See this is the kind of thing that makes zero actual sense but his supporters pretend to believe he can accomplish it or worse they actually believe him.
That’s not how anything works. The country exporting to the USA don’t field the tariffs expense. The importers do.
He would just be removing taxes for people like himself to the result of a massive deficit and decreased trade.
I hate Trump, and maybe that’s what he’s thinking.
But I’m not sure replacing taxes with tariffs won’t help; replacing sales taxes with teriffs will mean that domestic products are effectively being subsidized by people buying imported products. This increases demand for domestic products, hopefully stimulation domestic production.
I think the tell isn’t that he is using teriffs, it’s that he wants to cut income taxes at the expense of people buying foreign products.
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The USA mainly sells Financial Services and Machinery. Making our own rubber ducks and flatpack furniture would be analogous to a lawyer painting his house when he could have made enough money to pay somebody else to paint it 5x over.
Unfortunately, much of our raw materials are imports so by disincentivizing other countries to trade with us we are killing our own manufacturing capabilities. That is exactly what happened when Trump era steel tariffs killed a large sector of American manufacturing. And he explicitly excluded Russian Steel where his good friend Aaron Abromovich was offering to supply steel for his stupid wall, until congress twisted his arm into signing the additional tariffs against Russia, just another example of how his actions are purely selfish.
At the end of the day, trade is both good and conditional. Other nations might see these actions as hostile and reduce the number of goods they’re willing to sell, as they can’t be the ones left holding the bag if trade suddenly stops one day and they’ve overproduced specialty goods with no use so reducing production is the clear choice, and there is less incentive to offer other less profitable goods as per trade agreements and less incentive to even make new trade agreements in the first place.
You cannot force American CEOs to want to produce goods in the states anymore than you can convince Chinese people to live in the districts where excess homes were built: governments do not have enough control to dictate the markets via anything but positive reinforcement.
It feels like this (common) argument it’s trying to have is cake and eat it too, so maybe you can help me understand.
As you, and everyone, say: the financial burden of the teriffs are paid by the importer and passed to the consumer, rather than being paid by the exporting country or exporter - so what is the disincentive for those countries to continue trade with us? They’ll see a decrease in demand, but is that really a disincentive? I don’t understand how both of these things can be true and have the same cause, at the same time.
The problem is outsourcing, and teriffs are an attempt to make outsourcing less appealing. I understand your analogy, but that’s the problem: we’re encountering Goodhart’s Law. We’re optimizing for GDP, and you’re right that’s teriffs will result in lower optimization, but in chasing GDP numbers we’ve failed to consider where the money is getting allocated. The lawyer could save money by hiring foreigners, but hiring locals helps people in their community. (Not saying foreign workers are bad, just trying to reuse your analogy). I don’t think we should get too preoccupied with economic efficiency, as long as we can ensure the waste stays domestic.
I’m not confident teriffs are actually a good idea, and even if they were I don’t trust Trump to implement them. What I’m trying to do is push back and get clarification about why people are acting like teriffs are inherently bad.
I’m not trying to have the cake and eat it, I’m trying to convince people like you not to shit on the cake just because you think you might be able to eat around it.
What?
Why am I getting down votes?
How am I shitting on anything? What am I even shitting on? \All I’m doing is asking “why do we shit on teriffs and treat them as inherently bad?”
Im trying to have a discussion in good faith, and rather than having any of my questions explained or answered I’m just down voted and vaguely demeaned.I’m being very clear I do not support whatever shit trump is doing, I’m trying to understand why people just hate tariffs.
I don’t understand how, if the importer bares all tariff costs, what would disincentivize a foreign nation from exporting to us since they bear no increased costs. Why would this not just appear as a decrease in demand, from their perspective?I literally explained it to you in simple terms and you still argued against the facts.
Tariffs
Shit on
USA Commerce and Industry
They cannot ever be a replacement for taxation. Their uses are purely as a defence from foreign fuckery in the markets.
You didn’t provide facts, you provided arguments and assertions.
Then I refuted one of your arguments showing how it is seemingly contradicted one of your assertions and asked for elaboration.I don’t understand where your hostility is coming from. I’m not even saying you’re wrong, I’m pointing out arguments that don’t appear (to me) to lead to your conclusion.
I absolutely don’t refute that Trump’s idea is a bad one. My question is more general than that.
And he will do it.
He has to figure out this thing with a boat, a shark, and a battery…
But once he works that one out, China will be paying our taxes.
Like the tariffs of old.
This basically eliminates almost all taxes on the rich, burdens middle and lower class with higher prices, and blows up budget deficit.
So much for FiScAL ReSPonSibiLiTY
The real rich don’t pay any income tax tho? Not sure what you mean. Sure the high-income developers and engineers and lawyers etc. would become a richer, but they are not the rich, are they? The owners of the businesses they work at are. And they don’t pay income taxes.
In the USA in 2021, the top 1% of earners payed 26.3% of federal income from taxes, $3,872,395,000,000 Total. The top 50% of earners payed 89.6% of income taxes.
You could argue that the “true” rich people weren’t earners because they took out loans against their stocks and properties, but they’re either going to sell or die sometime and that has been true for centuries. However, Elon Musk for example won’t make your list if that’s how you measure it because he did sell and he paid billions in taxes.
Yeah, are you being fiscally responsible, chump? How much are you making? Jeff over here needs another yacht!
I swear he comes across as even more senile each and every day. But …
The rich would support this - they can only consume so much after all, and most of that would be discretionary. No more income taxes on vast incomes, stop buying imported shit, huge win for them. The chowderheads supporting Drumpf would probably be enthusiastic about such an idea too - imagining their small paychecks without that hated tax deduction box and imagining no more paying every year for that scary tax return software. And then, they lose their jobs because countries that we export to retaliate with their own tariffs. Prices on pretty much everything goes through the roof (because even domestic products have foreign supply chains), and most of the cheap shit they used to be able to afford (like electronics from China, bulk foods from overseas and (fast-)foods made with it) they can’t afford now.
Meanwhile, with the economy crashing, federal receipts (both tax and tariffs) dry up and it’s Government Shutdown time. All working according to the Plan. Grandma and Grandpa lose their incomes and health care and have to move in with unemployed, impoverished JimBob and the wife, which is darn near intolerable what with all the hillbilly kids being home all the time now that the schools have been shut down. Kids that are wailing about being hungry all the time just like the oldsters.
It would be fun to see what carve-outs to the tax/tariff policy they’d have, to try to keep the MIC funded. Borrowing is of course the preferred way to fund it, but nobody’s going to be touching the bonds issued by an actively collapsing national government.
Income tax is such a bitch to deal with. I used to support the idea of replacing it with GST/VAT because then I’d not have to deal with it. But then someone pointed out that disproportionately benefits the rich (who mostly just hold wealth rather than spend it) and disadvantages the poor (who cannot avoid paying for things).
So fuck it. Make it all income tax and get rid of the others! :P
(In before this is also a bad idea somehow)
Taxes usually start out simple, since that appeals to people. Then over time they get more complicated as people discover more and more edge cases to exploit.
If you make it all income tax, well, what counts as “income”? Elon Musk just got “paid” $46 billion worth of stock in Tesla, for example. But it’s not actually 46 billion dollars. It’s a share in ownership of a company. Those shares can’t actually be sold for 46 billion dollars. Trying to sell them would cause their price to drop. He can’t actually sell them at all right away, for that matter - they’re restricted stock. He has to hold on to them for a while, as incentive to keep doing a good job as CEO.
So if he keeps doing a good job as CEO and the stock goes up in value by 10 billion dollars, was that rise in value income? What if it goes down by 10 billion instead?
This stuff is inherently complicated. I’m not sure that any simple tax system is going to work.
I don’t know if this isn’t already a thing, but if he uses that stock as collateral to overpay for another social media company, or some other stupid flex, he should be taxed on that valuation with no deductions whatsoever.
Darn it, you’re right.
And as I suspected would be the case, some other folks have responded to my comment with a bunch of additional “simple” suggestions for what to do in this case. Which have hidden exceptions of their own, which will have unexpected impacts and loopholes, which will then elicit further “simple” suggestions for how to fix them, and before you know it we’ve got a complex tax code again.
There’s an old quote of unclear providence that I think applies here, “everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler”.
Elon Musk just got “paid” $46 billion worth of stock in Tesla.
He should have to pay income tax on the value of the stock on the day he “took possession” of it.
In 3 years, he says something on Twitter to pump the stock, and dumps a lot of it. He should have to pay tax (capital gains?) on the additional value of the stock that he sells.
If the value goes down and he sells it, it’s a deduction.
It’s the most practical tax idea I’ve heard in forty years, tbh.
It’s the least practical tax idea I’ve heard in forty years.
Heard about the Land Value Tax 41 years ago, huh?
It should be a moderately progressive income tax. That is to say the lowest earning bracket should pay nothing as a percentage of their income, the next bracket should pay a little bit, the next bracket a little higher % of their income, all the way up to billionaires who should be taxed out of billionaire status. I can certainly afford to pay a higher % of my income to taxes than someone who isn’t sure where their next meal is coming from, but my bosses and their bosses, and the people who own the building should be paying way more on their income than me. Also we need to get rid of the shenanigans that allows the ultra wealthy to avoid income tax altogether through loans and what not.
For clarity, say Kalkaline earns 100k a year. Ideally the billionaires would bring home exactly the same on their first 100k as Kalkaline does.
Marginal tax rate means the higher tax brackets only tax you in the money made above a certain amount. And it’s the same for the next higher up tax bracket, which doesn’t apply to any lower money.
If you’re not getting welfare, there is no “next tax bracket” that’s going to make you bring home less when earning more. That’s not a thing.
If you get a bonus, that might be
taxedwithheld at 50% because payroll is too lazy to figure out your taxes. You get the remainder back when you file your taxes. (Note this may mean you owe $200 at the end of the year instead of owing $1000. That still counts as you “getting” $800.)We could put an 80% marginal tax rate on incomes above a billion dollars, and it wouldn’t really touch someone who was only bringing home 1,030 million dollars a year.
If you get a bonus, that might be
taxedwithheld at 50% because payroll is too lazy to figure out your taxes. You get the remainder back when you file your taxes. (Note this may mean you owe $200 at the end of the year instead of owing $1000. That still counts as you “getting” $800.)One very slight correction in bold.
Also it’s 22% and it’s not solely because payroll is lazy. It’s actually set by federal statute
That must be before other, additional payroll taxes.
Yeah add SS and Medicare to that if you’re not capped already. And of course any state taxe
Edited, thanks.
I’d prefer a 70% tax on billionaires, but I’d settle for 50% for anything above 5million. Take Elon for example, the guy makes an estimated $50,000USD per minute. Yes folks, the guy makes more per minute than the average American does in a year.
prove to me that billionaires should exist. Tax them accordingly.
When they say MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN I think it’s generally understood to mean take America back to the 1950s.
That’s when the richest people’s tax rate was OVER 90%
That’s how you make it “great again”
Progressive tax brackets make things complicated, in myt opinion. I always like the idea of a large tax free bracket and then taxing. 30-40% for the rest. No tax deduction, everybody has to pay up. You could also go for fixed tax brackets like 15%, 25% and 35% and also no tax deductions.
The problem is that tax deductions/credits are a useful tool for guiding certain activity. We want people to put up solar panels, so we give a tax credit for that.
The other argument for a progressive system is using money for necessities instead of luxuries or investment. Your first $40k or $50k or so is spent on the basic cost of living. After that, you’re using increasing amounts for things you don’t strictly need. So you want to tax that first $50k or so very little, perhaps none at all, and then ramp it up on the people who are just spending money on fast cars or dumping it into SPY or whatever.
There’s a ton of twisty little ways the tax system makes everything fair-ish. Turns out, running a country of 330M people and an annual GDP of $25T is complicated. It’s not always a fair system, but it’s more fair than it looks at first glance.
Be mad that income tax is unnecessarily difficult to deal with. As has been pointed out by others online a lot recently, the US makes personal income taxes hard, where other countries you can fill it out in minutes if you have no deductions, and less than an hour if you do (and have kept good records).
No one likes paying taxes (usually) but since the process is so painless I don’t hear people complaining about income tax that much (outside of the right-wing media in my country, Australia)
No that’s about right. The big problem we have right now is we’ve lost the ability to effectively tax people who don’t live on an “income”. So we need a second system for people who are insanely wealthy.
This is the same economic genius that said if the US wanted to default on the national debt, we could and then we could just renegotiate what we owed like some chump who bankrupted their own casino.
Someone explain to me how this would benefit the rich. The rich don’t pay income tax.
If the rich didn’t pay taxes than tax cuts for the rich would not be their 1st, 2nd, and 3rd top priorities.
Tax cuts for the rich are capital gains tax cuts and corporate tax cuts.
Income tax cuts don’t impact them, broadly.
Income tax cuts don’t impact them, broadly.
Then they should not be objecting at all if we raise the top income tax rate back to 91% like it was in the 1950’s when we had a great economy.
The truly rich would be fine. They don’t pay income tax, they live off of capital gains.
That’s just punishing people at the top of the working class. Doctors, lawyers, etc.
That’s just punishing people at the top of the working class. Doctors, lawyers, etc.
Nope. First of all taxes are not “punishment”. Right wing propagandists use that word because they never get common sense feedback from ordinary people who immediately notice how ridiculous that word sounds. 2nd, nobody is pushing for a 91% top rank on doctors and lawyers. It is what we need for billionaire elites. And actually I think that the top rate of 75% we had before Reagan would be fine.
The truly rich would be fine. They don’t pay income tax, they live off of capital gains.
Income taxes consists of taxes on earned income and unearned income (e.g. capital gains). Billionaires do not earn their income so yes most of their income is “unearned income”. When we set the rate for billionaires we need not distinguish between earned income and unearned income.
This freak lost a fucking Casino. The place where people just give you their money. A CASINO!!! He is an idiot and the worst “business man”. Con man looking for a new con.
Idiot is an understatement.
Unfortunately, I can’t think of a strong enough word, including the one now regarded as a slur.
Fuckwit is my go to. Or “Too stupid to breathe.” Or bring out some Linus Torvalds, but honestly Trump doesn’t deserve to be graced by that mans insults, as awesome as they are from a “JFC dude, that is going way too far”, except Trump would actually deserve them unlike the poor kernel maintainers.
Are you suggesting that Convicted Felon and Sex Offender Treason Trump is not a very stable genius?
That would be… Correct!
Not a casino. Multiple ones. Because the dumb fuck decided the best way to run resorts was to have them compete and under cut each other.
So become 100% dependent on foreign trade… thats a stupid thing to do when conflict is potentially right around the corner
Someone did the math and realized we would need a 130% tariff on all goods to replace current income tax revenue.
People’s number one concern is inflation. If that tariff is created we will see 100% inflation over night!
Someone did the math and realized we would need a 130% tariff on all goods to replace current income tax revenue.
And probably didn’t take into account that actually the tariff would need to be even higher since imports would drop drastically from the current amount.
I believe 130% was the conservative estimate.
Trump floats more shit than a sewage treatment plant.
Jesus Christ, we learned that fixing the economy via tariffs was bad in 1930. Like holy shit, tariffs are nearly universally agree by every field of economics to be shitty for citizens, businesses, and then the country. It makes no one inside want to buy anything but the simple basics, even with the basics now costing much much more.
I am not a “free trade” person, but this is not how you “Make America Great Again”. Even Ronald Reagan and Dubya didn’t do tariffs as a replacement for other things.
Yes, but Trump has a “relationship with MIT” and a “very good brain” so what would those economists know?
The relationship is knowing MIT and not even knowing what it stands for…
He probably thinks it refers to Mitt Romney.
Do you know the real reason why he said he had a relationship with MIT? Because his uncle, John Trump, was a professor there.
I have a cousin who was prominent physicist at a prestigious university. Meanwhile, I dropped out of college. I wouldn’t even dream of suggesting I had any sort of understanding of physics because of my cousin. In fact, he has something named after him and he once tried to explain it to me and I couldn’t understand what the hell he was talking about.
Trump is so stupid that he has no idea how stupid he sounds.
I still stand by my words lmao
I’d love to see some way for this to encourage domestic production.
However, that wouldn’t work. Most of the bullshit we buy would still come from China or some third world country. And it’s not like the businesses importing the product would pay the tariffs themselves; they’d immediately tack the cost onto the retail price. They pass the pain into consumers and we get fucked instead of the multinational corporations.
