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Dec 4, 2024
3:48:35am
BeyondTheMark All-American
That simplistic idea needs some nuance. Each tariff dollar becomes revenue that gets spent mostly on
Americans/American interests and that can displace a tax dollar, potentially. So to an American citizen it CAN be a neutral event, depending on what they tend to buy and what taxes they pay.

It does tend to be regressive, which may be good/bad depending on your PoV. Currently taxes fall higher on the income curve, so this would tend to bring into 'taxpayer' status a lot of people currently avoiding taxes based on their brackets, which in my view is probably a good thing for democracy- more people in the tax base means more skin in the game, and a highly visible tax vs taxes taken out of paychecks also makes it more responsive to democratic pressures.

The economy's of China/Japan/Europe were all built on tariffs, so saying it is bad for the economy is nonsensical- but the American economy with minimal tariffs has been the fastest growing, so IDEALLY, tariffs should be low, in theory. In reality, tariffs ignore a multitude of important critical dependencies.

Rare earth minerals, energy independence, nuclear proliferation, exporting your industrial base to your geo-political enemies, strategic technologies, advantages of scale in industrial production, training/educating your enemies citizens, unbalanced tariffs vs trade partners- there are a myriad of reasons tariffs can and should be utilized at scale in order to protect and advance the interests of a country, and we've taken the mantra of 'free trade' to a toxic conclusion based on free market principles that only work if everyone is reading from the same hymnbook- instead we've engaged in strategic self-disarmament, allowing enemy countries all the advantages of participating in western 'mostly' free trade, without them giving back any of the advantages to other countries.
BeyondTheMark
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BeyondTheMark
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