All of you Free Traitors™ will never admit that consumption taxes, like the tariff, are superior to the income tax. Why? To admit that ruins your religion.
So forget trade, tariffs can be justified on the revenue generation aspect alone. Tariffs are not mandatory, the income tax you free trade Nazis tacitly support certainly is mandatory with incarceration the ultimate threat. Nobody ever got thrown into jail for not buying an imported good.
Income taxes are horrible. So are consumption taxes. Both should be as low as possible. But you want to raise them.
Do you like sky-high gasoline prices? Because they’re at least partly the result of ridiculously high consumption taxes. There are taxes at every stage of the process.
Are you in favor of raising the cost of American exports? Because retaliatory tariffs and trade barriers are coming if we do this.
Raising tariffs will undo a lot of the good that we got from the recent tax cuts. Of course, you protectionists will never admit that. Why? To admit that ruins your religion.
And to claim that “Tariffs are not mandatory” is as ridiculous as claiming that income tax is not mandatory, or payroll tax (which also is a drag on the economy and is the next tax we ought to cut.) You trade, you pay. It’s not as if we can just stop trading. One can stop smoking and avoid the tobacco tax. One can stop drinking and avoid the alcohol tax. But we can’t stop trading. Economic isolationism would do massive harm to our economy.