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9 sats \ 11 replies \ @Undisciplined 31 Jan \ on: Does Trump have a strategy with these tariffs or is he just YOLOing econ
It's hard to tease out signal from noise right now (at least for me it is), but I think there is method in the madness (not an endorsement).
Some of the tariffs are clearly being levied or threatened as a negotiating tactic. Agree or disagree, that's at least easy enough to understand.
The tariffs on our neighbors seem different, though. I'm wondering if they're part of the proposal to replace the income tax and IRS with tariffs and a national sales tax.
and a national sales tax
A national sales tax administered by the states would be much better approach.
We already don't locally tax things like food, rent, or mortgage payments....so you would sort of have the "exclusion" built-in and pre-sorted.
Plus it would subtly shift power back to the states in the sense that they would collect the money and forward to the feds
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I agree. It would suck for the small number of places that have no sales taxes in place, though.
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NH has no sales tax but they have excise taxes on alcohol and tobacco
call it a federal excise tax, problem solved
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I would expect most of the localities have sales taxes, though.
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I agree
California has a sales tax 5 percent. Los Angeles is about 4.75 percent
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In that case, the state or feds should pay for a new POS and payroll system for these small businesses
Running a small business is hard enough w/o the state mandating new software upgrades
update:
https://www.tax-rates.org/new_hampshire/excise-tax
NH taxes gas and cell phones.
Alaska, Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire, Oregon
Among these states, we should only provide assistance to Montana. Alaska has so much money from oil. The other states can 'suffer' especially Oregon and Portlandia
second update:
every state has an excise tax on tobacco.
We give a license to sell tobaccco to every hardware/electronic/etc store so they can collect excise taxes on tobacco sales including nicotine vape products
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Yea the one on Canada specifically seems contradictory. In some cases he references fentanyl as the cause (although it seems statistically the north border has a fraction of issues vs south) and makes it seem like “if you fix this it goes away”. But then separately will reference trade deficit figures that are kind of moronic to use since the trade deficit is mainly driven by oil and gas being sold to USA at a steep discount to global prices which benefits the country.
I think it’s rather dumb to use net deficits or surpluses without applying context as a way to evaluate a trade relationship.
Agreed it’s a tool for leverage tho
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As long as the liberals are in charge Canada is not a friendly neighbor
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Agreed liberals are terrible. However there’s potentially a lot of ramifications of escalating and ignoring trade agreements prev negotiated by the last trump admin. Discredits the ability to rely on terms
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