Stupidest idiot in the history of stupid. It’s like he learned a new word and it’s stuck in his head and all he can say is tarrif, tarrif, rarifffFfffFffs.
Maybe if we stopped wasting so much of our money on “defense” spending
These guys are just such assholes.
How sick do you have to be to shift all the burden on to the people that have the least?
It’s the main tentpole of Project 2025.
This is like backwards georgism. The fash dream.
George did nothing wrong
But George Santos did.
Trump got caught knowing nothing about tariff’s when on a finance news show. Trump said to the interview guy “No! You know nothing about tariff’s!”. Since then he has gone all in on the tariff’s he knows nothing about because he does not want to admit he was a fool.
No at this point it’s so we’ll known that Peter Navarro just lied and created fake experts to make his bullshit tariff theories seem more sane.
Now I’m no economician, but isn’t this like saying “we’ll replace writing class with origami class?”
No, replacing income tax with tariffs isn’t basically the same thing. It’s worse. It is replacing a progressive tax (one that is easiest on lower wage earners and gets higher with income levels) to a regressive tax (one that more greatly effects lower wage earners than higher) because lower wage earners have to spend most or all of their income for survival, while high income earners regularly use their surplus money for things unaffected by tariffs, like investments, property, travel, etc.
*affects. What you wrote - that it effects low income earners - means the opposite, that it enables them.
Is it regressive though? Multimillionaires don’t pay income taxes at all, they have no income. Elon musk isn’t sitting down in April to fill out a 1040 or a 1099. They pay capital gains and other rich people taxes. With a consumption tax like a tarriff they’d at least be paying something even if it’s a lower percentage of their wealth than yours or mine.
Multimillionaire do not, no. The ultra rich either have no income, have negligible income, or are compensated in ways that aren’t subject to income tax. That’s why there should be a wealth tax and sensible capital gains tax.
I agree. But wealth taxes aside, assuming the middle and lower classes end up paying about the same as they do now, the wealthy will pay more under a consumption tax (as in, more than the nothing they pay now).
Marginally. They don’t spend most of their money on goods.
Not most of their money, no. Way more than I spend on goods. Exponentially more. I have no faith that the current admin will pull this off in a way that benefits the 99% but it’s not outside the realm of possibility that some form of consumption tax would. It doesn’t have to be regressive.
There is literally no way to put a flat tax on goods without it disproportionately effecting poorer people unless it is exclusively on luxury goods they are not buying
It’s more like Trump saying “we’ll replace taxes on me with taxes on you.”
Of course he would. It would be a massive shift of taxation towards the middle class and especially the lower classes, and on top of that, he personally gets to decide who gets to pay and who doesn’t; how much and when, and especially why or why not.
On top of the continual shift of taxation towards the middle and lower classes we’ve had since Reagan.
The “good old days”the Republicans want to go back to were only good in the sense that the top tax rate was 90% and the rich paid something much closer to their fair share, and the middle class was able to actually have comfortable lives. But they want everyone other than them to be on the brink of economic ruin at all times so that they are more easily controlled.
Absolutely. It’s as if they had declared that life in America was much better in the 50s, and the lesson they learned was that it wasn’t possibly because of the economic policies of the post-war era, but because of the bigotry and racism and xenophobia.
Yes it’s all connected to racism and sexism.
So it is a tax on the people with out any representation. Seems like there was something like this in the past the North Americans dealt with
Time to start throwing big macs in the harbor?
At least the tea was biodegradable.
This is like the $5,000 stimulus checks Elon talked about and that “concept of a plan” from 2016. He knows his base doesn’t want to pay taxes, so if he references the possibility to get rid of them, they will keep holding on and later he can just blame the libs for it never happening.
Sadly, the “concept of a plan” line was from last year. :/
I almost say do it, triple-double-multiplier tariff added on everything! From water to bathroom visits to minutes of watched television, sodas to butter, corn to newspapers, even icecubes must not escape tariffs to make the country great again…
Then I give it 6 months, after which I suspect personal hells will open up…Say, what about sales taxes eh? Seems those remain, hmm, so it’s actually a tariff on top of taxes?
Sales taxes are state/city level taxes, there are no federal sales taxes (yet). But he is essentially using the tariffs as a way to enact sales taxes without really adding a sales tax.
With the tariffs he can add a massive tax on the people which Republicans would normally be very much against, but he can say it is about being pro American and most of them forget about all of the extra money they will be paying.
This shifts the tax burden further onto middle/lower income homes and lets him give more income tax cuts to higher earners without increasing the deficit so much that congress would turn on him.
The Republicans have actually been talking about this for a long time they called it the “fair tax”. Their fair tax plan was basically a flat ~23% federal sales tax that would replace income tax, but they could never get their base behind it.
Someone on Trump’s team realized that we buy so much from other countries that he could accomplish the same thing the fair tax aimed to do via tariffs while selling them to his party as “buy American”. His lower/middle income base eats that up, and his campaign donors see it as killing their overseas competition.
If it weren’t for the other countries reciprocating it would have been a good plan for them.
Sales taxes are state/city level taxes
Many other countries have them at the national level too.
You know the last time tariffs got out of control here we threw some tea in the bay.
This time it’ll be teslas. Teaslas?
Tesler
I like the idea!
I’d rather have it replaced with a sovereign wealth fund or something ngl.
I’d rather have it replaced with a sovereign wealth fund…
I’d rather not have it replaced with a
sovereign wealthtrump slush fundThe reason that sovereign wealth funds have cropped up recently in discussions is that trump really, really wants to have an unaccountable slush fund like his authoritarian buddies.
It makes like zero sense for a country like the US
Those are for nations running a surplus, not a deficit.
Patently false.
Any nation can have a sovereign wealth fund, Australia has a sovereign wealth fund and they have national debt, hell even in America there are states with a sovereign wealth fund, even Alaska with their massive deficits and if your referring to Norway, they had national debt until the discovered oil and they created their fund with oil taxes.
Patently false.
😂 that cracked me up
Yeah of course they can, like I can open and fund an IRA while underwater on credit card debt…
Any nation can also have policies that are bad or stupid or horrific.
The fact you’re comparing national debt to personal credit card debt tells me all I need to know about your thinking here.
Also nice to know you think that Norway’s decision to start a sovereign wealth fund was a bad idea.
We can talk about of the US starting a SWF, especially in the age of dumbass Republican rule, is a good or bad idea but your stated fact that these funds are only for nations without debt is still factually incorrect.
wooooooosh. That wasn’t the comparison.
Also Norway is literally the prime example of when a sovereign wealth fund works and makes sense… They have a massive… wait for it… SURPLUS… due to their nation’s natural resources (oil)
They didn’t have a massive SURPLUS when they made the fund. They made a conscious decision to tax and create a new revenue source that made them a debt free nation they are today, something we could do here, but not at that scale or expecting the same results because the US is a much larger country, by not coddling the balls of corporations and the ultra wealthy or if the US wants to “drill baby drill”, tax and regulate the new sources of oil and create a SWF.
But again, you seem to completely stuck on the myopic view point of just saying the US has debt hence the US cannot create a SWF because of credit card debt.
And again, plenty of examples of nations that have national debt and deficits but still have and fund a SWF.
Anyways, this conversation is going absolutely nowhere so have a good day.
because of credit card debt
wut, you’re the only one trying to make a comparison between credit card debt and the national debt. They aren’t comparable things, FYI…
ik, but hypothetically, why would a surplus be needed?
You don’t take out a loan to put into a savings account. That’s how you lose money.
Because that’s where the money that is put into the fund comes from. Otherwise you’re putting in money that should probably be used to balance the deficit.
but how is this different than some hedge fund or bank using money the government didn’t have but still spent, using that money to invest into something? Because as I understand it, sovereign wealth funds are just the govt investing into stuff that has a long term gain
There’s not much difference, but we can still agree that the example you gave are not exactly a sustainable way to grow, right?
If its not immediately clear to someonr, here is an explanation.
We all know the government borrows money right? Well the moment the government becomes an operator in the market, the market will lose faith in the stability of the government. When that happens interest rates on US debt skyrocket and its no longer possible to make more money than it costs to borrow.
It would blow up our debt immensely. Let’s say the current T bill rate is 4% and you can somehow funnel a Trillion dollars into your sovereign wealth fund. Let’s say you trade with it and do great, an awesome 15% return. That’s an extra 150B, cool right? Well now remember that the market will demand higher rates on T-bills, and let’s say it goes up only 2% to 6%. Well that means you ate now paying an extra 2% on the 36T in debt you have to continually refinance. Meaning you lost 720 Billion to make 150 Billion.
I decide to start a business. I borrow a million dollars from the bank at 2% interest.
I now have a million dollars cash, and a million dollars of debt. Logically, rather than investing my million dollars of cash in building and growing a business, I should use it to pay off my debt. That’s clearly the the best use for that money.
Do you see how what you’re saying doesn’t make any sense?
What you’re misrepresenting is that its not the millions dollars that is supposed to pay the debt, its the revenue you get after investing that million dollars into the company.
You’re claiming it makes sense for the company to invest a large portion of that revenue in growing the company when the revenue is not even enough to pay back the interest from the bank?
Wait, doesn’t that sounds familiar? That’s basically how they run companies under a venture capital model. Who cares about negative profit as long as you continue growing, baby. I guess you really like how Silicon Valley startups run their business.
I honestly don’t even know how to respond to a comment like this. Every word is such abject nonsense that it’s hard to even figure out where to begin, and I frankly do not have the energy for it.
Now you know how I feel reading your comment. It made zero sense, so it was easy to counter.
