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Trump tells Joe Rogan he supports getting rid of income taxes and instead relying on tariffs—’Yeah, sure, but why not?’ (fortune.com)

submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Sales tax on goods makes sense.

No. Sales and use taxes are inherently regressive; they affect the poor far, far more than they affect the wealthy, and thus harm all of society.

Tariffs don't make any sense, because that cost simply gets passed on to the consumer. The company I work for uses a lot of aluminum; the raw material is imported from China, and is custom extruded to our spec here in the US. Aluminum from the US is prohibitively expensive. If tariffs double the price of the aluminum, then the company we buy it from is going to pass that price on to us, and we're going to turn around and pass it on to our consumers. There's simply no competing industry in the US, and building the industry to compete would take a decade or more. So it's not even creating an incentive to buy American, because you can't.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 2 weeks ago

A sales tax as a general term on goods that have negative externalities. That produce pollution, have negative health impacts, use public infrastructure etc.. whole foods, homes at minimum should be exempt. I agree that the poor shouldn't bear the brunt of tax policy changes.

Yes tarrifs getting passed to the consumer is completely the point, to normalize for asymmetrical human rights across the globe. Fair trade, not free trade. Not isolationist either. An elegant way to implement would be based on a democracy index.

The aluminum example is a good one. The consumer in this case is the company importing aluminum. They can buy from an authoritarian country at a 2x tarrif (or whatever), or a democratic country with no tarrif.

But... more of a thought experiment, I think that would be the way from a humanist perspective. But the geopolitics are very challenging.