Trump simply does not understand how tariffs work. I'm sure, after all this time he’s surely had it explained to him many times over?!. Or He knows his constituency is so stupid that they don’t understand how tariffs work. I'm going with the latter. Trump acts as if tariffs are paid by the country they are levied against, and are therefore an inexhaustible supply of money that doesn’t hurt anyone in the US, whereas they are actually higher costs for imported goods ultimately paid for by US citizens or corporations.
It’s hard to see how it would work, and critics say it would hurt the poor when compared to the current tax regime.
www.huffpost.com
Just for the hell of it I decided to run the numbers to see what size tariffs would be required to replace income tax. Income tax brings in
$2.6 Trillion, and there were
$3.2 trillion in imports. So in order to replace it you would need tariffs of over 80%.
Now we can bring in the Laffer curve which is mostly irrelevant in terms of our current tax rates, but which become dominant when we start talking about tariffs in this range. Since you nearly double the price of imports, the number of imports sold will drop by significantly more than half. So there really is no way to make up the revenue with tariffs.
Finally, if he tried the result would be other countries announcing obscene tarriffs on your goods in retaliation, and suddenly the US would find itself completely economically isolated. Which is just the sort of thing that we try to do to other countries that hate us (e.g. Russia, Iran, North Korea).
Trumps plan would basically be his self-imposing worldwide sanctions on the US.
What a fucking Dope!