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PaperclipPerfector  11d ago (text post)   29623 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024

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Tariffs are generally a bad idea in the modern world. While consumption taxes in general are good, by applying them only to imports they have to be much higher (and this cause much more dead weight loss) than a general sales tax would.

A lot of the things said about tariffs by the media are stupid and pretty much just campaigning for the Democrats, but that doesn't actually make tariffs good.

Tariffs aren’t a great idea, but the US economy is undertaxed and putting a consumption tax on manufactured goods(which is what tariffs would amount to in practice) is a great way to fix that. Trump will simply balloon the deficit rather than have tariffs high enough to cause damage.

Now taxing unrealized gains, on the other hand….

Undertaxed? I was unaware that economists agreed on some optimal non-zero amount of taxation for purely economic reasons.

Trump has been a bit inconsistent about tariffs. Sometimes he has talked about them being solely protectionist; other times he has talked about using them to force other countries to bring down their trade barriers (leading to less tariffs). I’m not sure where exactly he will come out.

He does care about manufacturing. The single best way for him to influence manufacturing is making energy cheap in America. He and Vance seems to support nuclear among others. He can directly help shepherd these things via EPA. Question is how quickly can you get these programs off the ground. The manufacturing jobs probably would t be during his term but the building of plants etc would be so he could point to an employment benefit to make the case for a Vance presidency.

Tariffs would be much better received by the D faction if they were packaged as a carbon/global environmental-and-worker-protection tax, which is a big part of why manufacturing moved to China in the first place.

Of course, because the Ds benefit the most from dodging those taxes (in the same way, and for the same reasons, that they benefit from open borders- they suddenly stop being so generous with other peoples' money once it starts costing them directly), you can expect them to pivot away from environmentalism if such a pricing scheme were to be implemented.

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