Trump's $1.1 Billion Tax Hike on Toys and Games
"Maybe the dolls will cost a couple bucks more than they would normally," the president warned in April. That's an understatement.
Asked in April about the potential consequences of hiking tariffs on nearly all American imports, President Donald Trump delivered a memorably blunt assessment.
"Maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls," Trump said during a cabinet meeting on April 30. "And maybe the two dolls will cost a couple bucks more than they would normally."
A "couple bucks" here and a "couple bucks" there…and eventually, that adds up to a massive tax increase.
Federal data covering the first eight months of the year show that the government collected more than $1.1 billion in tariffs on toys, dolls, and games.
During the same seven months in 2024, the federal government collected no revenue on imports covered by those lines in the tariff code, because toys, dolls, and similar products entered the country duty-free thanks to trade agreemens that Trump's tariffs now supercede, explained Ed Gresser, a former assistant U.S. trade representative and vice president at the Progressive Policy Institute, in an email to Reason. (Gresser wrote a post earlier this month pegging the figure at $888 million through July, but he shared more updated figures with Reason for this post.)
Those higher taxes paid by American importers are likely to be passed along to consumers doing their holiday shopping—and the actual total is likely quite a bit higher, since the tariff data lags by a few months.
The direct costs of the tariffs don't even tell the whole story. As Reason has detailed, the tariffs have created headaches for board game and toy companies across the country, as normally reliable supply chains have become more expensive and sometimes totally unworkable amid the White House's ever-shifting tariff edicts.
"The U.S. is our least trustworthy trading partner right now—and I say that as an American," Price Johnson, COO of Cephalofair Games, told Reason last month. "I can't trust what the policy is going to be tomorrow, let alone next week."
Two weeks ago, the Trump administration seemingly admitted that its tariffs were making some goods more expensive. The White House rolled back tariffs on coffee, bananas, and several other items. That was framed as an attempt to lower grocery prices amid rising inflation and deepening skepticism from the American public about the merits of Trump's tariff plans.
As Gresser notes, however, the tariffs that remain in place are in many cases bigger tax increases than the ones on goods like coffee and bananas, which have now been removed.
"The tariff hike on toys is twice as big as that of the banana and coffee tariffs put together, and that on shoes tariff increase alone offsets the entire 238-product exclusion list," he wrote earlier this month.
Indeed, some limited reductions on tariffs might be welcome, but they are hardly enough: The Yale Budget Lab estimates that Trump's tariffs will cost the average American household around $1,700 this year.
That might explain why retailers are bracing for a less robust holiday shopping season this year. Santa Claus might be able to smuggle toys past the authorities under the cover of darkness and with the help of magic, but many American parents are facing exactly the situation that the president predicted in April: Fewer and more expensive toys this holiday season.
