Trump's 'All Tariff' Proposal is Class War for the Rich

[Passages]

Donald Trump’s disastrous idea of replacing the federal income tax with a tariff would redistribute wealth upwards while likely necessitating devastating cuts to essential government programs.

Stephen Prager

Donald Trump is floating the idea of eliminating the federal income tax. In its place, he wants to implement an “all tariff policy,” according to a campaign source who recently spoke with CNBC. It’s an even more radical expansion of a policy Trump has already proposed publicly, to place a minimum 10-percent tariff on all imports to the United States, which would be used to finance more tax cuts that would disproportionately benefit the rich.

Right now, our tax system is filled with loopholes that allow the rich to avoid paying what they owe. (Trump already made it more so with his 2017 tax cuts.) But at the very least, the U.S. is supposed to have a progressive income tax system, in theory. Trump’s plan would effectively fulfill the long-standing conservative goal of doing away with progressive taxation as we know it.

As Jonathan Chait writes in New York magazine:

[T]he rejection of progressive taxation on moral grounds remains a foundational tenet of American conservative thought. Conservatives have never stopped devising proposals to roll back progressive taxation, employing a wide array of creative ideas with varying levels of plausibility, from the utopian (the flat tax, the “fair tax,” Herman Cain’s 9/9/9 tax) to more banal proposals to slash or eliminate taxes on estates, capital gains, dividends, or the top income tax bracket.

These flat tax plans varied in their particulars, but the shared premise between all of them was that they would treat wealth identically at all income levels. This was sold as a means of making taxation “fairer,” but in practice, it would dramatically shift America’s tax burden away from the wealthy and onto the poor.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/trumps-all-tariff-proposal-might-be-his-most-evil-idea-yet

[no_hypocrisy]

1. IOW, wealth redistribution to the wealthy.

Killing The New Deal and The Great Society.

[cstanleytech]

9. Won't do the wealthy a bit of good if enough people start taking potshots at them.

After all there are only so many people willing to take a bullet for someone for money.

[multigraincracker]

2. Very regressive tax. Replace it with a

Wealth Tax. That’s the only fair tax.

[NGeorgian]

3. No, just go back to pre Reagan ......

rates up to 74%.

[multigraincracker]

5. The rich will spend to get tax breaks again.

That’s what they do and get a great return on that investment.

[Martin68]

4. The stock market crash affects rich people more than ordinary people, particularly those with inherited wealth.

[FakeNoose]

6. I'm not understanding how tariffs benefit the ultra-wealthy?

Don't the billionaires (American oligarchs) have to pay the same "tariffs" that we all have to pay?

I can see that billionaires will take advantage by raising retail prices on their products, even the ones that aren't affected by tariffs. That's what will drive up inflation across the board.

The same thing happened in the 1970s when the price of gasoline suddenly sky-rocketed after the OPEC oil embargoes. In no-time-flat Americans were paying higher prices for EVERYTHING, not just gasoline-related products, and it's going to happen again in the next couple months because of tariffs.

Ultra-wealthy Americans who have their own yachts and private jets are going to find out how unwelcome they are in other countries. That will be another unforeseen fallout from all of this.

[Passages]

8. Yep. They'll be fine.

Trump seems to have learned that he can mask the taste of regressive policies by slathering them with magic Tariff Sauce. His “all tariff” policy doesn’t just replicate the flat tax, it is actually far more extreme. It effectively takes a progressive tax system and inverts it, leading the poorest Americans to pay the greatest percentage of their incomes.



snip While tariffs are technically a tax on importers, businesses pass much of the cost on to consumers in the form of price hikes. Replacing income taxes with an “all tariff” policy would require the poorest Americans to pay a much greater percentage of their incomes in the form of higher prices. And like the first Trump trade war, it will surely invite retaliatory tariffs from China and other nations that will hurt American manufacturing and cost more jobs.



snip
This tariff proposal should remind us of another, subtler danger of Trump. He has figured out a way to define himself as a crusader against the “elite,” while enacting an agenda to make them more powerful at the expense of everyone else. It demonstrates how “populism” from the right is always pseudo-populism. And a continued failure of our leaders to address the material crises in this country—wages that are insufficient, unaffordable housing, exorbitant healthcare costs, and so forth—means that pseudo-populists will continue to appeal to people, and our politics will continue to lurch further, dangerously, to the right.

[dalton99a]

7. The poor and working class will lose a lot or everything, the rich will lose very little if anything, and

the gap will grow much wider

[GenThePerservering]

10. This aspect of it becomes clearer

if you think of tariffs as another form of sales tax.

[mdbl]

11. So are the Rethuglicans in Congress going to do something?

Or are they going to continue to allow Mr Dump to run roughshod over our country.