Tariffs paid a significant amount of government expense before the income tax became the government's major permanent support with the 16th Amendment to the Constitution in 1913.
Tariffs are a tax on the customer who spends money.
Economist Robert Reich prefers the term "Import Taxes," which is easier to understand than
"Tariffs." But that's the point. Those advocating "Tariffs" don't want you to understand.
Income taxes tax those who earn money. A graduated income tax means the more one makes the higher the percentage and the higher the amount paid to the treasury.
Tariffs: "Infant industries cry for it," 1921
"As of [August 7th], import taxes (aka tariffs) have hit their highest level since the Great Depression. Americans are now expected to pay an average of 18.3% more for imported products." Robert Reich.
Tariffs are hyped as a benefit for domestic industry---encouraging and protecting American manufacturers. When foreign goods cost too much, domestic production should increase because, "We can do it cheaper."
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We err when we think of the current administration as full of smarmy idiots.
Rather, they are smarmy ideologues with an old agenda favoring the rich
who do not like to pay income taxes.
1890, McKinley & Import Taxes
Lessons from history illustrate the problems with tariffs.
President William McKinley dispensing tariff tonic to residents of
a psych ward, cartoon from 1897
In the early-19th century the North and the South fought over many moral and economic policies, particularly slavery. Tariffs were a matter of serious dispute too. Northerners with their newly built factories favored tariffs but the agricultural South, which bought much from the rest of the world, abhorred the taxes.
Cotton remains an agricultural mainstay in the American South
Demagogue John C. Calhoun made a political career out of what he called the Tariff of Abominations in the 1820s. (That's what demagogues do---make a career out of hot-button issue with overblown rhetoric.) Thirty years later the South persisted in feeling marginalized by tariffs that benefitted the industrial North.
Mid-century Southern-leaning cartoon---still smarting
25 years later over South Carolina's Calhoun
losing the political game on tariffs in 1832 to
King Andy Jackson..
Resentment over differing economic interests and a good deal of
fire-eating demagoguery led to the attack on Fort Sumter in 1861
and the beginning of a 5-year Civil War.
The first post on tariffs:
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