Somehow, the buzzword of 2025 is an economic one, though my kingdom for it be some oddball TikTok slang I'd never heard before. No, we're stuck with the word "tariff."
For those who've been living under a rock, a tariff is a tax on the consumer put in place by a government when it imports a product into another country. This is designed to make it more desirable to purchase goods from within the country of import, but rarely works that way and, again, is a tax on the consumer. For example, if you have a set of gloves that cost $100 and are manufactured in a country with a 25% tariff on its imports, it'd cost the consumer $125.
And this isn't even getting into the idea of tariff wars, which sees countries tariffing other countries as the original country tries to tariff the other country. It's tit-for-tat gamesmanship played with the hard-earned money of the consumer.
