But if there were a 45 percent tariff on Chinese goods, at least part of that would probably be passed onto consumers in the form of higher prices. Americans would end up buying fewer Chinese things, and fewer things from anywhere else.

Shrinking sales of Chinese products would generally hurt American businesses and workers. A product labeled “Made in China” is not necessarily 100 percent Chinese, since many goods are assembled in China with parts from the United States and elsewhere. Sluggish purchases of these so-called Chinese products would reduce the sales of their American components, too.

For this reason and others, quite a lot of the money spent on Chinese goods actually ends up in the wallets of Americans. A study by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco figured that 55 cents of every $1 spent by an American shopper on a “Made in China” product goes to the Americans selling, transporting and marketing that product. Suppressing Chinese imports would harm shopkeepers and truck drivers.

In fact, making Chinese-made goods more expensive would ripple through American shopping malls. An extra $20 for, say, children’s clothing from China is $20 not spent on a new baseball glove for a child, or a birthday gift for a grandmother. A tariff on China would dent the sales of all kinds of products, even those made in the United States.

It seems likely that such a tariff would burden American consumers while doing little to create jobs for them. Gary Clyde Hufbauer and Sean Lowry at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, studying the impact of a 35 percent tariff imposed on Chinese tire imports by Washington in 2009, found that American consumers had to spend an extra $1.1 billion on tires, while the tariff protected no more than 1,200 jobs. About $900,000 for every job saved, in other words.