(The Epoch Times)—A new report from the White House Council of Economic Advisers found that prices for imported goods have dropped in the first five months of the year, even though overall goods prices have risen in the same period, challenging the notion that President Donald Trump’s tariff policies are fueling higher inflation.
“Imported goods are actually getting cheaper,” Steve Miran, chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, said in a July 8 interview with Fox News about the report’s findings.
The report analyzed inflation trends using both the Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) Price Index, which is closely tracked by the Federal Reserve; and the Consumer Price Index (CPI), the measure more familiar to most Americans.
According to the report, import prices—those directly affected by tariffs—dropped 0.1 percent from December 2024 through May 2025 based on PCE data, while overall goods prices rose 0.4 percent over the same period. CPI data showed a similar pattern, with prices for imported goods falling 0.8 percent even as overall goods prices remained flat.
“The prices of imported goods have not only fallen this year, but also declined faster than overall goods prices since February,” the report states. “These findings contradict claims that tariffs or tariff-fears would lead to an acceleration of inflation.”
The report arrives amid ongoing debate over whether Trump’s tariff measures might eventually push inflation higher. So far, the administration has imposed a baseline 10 percent tariff on nearly all countries, while certain nations, such as China, face higher rates.
Additional “reciprocal” tariffs have been announced but these have been suspended until Aug. 1 to allow negotiations for broader trade agreements that could lower or eliminate the tariffs. Many analysts expect the largest price impacts to emerge if those reciprocal tariffs take effect in August.
In April, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent noted that a rough rule-of-thumb is that every 10 percent increase in tariffs typically leads to about a 2 percent increase in consumer prices. But he emphasized that this relationship isn’t always precise, citing Trump’s first term, when roughly 20 percent tariffs on China raised U.S. consumer prices by only about 0.7 percent, according to one study.
In a recent interview on ABC News, Miran said he expects similarly modest inflation effects from Trump’s current tariff policies.
“I think that there’s been a lot of doom mongering, a lot of scare mongering,” Miran said, addressing concerns from some economists that tariffs could trigger a surge in inflation. Drawing on the experience from Trump’s first term, he added that there was “no meaningful economic inflation” from earlier tariff measures, and he expects a repeat this time around.
“Thus far again, this time, we’ve had a repeat of the same performance, whereby lots of folks predicted that it would end the world, there would be some sort of disastrous outcome,” Miran said. “And once again, tariff revenue is pouring in. There’s no sign of any economically significant inflation whatsoever, and job creation remains healthy.”
Indeed, the latest jobs report showed the labor market remained robust in June, with the economy adding a stronger-than-expected 147,000 jobs. The unemployment rate edged down to 4.1 percent. In another sign of labor market strength, job openings in May soared to a higher-than-expected 7.7 million, rising by 374,000 from the prior month and defying pessimistic predictions for a decline.
Inflation has also stayed relatively subdued. The latest PCE data showed prices rising just 0.1 percent from May to June, bringing the annualized headline inflation rate to 2.3 percent, close to the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target. The CPI, meanwhile, showed annual inflation at 2.4 percent in May, the latest available data. The Fed tends to place more weight on the PCE index because it’s updated more frequently and covers a broader range of expenditures.
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell has indicated he wants to see further inflation data through July to ensure price pressures are cooling before considering interest rate cuts.
Trump, however, has been pressing for immediate rate reductions, arguing that Powell and other Fed officials are unnecessarily restraining economic growth by keeping rates elevated.
“Jerome ‘Too Late’ Powell, and his entire Board, should be ashamed of themselves for allowing this to happen to the United States,” Trump said in a recent post on Truth Social. “They have one of the easiest, yet most prestigious, jobs in America, and they have failed—And continue to do so.”
Beyond potentially spurring economic growth, lower rates would also help reduce the government’s borrowing costs. The U.S. Treasury pays interest to investors holding government debt, and those payments have ballooned in recent years.
In fiscal year 2024, the government spent $882 billion on net interest payments—almost triple the amount from 2020, according to Treasury data. In the first eight months of fiscal 2025, interest payments have totaled $665 billion, putting the United States on track for the highest annual interest bill in its history.
Meanwhile, although Trump’s tariffs haven’t driven up inflation, they have generated significant revenue. Since Trump’s return to office in January, U.S. Customs and Border Protection has collected more than $106 billion in customs revenue, including $81.5 billion directly attributed to the new tariff measures.
During a cabinet meeting on July 8, Trump said that once the reciprocal tariffs take effect in August, “big money” would begin flowing into Treasury coffers, helping to ease the government’s funding challenges.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
