Tariffs would cost the working class much more than income taxes do
...and how to communicate as much to voters
Note: you can find a shorter version of this article, with more emphasis on Henry George, for free at the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation website
Mark Twain claimed that “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme”; at some point though the repetition and rhyming become indistinguishable. Tony Mellon, grandson of Gilded Age robber baron and 1920s Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, gave a pro-Trump PAC $50 million the day after the former president was convicted of dozens of felony charges related to his fraudulent business records. A few days later, Trump posted on his Truth Social account about the many delights of tariffs, a favorite tool of Mellon’s grandfather and of William McKinley, whose unabashedly pro-business policies helped create the Mellon family fortune in the late 1800s:
The sudden upswing in support for tariffs, after decades of expanding free trade, has many roots. A general distrust of all things “neoliberal” is one of them, and perhaps the most understandable: increased trade has brought increased prosperity, just as economics from David Ricardo to Paul Krugman predicted. Henry George should have been able to put the idea in its coffin with a single quip: ““What protection teaches us is to do to ourselves in time of peace what enemies seek to do to us in time of war.” However, the wealth was not broadly distributed, and increasing inequality in wealthy countries has led to a protectionist backlash in many. The proper response to point out that tariffs replacing income taxes, as Trump seems to be proposing, would be an unmitigated disaster for the the working class.
Why?
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