As usual, the answer is somewhere in between, depending on price elasticity and availability of substitutes en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_in… nitter.vloup.ch/rlove/status/824…

But “paying for” implies zero sum transfer. This involves net losses, to Mexicans and Americans.

As is the case with all taxes. Here, my gut says more of the burden will fall on the Mexican imports due to lots of substitutes.

not the case for taxes on negative externalities like pollution: those are net positive.

taxing negative externalities makes a lot of sense, especially if you're looking to change practices, but they're still paid

and it's interesting in the case of carbon taxes in particular to see who pays (oil companies, retailers, consumers etc)

Distributional aspects can be corrected by other policies that change distribution. But don't know what you mean by "still paid".

using a carbon tax as an example, you could see the same arguments being made "oil companies will pay for their pollution: cont.

on the flip side if demand were perfectly inelastic and there were no suitable substitutes, consumers would bear the entire cost