item: The researchers at the New York Fed found that foreign suppliers started to bear a greater proportion of the tariff costs by the end of the year, likely as U.S. companies began renegotiating their contracts. Still, in November, 86 percent of the tariff cost was still passing through to the United States. Navarro concluded that “[e]ven when prices don’t visibly fall, exporters still lower their effective prices through rebates, discounts, extended payment terms or by absorbing costs internally to remain competitive.” Swanson and Ember didn’t mention any of this.  Also not helping Swanson and Ember's case is the fact that the Bureau of Labor Statistics just released a report February 13 showing inflation easing to 2.4 percent, defying expectations and illustrating the muted effects of tariffs on prices once again. Fox Business Making Money host Charles Payne underscored that the data exposes how the media, like The Times, have been treating readers to a "nonstop stream of articles and research reports" this week "on the impact of tariffs. The plan was to permeate the air with negativity and set up a 'moment of [t]ruth' with a hot CPI report this morning. The scheme backfired again. CPI was better than expected and much better than the narrative laid out by the fearmongers." No kidding.  This week saw a nonstop stream of articles and research reports on the impact of tariffs. The plan was to permeate the air with negativity and set up a "moment of gruth" with a hot CPI report this morning. The scheme backfired again. CPI was better than expected and much… — Charles V Payne (@cvpayne) February 13, 2026 Economist Daniel Lacalle also skewered the argument that the U.S. is bearing over 90 percent of the tariff costs, based on another study by the Germany-based Kiel Institute making the typical media rounds: The key result behind the headline circulating in the media—that exporters absorb 4% and the U.S. absorbs 96% of tariffs—is based on a coefficient of approximately −0.039 with a standard error of 0.024, which is only significant at the 10% level, showing a very noisy estimate despite having 25.6 million observations, Carney explains. With that level of imprecision, the implicit confidence interval itself allows for exporter absorption between 0% and 9%, so presenting “4%” as a precise figure creates an illusion of accuracy that the data do not support. Specifically, if both import and export prices rise but import prices barely budged in the 12 months ending November 2025 (which Bureau of Labor Statistics data insinuate), Lacalle concluded that “the effect of the tariffs is being absorbed throughout the supply chain, particularly in locations with the greatest excess capacity.” This is supported by another concession Swanson and Ember chose to bury in the sixteenth paragraph: Still, the impact of tariffs has been smaller than many economists anticipated, in part because many companies feared that raising prices would drive away customers. Tariffs have lifted prices on some imported goods, but for the most part, prices have not ballooned. Oh, you don’t say! In fact — not that you would know it from Swanson and Ember’s piece — tariff revenues have spiked 304 percent, putting the year-to-date tally at $124 billion, according to CNBC. “The tariffs have helped put a dent in the pace of the budget deficit. The shortfall in January totaled roughly $95 billion, down about 26% from the year-ago period,” CNBC concluded. Is this to suggest that tariffs are painless writ large? Nope. But refusing to take ownership for failed Armageddon prophecies by doubling down on them is just another textbook example of the kind of hubris the American people have come to expect from the elitist media.