“The data says the South supplied the overwhelming majority of all exports and thus paid the overwhelming majority of the tariff burden.”
Can somebody please explain how this works? Tariffs were on imports, not exports!!!
My post 100 shows that Federal expenditures from 1789-1860 were:
Free states $37,719,344
Slave states $36,983,300
Where's the big difference? Which region benefited the most per capita?
Can somebody please explain how this works? Tariffs were on imports, not exports!!!
The exporters were also the importers. Exporters contracted with shipping companies which either did not offer one way shipping or if they did, offered it at uneconomical prices. So those exporters needed to find something to fill the holds of the cargo ships on their return voyages. Naturally, they used the money from selling their cash crops to buy manufactured goods to put in the ships’ holds. Those manufactured goods were then to be hit with very steep tariffs once the Morrill Tariff came into effect. Since Southerners produced and owned the cash crops, they also owned the manufactured goods those cash crops had been effectively exchanged for.
Diogenes believes that every dollar that cotton planters got from exports and spent on US goods was still somehow their money and still somehow in their wallets and pockets.
I tell him over and over again that the plantation owners used the money they earned from exports to buy goods and services from other Americans who could then use that money to buy foreign goods if they wished.
Indeed, the money received for exports would have been pounds or francs or some other currency and would have stayed in banks in London, Paris, New York or New Orleans which would have given dollars to the planters and given the foreign currency to other people who wanted to exchange their dollars for foreign currency in order to buy imports with the foreign money.
I have explained this to Diogenes many times, but he doesn't get it or won't acknowledge it. His idea is that cotton planters snagged the money and they have a moral right to continual possession, even if they spend it, because it was their cotton that first brought the pounds, francs, marks, kroner, or pesetas to the US. Therefore, whoever buys imported goods, it's really the slave-owning planter who bought them.
I believe that's called having your cake and eating it too. Diogenes won't admit that the US had other exports than could just as well bring foreign currency into the country.
There are economic details involved here that I don't entirely understand. Neither does Diogenes. The difference is that I'm aware of my incomplete understanding and freely admit it. Diogenes isn't aware of his own incomplete understanding and won't admit it.
I am utterly shocked that you are seemingly unaware that exports pay for imports. So let me explain it to you.
Exports are how people get money to pay for imports. Trade must balance, or someone is giving away stuff for free.