Tariffs Are Awful, but the Income Tax May Be Worse

Every fiber of my economic being cries out against tariffs. If they are so good, why doesn’t each state in the US have one against the products of all of the other 49?

Source: Tariffs Are Awful, but the Income Tax May Be Worse - FEE

At the end of the day, a tariff is a tax. You can argue about who pays it but it is designed to and effectively does make products more expensive to import. This will put an upward pressure on prices which makes the consumer likely to bear the brunt of this increased cost. I am not a fan of new taxes therefore I am not a fan of tariffs.

Having said that, I definitely consider the income tax to be a worse form of taxation. If we could somehow replace the income tax with tariffs (reasonable ones anyway) that would be great. After all, if you agree that there has to be (or will be) at least SOME government then it needs some sort of funding. However, replacing the income tax is not what has happened so far. The U.S. has simply added tariffs to the already existing tax burden which of course includes the income tax. The income tax is unlikely to go away and in order to make it permanently go away, we would need a Constitutional amendment.

This article lists all kinds of reasons why tariffs (and the income tax) are bad. And it certainly may be that Trump is merely using tariffs as a bargaining tool to get better trade deals than what we had before and that most of these tariffs will eventually go away. I'll reserve judgement a little longer until we see how this plays out.

This reminds me...I still need to do my taxes...