They were sold as protection. The bill landed at checkout instead.
This is part of The Squeeze — a five-part series on how Washington’s choices, from tariffs to tax policy to corporate consolidation, are driving up costs for Maine families. Each part looks at one piece of the picture: what’s happening, why it’s happening, and what it’s costing you.
Read part one on the war in Iran, part three on the tax code, part four on corporate power, and part five on how Washington is spending your tax dollars.
By Karin Leuthy and Garrett Martin
Tariffs are pitched as a fight against other countries, a way to protect American jobs and industries. When they’re targeted and strategic, that may be true, but when used indiscriminately and recklessly, they can have the opposite effect. For the Maine family filling up the car, buying school clothes, or pricing out a home renovation, the fight has a much more familiar face: their own receipts.
The bill has already arrived
Consumer prices are up more than 5% since January 2025, and Yale’s Budget Lab estimates tariffs alone will add $1,100 to the average family’s costs over the next year. A new car now costs about $1,200 more; a used one, $1,300 more. Clothing and food are both up more than 4%. Construction materials cost 15% more, tacking roughly $11,000 onto the price of an average new home.
Steel is up 43%, copper 53%, and aluminum 57%. That shows up in unexpected places. Maine brewers are bracing for higher costs on cans. A Maine town had to redesign a new fire truck order. Manufacturers across the state say tariff uncertainty is forcing them to put projects on hold or cancel them altogether.
Maine takes a second hit
Because Canada is Maine’s largest trading partner, Mainers don’t just feel the national price increases. They take an extra hit on top. Maine’s forest-products industry, which supports nearly 30,000 jobs, has seen exports to Canada drop 20%, and a Baileyville pulp mill laid off 144 workers. Canadian visitors who used to spend more than $450 million a year in Maine have pulled back sharply as tariffs and cross-border tension sour relations. Border crossings remain more than a third below normal. Even winter road salt is at risk, since most of what Aroostook County towns use comes from Canada.
Tariffs on Canadian autos triggered Canadian retaliation last year, and the administration is now citing that decline as justification for more tariffs creating a cycle with no clear off-ramp. The latest round, and Canada’s retaliatory response that took effect on September 8, 2026, will raise costs further on steel, aluminum, and everyday goods on both sides of the border.
Who actually pays a tariff?
A tariff is a tax collected at the border, and research shows much of that cost gets passed straight through to the customer at checkout, even for American-made products that use imported parts. Americans don’t have to be the importer paying the tariff to feel its effect.
A policy without a plan
More than a year in, tariffs have been threatened, imposed, rolled back, reinstated, and delayed against nearly every country in the world. The Supreme Court has ruled some of them unconstitutional. That kind of whiplash makes it nearly impossible for a Maine builder pricing home construction cost, or a small manufacturer setting its budget for the upcoming year, or a farmer deciding what crop to plant. Uncertainty itself becomes a cost, and like the tariffs themselves, it gets passed along to the customer.
For Maine households already managing high heating and housing costs, tariffs aren’t building toward some future benefit, they’re a surcharge on top of bills that were already stretched thin.