Michigan Smart Trade Alliance tracker shows over $26 billion in tariff-driven costs paid statewide

Filed 1h ago · Via Michigan Advance · The Buffoon Desk

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Fig Leaf Rag

Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: Lucas van Leyden · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons

The Michigan Smart Trade Alliance has launched a tracker claiming Michigan households have paid more than $26 billion in tariff-related costs since January 2025, or $6,419 per household, built on National Taxpayers Union Foundation data. The group's own website admits this reflects the highest of several published estimates, while other analysts and the White House put the number lower and some dispute tariffs impose any net cost at all.

The tracker also projects a running total of $488.4 per second, a figure produced by dividing an old $23 billion total by 545 days and extrapolating forward, not by measuring anything happening in real time. The website discloses the tool was built using artificial intelligence.

The alliance also released polling, including an Ipsos survey of 559 voters and an EPIC-MRA poll showing 70% to 20% support for reducing tariffs, though that support splits sharply by party, with Republicans favoring tariffs 81% to 13%.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

A number that ticks up by the second looks awfully busy for something that's just old arithmetic wearing a stopwatch. Nobody's arguing tariffs are free, but when you reach past every other estimate on the shelf and grab the biggest one, you've told me what you wanted before you told me what you found. The poll splitting 81 to 13 by party is the honest part of the whole package, and it's buried at the bottom.

Source: Read the original at Michigan Advance → Scored: Fig Leaf Rag · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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