The newly imposed 10 percent tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese imports to the United States won’t have a large effect on American consumers, according to Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, and here’s why: “That’s a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of one percent [of] total inflation in the U.S. Because it’s spread over thousands and thousands of products, nobody’s going to actually notice it at the end of the day.”

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross leaves CNBC hosts dumbfounded after he tells them that American families won't be bothered by tariffs on $200b of Chinese goods because "it's spread over thousands and thousands of products" so "nobody will actually notice" that prices went up. pic.twitter.com/VXgCZ9EQFr — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 18, 2018

This logic—that if you pocket small portions of a wide range of transactions, it will go unnoticed—underlies popular schemes of movies such as Richard Pryor’s paycheck rounding in Superman III to the ill-fated interest-payment embezzling in Office Space, as explained by one of the disillusioned technology employees who helps come up with the it:

It’s pretty brilliant. What it does is where there’s a bank transaction, and the interests are computed in the thousands a day in fractions of a cent, which it usually rounds off—what this does is it takes those remainders and puts it into your account.

Or as Ron Livingston’s protagonist Peter later explains to his disillusioned waitress girlfriend played by Jennifer Aniston, “I’m just talking about fractions of a penny here, but we do it from a much bigger tray. A couple of million times. So what’s wrong with that?”

The problem with Ross’ logic is that the administration wants to have it both ways: The tariffs will be small and spread out enough that consumers won’t notice price increases on any given item, but high and comprehensive enough in the aggregate that China will back down, businesses will alter their supply lines, and the government will see a huge boost in revenue. Even if the tariffs lead to only small price increases at first, the current plan is for them to more than double by the end of the year, with more to come if China decides to retaliate. This means the level of potential price increases will go up, as well as the number of items they apply to, draining money from consumers.

There is some evidence that tariffs on inputs companies use to make goods, like steel and aluminum, have already boosted consumer prices. And prices for a consumer goods targeted by an earlier round of tariffs—washing machines—have already noticeably jumped up by as much as $50.

There’s also the possibility that companies will just eat the tariff and accept reduced profits in order to maintain their level of sales and, over the longer term, will shift production either to countries other than China or even into the United States.

And if that happens, then everyone will notice.