I think this is a downplay, I come from rural farmland before the north and dollarama and walmart were the place to be. Its your one-stop shop when times are tough and its all imports. If used cars go up in price because new cars become more unaffordable for the middle-class taking used away from the lower class that hurts even more.
Again, from a pure dollar value, yes obviously those that have wealth have the most to lose, from an impactful amount, the poor will be hit the hardest because what we deem as insignificant is significant to them.
I don't think you're going to see those cheap department stores stocked up with American made items all of a sudden. You will never get that cheap because of labour laws, safety, etc. Even with a sizable terrif, its still going to be cheaper to be made overseas in countries with essentially slave labour.
It might feel good as a impoverished person to see big numbers like 6.9 trillion lost on Wall Street, but I doubt anyone of wealth lost sleep. Prices go up slightly at walmart and rent suddenly looks harder to hit, you will lose sleep. Shit typically rolls down-hill and its almost always the poor that will suffer. I don't have any reason to suspect otherwise here.
Its still a real question of the elasticity of price and affected products. I'd argue most staples and services and utilities are basically unaffected. What % of walmart sales by volume (not profit) are actually domestic products? 60% of their sales are grocery and about 70% of their groceries are domestic. It hits pretty much all their general merchandise sector and probably health and wellness, shoes, clothes, plastics, electronics, etc. But cars are not a 1:1 elasticity of price when competing cars are manufacturing domestically and most groceries are not affected at all.
Of course the CPI is only calculated for urban consumers and the coastal economists never calculated a basket of goods for rural america or the rust belt, so I can't directly look at the CPI to quote you what % would be elastic, affected directly or unaffected.
It is indeed more car prices, more gas, more home cooked meals, more energy. But say we look at the CPI-U
>35.4% shelter
>13.7% food
>13.2% vehicles (6.4% maintenance/insurance/repair/fares, 4.4 new vehicles, 2.4 used)
>8.2% medical care (6.7% care, 1.5% commodities)
>6.3% energy
>2.5% apparel
>1.2% alcohol/tobacco
Say that's your basket of goods for urban america. Vehicles should be affected to a partially elastic degree. Apparel moreso, but still not a 1:1 increase. Pretty much the rest of it ignores tariffs.