Trump has 33 tech leaders over, and they all suck his dick like he’s a vain dictator.
What’s the point to gaining that much power and wealth if they are just going to bend over for a vain, capricious, and rule-breaking ruler?
Jobs numbers aren’t good, indicating a weak economy. Especially young people are having trouble getting jobs, indicating companies aren’t ready to expand with inexperienced people given the economic and political uncertainty. Of course, the economic uncertainty is mostly driven by bad White House policy.
Manufacturing jobs are down. Manufacturing business leaders say tariffs are the cause of less manufacturing jobs. They can’t plan with the tariff created uncertainty. Trump’s tariffs are weakening manufacturing, not strengthening it.
Most job growth was in education, healthcare, and government, meaning sectors that often don’t reflect economic growth.
“It’s true that taxes distort behavior, and that America’s income-based taxes—especially the corporate tax—are among the most damaging varieties. Economists prefer consumption taxes, which leave income alone until it’s spent, sparing savings and investment from double (or triple) taxation.
Leaving aside their protectionist nature, if tariffs did that, it might make sense to think about substituting them for other, worse forms of taxation. But they don’t.
Take an actual consumption tax—the value-added-tax—which is applied uniformly to domestic and imported goods, rebated at the border for exports, and structured to avoid double-taxing investment. Tariffs, on the other hand, single out imports, which account for only about 15 percent of U.S. consumption. Different goods from different countries also face different rates. Thus, they are neither broad-based, nor neutral or transparent. They’re just an additional tax that tries to push buyers toward less-preferred products.
Worse, tariffs fall heavily on capital inputs like machines and other equipment. More than half of U.S. imports are raw materials, intermediate goods, or capital equipment—things we need to build other things. As the American Enterprise Institute’s Kyle Pomerleau notes, this makes tariffs more, not less, distortive than our current capital income taxes.
The latter allow firms to deduct investments in machinery and equipment, lowering the effective tax rate from what’s on paper. Tariffs provide no such deduction. That makes investing in U.S. capabilities—precisely what spurs productivity and wages—more expensive. Far from being a relatively tolerable consumption tax, tariffs are an inefficient, arbitrary surcharge on growth.
Tariffs fail another principle of good taxation: stability. A serious tax system is predictable, allowing businesses and households to plan ahead. Tariffs are imposed unilaterally under statutes like Section 301 or even emergency powers. As recent experience shows, they can be, and often are, reversed overnight without any assurance they won’t soon reappear. That’s not a reliable revenue source or incentive for businesses to proceed with confidence.
Finally, tariffs invite carveouts and favoritism. Politically connected firms routinely secure exemptions, exclusions, or special treatment, drastically narrowing the tax base. Since April’s “Liberation Day,” exclusions have sheltered goods worth more than $1 trillion while other goods got hammered. A tax code riddled with loopholes secured through Congress is bad enough; a tariff regime where lobbyists compete for carveouts so quickly and effectively is worse.
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In the most recent fiscal year, the federal government collected about $2.4 trillion from the individual income tax. That’s 49 percent of federal tax revenue. The Tax Foundation’s calculation for 2021 shows that collections from those earning less than $200,000 amount to $737.5 billion annually. There’s also $430 billion brought in from the corporate income tax in fiscal year 2024.
Extrapolating from the Treasury Department’s duty collection for July, Trump’s sweeping new tariffs might bring in as much as $360 billion this year—significantly higher that the pre-Trump era collection of $80 billion. Grandiose plans to do away with most people’s income taxes would mean raising tariff rates far higher than even Trump wants, and without all the carveouts. Then, we’d need to hope for the impossible—namely, that the tariffs don’t kill off a ton of economic activity.
Tariffs are not a realistic tax base. They’re among the worst taxes imaginable—narrow, arbitrary, unstable, and regressive. They tax investment more than consumption. They reward lobbying over efficiency. And the revenue they raise is but a fraction of annual government spending.”
“Americans who enjoy German lagers, Belgian saisons, and Czech pilsners will get no relief from the higher tariffs that President Donald Trump has poured on their favorite brews.
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The deal locks in the 15 percent tariffs that Trump has imposed on most European goods imported into the U.S., but it also serves as a promise from the Trump administration not to target European goods with product-specific tariffs that could be announced in the coming weeks or months—including potentially huge new tariffs on pharmaceuticals, something the White House has been teasing for months. The deal also creates a pathway for the United States to reduce its tariffs on European cars to the 15 percent threshold, once the E.U. reduces some of its own tariffs on American industrial goods.”
The U.S. debt issue is a political problem. In order to get elected, politicians promise to not cut taxes and/or to not cut benefits, when a combination of these is needed to fix the debt.
“As President Donald Trump’s tariffs make life less affordable and predictable for Americans, they’re also threatening to make it less creative. American craft stores are struggling to keep up with ever-changing trade policies, which are making the foreign-made products they stock more expensive and difficult to access. Many foreign craft supply companies are now unable to ship to American consumers at all.”
“President Donald Trump’s tariff regime is making everything from American-made steel weights, imported yarn, and Amazon’s “everyday essentials” more expensive while his immigration crackdown is causing worker shortages in key industries. These policies will work in tandem to slow down already expensive deliveries of your favorite goods.
“President Donald Trump overstepped the limits of executive authority when he used emergency powers to levy tariffs, a federal appeals court ruled on Friday.
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the tariffs in a chaotic state of limbo. Three courts have now ruled that they were unlawfully imposed, and yet they will remain in place (at least for now).
That’s an outcome that seems to create even more uncertainty for American businesses that are bearing the brunt of the tariffs. Rather than providing relief in the form of a new or renewed injuction, the appeals court has effectively said that Trump is illegally taxing nearly all imports into the country and that Americans will have to continue paying those taxes while the rest of the legal process plays out.”