On Tariffs

 I don't feel like this is being said enough, so I'll take a stab at it myself:

Tariffs hit the poor harder. They are a regressive form of taxation, as opposed to a progressive one that would demand more money from the rich. 

Why is that? Well, think about it: One of the privileges of being wealthy is that you can pay other people to do tasks for you. Those are services, and tariffs are charged on stuff, things being imported--not on services that people perform for you. 

The less money you have, the more of it you spend as a proportion of your income on actual things: Groceries, clothes, technology, you name it. This is part of what is powerful about the spending power of average people, that those dollars keep moving through the economy in a flow of business that creates local jobs and keeps stores open in your neighborhood. 

If you live paycheck to paycheck, it's because you keep spending your paycheck. Your money isn't locked away somewhere, because you need it now for things like food and rent. 

Now, obviously, the rich also spend money on physical things--sometimes really big physical things, and sometimes so much money there isn't any left. 

But the really big game in wealth is having so much money it can be put away, siloed into different investments for years or decades at a time, quietly growing. If you have enough money that you don't have to spend it all each month, you can slow some of it down, put it away for later, and find ways for it to accrue interest and become an even bigger pile of money. 

To bring it back to tariffs, whacking up the price of food 25% has almost no impact on the rich, because their food budget is such a small proportion of what they're spending. For the average American, who cannot withstand a financial shock of a random bill of $1,000 one month without serious consequences, a 25% increase in the price of food jeopardizes the ability to pay rent, and thus be housed, or to pay for some other essential item. 

Tariffs don't raise money off of foreign governments, they wring money out of average consumers. Think of them like a sales tax, an extra cost mandated by the government that gets passed straight on to customers. 

Trump idolizes a particular moment in American history when a huge amount of revenue was generated by tariffs, before income taxes came in to even the burden by asking the rich to pay their share. That's what he wants to take us back to. (He also loves the leverage that he gets when he creates difficulties that people have to make personal deals with him to avoid. That's the extortion racket bit.) 

Finally, the richer a person is in the USA, the less likely they are to pay even income tax. This is what I think is the most infuriating part: All of this chaos and cost is being borne by us to privilege a group of people who are already dodging most of their tax obligations. 

If you're wealthy, one of the many services you can pay for is an accountant to advise you on investments to make to lessen your taxes. You can create trusts, write down losses, shuffle debt, and shift money around so that you appear to have little to no income. Sometimes, this is overtly fraudulent, like Trump's gaming of his properties' values, where he told banks they were worth more so he could borrow more cash, and he told the government they were worth less so that he would have lower tax obligations. 

So, to bring it home: If you're poor, you have to go buy your own soap, sponges, mops and rags, and if any of them are imported, they now cost you extra because of tariffs. 

But if you're rich? You can pay somebody else to clean that up for you, and no import duties apply.