Sign up, and you can customize which countdowns you see. Sign up
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
Previous username
AtlantaMark
Bio page
BeyondTheMark
Joined
Aug 20, 2001
Last login
Dec 5, 2024
Total posts
16,185 (265 FO)
Messages
Author
Time

Posting on CougarBoard

In order to post, you will need to either sign up or log in.