Ok let’s do it AGAIN. This time eliminate all income and corporate income taxes + capital gains. That will leave American consumers with more $$$ to buy the tariffed goods.
Sure Obamacare has a devastating economic impact, but life isn’t just economics. The most important aspect of Obamacare is that it is a direct attack on the freedom of every single American and an unprecedented invasion of privacy by the federal leviathan. Obamacare represents abject tyranny, Smoot-Hawley did not.
I think just the opposite was the case.
When the US created these variable tariffs, other nations retaliated, and Germany decided that it needed to become self sufficient. In the context of the Great Depression, tariffs inhibited exports and imports all around.
Despite taking something of a hit in imports and exports, on the grand scale it accomplished something good: instead of their being an extended “international depression”, it isolated countries from each other, so that the stronger ones could recover faster, and not be dragged down by the weaker ones.
Had Hoover a year or two more, it is likely the US could have come out of the Great Depression by 1934 or ‘35. But Hoover made the terrible mistake of trying so hard to fix the problem at the level of business, that millions of people who were unemployed and starving, who needed help immediately, were ignored.
In a way, this is presaging what is happening today, on a smaller scale. The Republican leadership are so fixated on doing what big business and multinational corporations want, that it is ignoring what the people on Main Street want.
To make matters worse, corporations that are “too big to fail”, like that status, and want it to be preserved, even if it threatens the US economy. And multinational corporations have no loyalty to the US at all, and for even modest profit growth would deeply harm or even destroy us.
For RINOs to see them as their real constituency damns them, and the sooner they are out of power, the better.