Judging by the campaign rhetoric of the President-elect, tariffs levied against foreign goods, particularly Chinese, Canadian, and Mexican imports, will play a significant role in the next administration’s trade policy, despite Trump’s utter unfamiliarity with the concept. 

“A tariff is a tax on a foreign country,” is how Trump defined the word during a rally this summer.

That’s just plain fucking wrong. 

Trump has repeated this tariff lie (or grave misconception) throughout his campaign and to this day: “It’s a tax on a foreign country. It’s a tax on a country that’s ripping us off and stealing our jobs. It’s a tax that doesn’t affect our country…”

Donald. A tariff is a tax on imported goods. Any economist will tell you this, except apparently those in your employ. The tax or duty is paid at the border to U.S. Customs by the importer — with the funds going to the U.S. Treasury.

Despite what the President-elect believes or says, the tariff is paid by the domestic firm doing the importing, not the exporter. The shipper, perhaps the Chinese government, pays nothing, zero, nada, zilch, bupkus, stugots.

“Tariffs are the greatest thing ever invented,” said Trump in Flint, Michigan last month in a fever dream where he imagined that tariffs could be used to raise “tremendous amounts of money” for the U.S.

That’s absolutely fucking wrong. 

Billion dollar revenues from import levies on U.S. shoppers and firms — even in a Trump tariff orgy — would still amount to pocket change in comparison to America’s current multi-trillion dollar tax revenue stream.

Trump seems to be pining for a pre-Civil War economy (in more ways than one) based on tariffs and not income taxes. Tariffs haven’t provided meaningful revenue for governments for a century: After World War II, trade levies represented a tiny sliver of U.S. or global tax revenue.

The Queens quisling seems to believe that the larger the amount of the tariff, the better. Referring to Mexican auto imports, Trump said, “If I’m going to be president of this country, I’m going to put a 100, 200, 2,000 percent tariff,” while speaking at the Economic Club of Chicago. “They’re not going to sell one car in the United States.”

Last month, the short-fingered vulgarian told a ballroom full of executives in an interview with Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait, “…[T]he most beautiful word in the dictionary is ‘tariff.’” Unfamiliar with either term, Trump said that he thinks the word, “tariff” is “more beautiful” than the word, “love.”

Economists agree

Joining in the shared hallucination, Vice President-elect J.D. Vance-Thiel von Rand, one Big Mac-heart attack away from the Oval Office, said that economists disagree about whether tariffs lead to higher prices. 

That’s just plain fucking wrong. 

In a survey of leading economists by the Kent Clark Center at The University of Chicago Booth School of Business, a resounding 95 percent agreed or strongly agreed that “imposing tariffs results in a substantial portion of the tariffs being borne by consumers of the country that enacts the tariffs, through price increases.” The one expert who disagreed didn’t understand the question. Really. 

Think tanks from the center-left to the right come to the same conclusions about tariffs; Just ask the anarchists at the Council on Foreign Relations, the George W. Bush Institute, Cato Institute, Brookings, and the Tax Foundation.

A single aberrant think tank, The Coalition for a Prosperous America, is the lonely voice that supports Trump’s universal minimum tariff applied to all imports, calling the “globalist free trade era” a “bipartisan mistake” that hollowed out U.S. industry. The Coalition imagines that a 10 percent universal tariff would generate 3 million additional jobs, lead to a surge in U.S. manufacturing output, and bring in trillions in revenue to the federal treasury. 

The rest of the field of economists find that tariffs result in higher prices for consumers and American firms; they “weaken the middle class” and hit the poorest the hardest; they provoke retaliatory tariffs from abroad and hurt export growth; they reduce GDP, wages, and employment. 

The radicals at The Washington Post published a report last month detailing how Trump’s potential trade policy would likely “raise prices, hurt the stock market and spark economic feuds with much of the world” while American consumers would carry the weight in price increases. 

In a study published in early November, the Communists at the National Retail Federation found that Trump’s tariffs would cost an additional $46 billion to $78 billion a year for just appliances, clothing, footwear, furniture, toys, and travel goods. Tariffs would cost a middle-income family roughly $1,700 more a year, according to the hippies at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

Biden’s own Office of the U.S. Trade Representative surveyed the impact of tariffs on Chinese products over the last four years and found that the duties have had ​“small negative effects on U.S. aggregate economic welfare,” although they did produce ​“positive impacts on U.S. production in the ten sectors most directly affected by the duties.”

U.S. Presidents ❤️ tariffs

American presidents from Washington to Jackson to Lincoln through Obama, Biden and Trump have wielded tariffs across the eras for very different reasons. Trade dynamics in a pre-industrial, agrarian, slave/serf/peasant society differ from those of an entwined global network of industrialized supply chains.

Trump has said the tariffs will help prevent unfair trade practices by China and increase U.S. manufacturing jobs. And despite an absolute misunderstanding of the concept of tariffs, on these points, Trump economic policy is in full alignment with the Biden and Obama administrations. 

Biden’s stance is the same as Trump’s: He has accused China of unfair trade practices as well as ​“flooding global markets with artificially low-priced exports.” Biden has ratcheted up tariffs on $18 billion worth of annual imports from China — paying special attention to electric vehicles, solar panels, and critical materials. Biden is also maintaining Trump-era tariffs on $300 billion worth of annual imports.  

Presumably even Biden, in his diminished state, understands the definition of tariffs and that they are intended as deterrents, not profit centers. His administration is still raising the tariff rate on Chinese solar cells, reinstating tariffs from the Auxin Solar suit on solar modules built by China-linked companies in Southeast Asia, increasing tariffs on Chinese-made lithium-ion batteries and battery parts. Tariffs on steel and aluminum from China are rising as well.  

Solar panels are a revealing example of how these Obama-era anti-Chinese tariffs play out over time. Despite tariffs having been in place since 2012 — increased by Trump and expanded by Biden — consumers in the U.S. pay up to twice as much and more compared to the rest of the world for solar panels. 

In stark contrast to ineffective tariffs, incentives from the Biden term have actually produced results. In the two years since the Inflation Reduction Act was passed, American solar manufacturers have announced nearly $17 billion in planned investment, according to the White House. The act’s incentives have driven unprecedented expansion of domestic clean energy manufacturing — hundreds of billions in investments in clean energy factories and infrastructure, sparking hope of a U.S. manufacturing renaissance. That’s a lot more than has been achieved by over a decade of tariffs. 

Already, the looming threat of additional Trump levies has U.S. firms dependent on imports reacting by stockpiling Chinese goods before prices rise or rerouting their supply chains around tariffed nations.

The incoming administration has the mandate and privilege to remake international trade agreements in accord with the Trump doctrine. The President would be best served by understanding the tools at his command — and that tariffs are essentially a wildly inefficient national sales tax best used by developing nations.