It's not the same. If I decide I don't want to pay tariffs, I just buy American. Same with excise taxes. Sales taxes are unavoidable. The only way I can limit sales taxes is to buy less, which is bad for the economy. Same with income taxes. I either come up with a bunch of phoney deductions or just make less money.
The money I save on tariffs, assuming they are not eaten by the importer, are repaid by supporting unemployed workers that need to be retrained for jobs that will soon be exported. I don't see where you end up ahead unless your goal is to have everything run through the big government filter.
It is indeed the same for two reasons: (1) Goods in the modern economy are extremely complex with almost all featuring components of some sort that were imported and thus paid a tariff, and (2) even if you buy a purely american good, you are still hit with a higher price that would not exist for either the american or foreign good without the tariff since both would have to sell at the world price.
The money I save on tariffs, assuming they are not eaten by the importer, are repaid by supporting unemployed workers that need to be retrained for jobs that will soon be exported.
No. Only some of it is repaid. Due to the geometry of price curves it is mathematically certain that the ammount that gets repaid to those workers will be significantly less than the ammount withdrawn from the economy by the tariff itself. Besides, a person who has to depend on the government to keep his job for him and send consumers his way by forcing prices up is little better than the welfare bum who does the same by collecting a government check. Both of their livlihoods are obtained by redistributionary government programs.