[Itse]

Prices especially in late-stage capitalism are dictated primarily by supply and demand, not costs. The price of something like an iPhone is essentially completely detached from the costs of making them.

This is why it's simply wrong to say that "additional costs like tariffs are paid by the customer". They might be, or they might not be.

There are however an endless amount of public facing lobbyists that will try to make the public forget about supply and demand and focus on costs, because every industry hates extra costs (like higher wages or regulation), because additional costs pretty much always eat into company profits. They are usually not fully paid by the customer.

If there is a lot of competition in the marketplace, they might not be even partially paid by the customer. This becomes more obvious when you remember that lowering manufacturing costs by moving production overseas does not typically mean the customer prices going down, so similarly, bringing those costs up also doesn't mean the prices go up. Quite often costs going up or down only affects the company profit margin, not the customer price.

This can in some cases even be true if the customer is a company buying products from abroad like China to sell in the US, although these days there isn't a lot of international competition for Chinese built goods unfortunately.

The devil is very much in the details with something like tariffs especially, you can have them do almost anything to marketplace incentives, especially if you start compensating for them by removing taxes from other places, which Trump will also likely do.

It is absolutely just not true that tariffs on Chinese imports are automatically paid for by US regular people.
We'll see.

If companies could just move all costs into customer prices, it wouldn't make sense for them to burm large piles of money fighting regulations and taxes, and busting unions to keep the costs down.