Mike Samples is proud of the “Made in the USA” stamp he puts on his products. He’s owner of Monster Rings and Cages in Lawrenceburg, Kentucky, and manufactures boxing rings and cages for fighting sports like wrestling and mixed martial arts. The company ships products all over the world and has made countless fighting rings for movie sets and even Madison Square Garden.

Samples sources as much steel from U.S. suppliers as he can.

“In the boxing and MMA community, you have a lot of ex-military people, and they certainly are happy to see ‘Made in the USA,’” Samples said.

One might expect tariffs on imported metal would just raise the prices of imported metal, but Samples said the price of his American-made steel is going up too.

His supplier for U.S. steel recently raised prices from about 60 cents per pound to 75 cents, he said. That’s about a 20% increase. Imported steel has a 25% hike from tariffs.

Samples believes paying a little more is worth it — especially if it can help him compete against foreign companies and create new jobs in manufacturing. But there is a limit.

“Now we’re taking some bad-tasting medicine that will eventually make us all good, you know, that’s my hope,” he said.

Monster Rings and Cages owner Mike Samples poses in front of a boxing ring frame assembled on his factory floor. (Justin Hicks/LPM)

Tariffs are causing increases in the price of domestic aluminum too.

Debra Dudley owns Oscarware based out of Bonnieville, Kentucky. It’s a small family company that makes grill accessories. She also hopes tariffs will give her a competitive edge against cheaper Chinese copies.

“We’ve had a lot of competitive knockoffs of everything we’ve done, basically coming in from China at lower cost and lower quality,” she said. “I can’t compete with that.”

Dudley said she’s stocked up on aluminum and has a low price fixed for the rest of the year. But her supplier told her that next time she orders some of that U.S.-made aluminum, prices are going to be higher.

“I’m asking why?” she said. “How are the tariffs on imports going to affect the materials that are actually made in the USA?”

Clark Packard, a researcher at the Cato Institutes, said the answer is pretty simple: U.S. metal makers are raising prices because they can.

“It ultimately comes down to competition, right?” Packard said. “By raising prices of foreign steel and aluminum through tariffs, domestic producers are given a sort of green light to raise their own prices.”

Packard said the rise in prices is also odd because demand is pretty low. The biggest users of raw metal are the automotive and construction industries and they’re waiting for market uncertainty and high borrowing costs to cool down.

“So prices should, in theory, be falling, but because of this added protectionism… It’s unfortunate, but not really surprising,” Packard said.

Packard has heard the argument that folks like Samples have made: maybe this will be a brief moment of pain that ushers in a new golden era of manufacturing, but he’s skeptical.

“It makes it really hard to invest when it’s so uncertain,” he said. “Historically, the economics don’t back up that idea.”

Still, Samples said he supports President Trump’s attempt to use tariffs to bring back manufacturing. And if it doesn’t pay off, he’ll have to wrestle with whatever comes next.

“Days when I think, you know, maybe I should just retire and forget it, which isn’t very often, then I remember, well, there’s nine or 10 families, depending on me,” Samples said, watching his workers grind and weld steel tubes.