Trump is intending to turn the tariffs into a sales tax to replace the income tax. This place a monumental amount of the tax load on poor and middle class Americans. The tariffs do not show up on your receipts or your tax return, but it is a huge economic burden nonetheless. If the republicans manage to make a case for getting rid of the income tax, it will be very difficult to reestablish it.
We cannot allow republicans to control the narrative on this. We need to stop talking about tariffs and taxes like they’re two separate things. TARIFFS = TAXES. Repeat this over and over again on all media platforms.
Originally Posted By u/BeneficialNatural610 At 2025-04-27 02:04:23 PM | Source
They are already charging highest price possible that’s how market pricing works.
Sure if their entire profit margin gets eaten, they will up the prices but they won’t be able to recover 100% of these tariffs from the broke pleb class. They will price people out, sales will drop, revenue drops and hence profit.
I am not saying that prices can’t or won’t go up, I am pointing basic economic premise of how tariffs actually work in practice.
I am doing this because people shilling tariffs are taxes on consumers are either being useful idiots or threat actors. This is factually incorrect.
Amazing how people never get butt hurt about corporate profits tho that’s literally a tax on everyone and most mega corpos barely pay income taxes too.
Not necessarily. It depends on the specific market. Ferrari, for example, immediately increased their prices when auto tariffs were announced because they are a luxury brand and know that their customers will eat the cost.
For everyday products, you’re right that the corporation won’t recuperate the full cost of the tariff. So ultimately, the customer pays more, the corporarion they’re buying from makes less and the foreign exporter also makes less due to reduced demand.
Who wins? Whoever is collecting the tariff ie. the US government. Which can be fine if they give it back to the people and certain targeted domestic corporate subsidies but I doubt that’s how this government intends to pay it.
The fact that he used the phrase External Revenue Service tells me he doesn’t know what he’s doing. You can’t replace income tax with economic leverage over foreign markets alone. Those markets would simply stop doing business with you.
The US garnered incredible economic leverage over the world due to the circumstances of WW2 but it is far from infinite or perpetual.
I would be careful with thinking this. He doesn’t understand or care, but the Heritage Foundation thinktank pulling the strings certainly does.
A large number of Americans don’t understand it either, and they think it’s the exporter (the other country) who is paying the tariffs. Calling it “External Revenue Service” seems like a deliberate choice to reinforce that misinformed narrative that tariffs aren’t a tax.
Its certainly a thoughtfully constructed phrase to appeal to a type of greed and entitlement.
I don’t doubt that the heritage foundation has a plan but they’re essentially engaging in a gambit and hoping the rest of the world will blunder. There’s no real precedent here to go off of. I personally don’t think the US has ‘the cards’ to come out on top. I have a feeling that Trump is going to end up backtracking and facing legal challenges to the point that more moderate republicans will start to turn away. In the end, the overton window will have shifted which may likely be the long term goal.
We havent even seen widespread price increases yet. If the tariffs result in a decline in the US dollar, oil prices will go up and so will the price of gas. I don’t see that going over well. He’s not going to be able to increase domestic supply fast enough to soften that impact.
There’s still a ton of room and time for him to lose public support here. The less support he has, the harder it will be for him to make the substantial moves he has in the first few months here.
Most of the rest of the world is looking at how to bolster their economies and defense to the exclusion of the US. That will ultimately be Trump’s lasting legacy, in my view.