If you don't like tariffs, how should a government, state, or voluntary political association be funded?
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If you don't like tariffs, how should a government, state, or voluntary political association be funded?
Voluntarily.
Voluntarily?
But if you're going to fund it through taxation, low tariffs are the best way.
Trump dipping his toe into the tariff pool will give him leverage to lower our export tariffs that have been shackled on us by other countries. Time to watch "The Art of the Deal" in action..
Ah, someone remembers the Harry Browne / Ron Paul platforms which called for abolishing the income tax, and funding the Federal government via excise taxes and (low, flat) tariffs, as the Constitution originally allowed.
Make aluminum can collecting great again!
https://www.autoflower.net/forums/at...33-jpg.845638/
Price of aluminum up due to tariff.
Fee was set much greater than market price of aluminum scrap to encourage cleaning up public commons. State's probably haven't adjusted rebate in a while for inflation. Potentially if aluminum prices increase enough the market price on aluminum scrap might surpass the centrally planned price and private recyclers might give you more than the state.
You have missed quite a bit , anti tariffists are more likely to support taxes , be open borders and wear dirty underwear while running a cord to the guy next doors house for electric while they post in the squalor of an abandoned basement that smells of rat urine while avoiding paying student loans they spent on Mac n Cheese .
I’m not morally opposed to a low uniform tariff that is applied at a real low rate across all industries and all imports. But this is not what we have nor what is being discussed. This is about cronyism to benefit one sector of the economy at the expense of all the rest.
If it were worthwhile, people would pay for it.
Lotteries, donations, pools for specific programs one wishes to enlist in.
If tariffs were uniformly 2% and the income tax were abolished that would be leaps and bounds better than what we have now.
That is not going to happen as spending will not be cut.
A 2% tariff on everything imported would give you $44 billion to spend. (Imports last year were $1.2 trillion)
If you want tariffs to replace the income tax, they would need to be to be just over 100%.
Include your Social Security taxes and you are up to 150%.
If you want a balanced budget at current spending levels you need a 200% tariff on every single item imported.
https://media.nationalpriorities.org...ending_pie.png
It's "paid for" by adding to a national debt that will never be repaid. So ultimately it will be those who chose to buy shares in the ability of the government to extract wealth from us by force, who end up eating the losses. And it will be divine justice when it happens.
Fair enough.
The correction will be that much more painful.
Also it isn't as if when the house of cards starts to unravel there will not be a dollar dump for actual assets. And while I'm all on board with giving the usurers the finger, not every creditor is going to eat the losses and even while the majority do, still the repercussions of living beyond our means will be felt for years if not decades.
That ship sailed so long ago there is little to nothing we can do about it at this point. Back when we were campaigning our asses off for RP there was still a chance. After 8 years of Obama our last chance to avoid default is gone.
The creditors will eat the losses because they have no other choice. We have nukes and we will still have them after the default.
Would you expect Congress to limit foreign investment in land and other hard assets within the United States?
I half expect the whores of Congress to authorize the wholesale of acreage to profit one last time off this funny money scheme. Parcel off thousands of acres to satisfy certain so called obligations and establish their socialist fiefdom.
Any foreign nation that tried to take ownership of territory as a claim on the national debt would learn that Yamamoto wasn't joking. We could simply deny their claims and there's not a damn thing they could do about it. What are the Chinese going to do, maintain divisions in the continental US to maintain their claims? No matter how much they lose, it will not be worth it to them to get saturation nuked over.
Now this is some compelling discussion!
We don't have any guarantees that we won't get sold out by Congress on that point. It's fair to presume that when the financing desperation sets in, they will indeed attempt to sell off parts of the nation in order to raise cash, as there has already been movement on China's part to secure land in the US as collateral.
The bottom line, though, is that there is absolutely no way for a foreign power to secure a land claim in the US, as long as we have EITHER a nuclear arsenal or a nation full of civilians armed to the teeth. So when the time comes, we will simply declare the debt to be odious and default it and that will be that.