Help Preserve Jobs and National Security & Independence:Defeat the U.S.-Oman Free Trade Agreement

The New American ^

[expat_panama]

By eliminating tariffs you are placing a much bigger burden on the people who pay income tax....   ...Elmination of tariffs encourages offshoring, outsourcing, wage deflation in this country.

These are the two clearest arguments favoring tariffs, that they help create domestic jobs and they lower the workers' income tax burden.  This theory does make a lot of sense, so we need to check the actual wages, tariffs, and employment records to see if this is how it really happens.   

Disposable (after tax) income numbers are easy enough to get from the BEA, it's one of the main numbers use to figure the gdp.  Employment numbers from the BLS aren't too hard to get a hold of either.  Thanks to Todd's pdf we now got import tax numbers going back over a century, and the most useful number is that last percentage; namely the percent of the cost of all imports that's paid in taxes --it takes into account both import tax rates and how often it's charged.

What we end up finding out is that the real (inflation adjusted) after-tax income per person didn't start taking off until after 1950 when import taxes got cut down to 10% or less.   It was a hard lesson we learned in the first half of the century when a huge tax-hike made incomes collapse.  

It was the same with job creation.  The import tax-hike of the '30's happened at the same time as massive layoffs, and it wasn't until the import taxes were finally slashed that everyone got back to work  

OK, now we'll hear a lot of the tax and spend people say that we don't really know for sure that the tax cuts were the true cause of those good decades.  OK fine, we don't.  The only things we know for sure is that (1) the tax cuts didn't hurt anybody, and (2) Todd and I prefer paying less on taxes and more on feeding our kids.

[hedgetrimmer]

These are the two clearest arguments favoring tariffs, that they help create domestic jobs and they lower the workers' income tax burden.

It isn't theory. There were no income taxes on wages before 1913. The government was supported before income tax was collected.

[Toddsterpatriot]

According to the following source, income tax revenue in 2004 was about $809 billion.

Historical Amount of Revenue by Source

I guess we could raise tariffs to 65%. That would raise the same revenue. Assuming nobody changed their behavior.

[expat_panama]

There were no income taxes on wages before 1913. The government was supported before income tax was collected.

We need America, America needs revenue, and revenue depends on taxes.  We all like to have a strong America even though nobody likes to pay the taxes needed to keep it strong.   

We've got to also remember that we don't want to tax everything like they do in Albania, because then our government would go broke like Albania's, because when the rates get to high then revenue falls. 

It's all there in the PDF file back in post number140; if we really want the US government to get more money from import taxes (because we don't want to pay income taxes), then we need to keep the import tax rates down.

The other good news is that we've come a long way.  We're no longer saying that high import tax rates protect jobs or increase income --that was cleared up in post 141 and left us with just the concern about supporting the US treasury.  Now that question's cleared up too.

Cheers!

[hedgetrimmer]

What is this hypermart stuff you guys post?

[phoenix0468]

Actually, there were some pretty good jobs here in Oklahoma until just a few years ago. I'm not sure if any of the recent trade agreements caused the closing of a Wrangler's plant.

[expat_panama]

What is this hypermart stuff you guys post?

In the old days what people used to do is read the WSJ or the NYT where pundits would put up anything they wanted and nobody would check them.  These days everyone can look up the actual figures on say, personal income (Latest news release -- 6/30/06 In May 2006, personal income increased 0.4 percent.) and see for themselves what's going on. 

Hyper mart is nothing-- it's just a tool for freep posting; it's one of the internet places where you pay them and you can post stuff on the web for a link.  There are places where you can do it for free (geocities, some foto places etc.) but they have a bad habit of taking it down without warning.   I got the cheap plan at hypermart ($70/year) and that lets me store 350 mb of graphs and files on their harddrive which freepers can download at the rate of 2.5 gigs per month.

So whenever I see some useful numbers in say, a PDF file from these guys, what I do is copy/paste it on to an excel spread sheet (or you could get OpenOffice.org 2.0.3 for free) to make a graph, then I copy the graph into paint to make it a gif, and then I upload the gif to hypermeart.  If you're ever skeptical about how I fudged these graphs, just ask and I can post the numbers/links their based on too.

Freepmail me if you want to try graphing/posting your own stuff and run into a barrier.  I only learn from arguing with people I disagree with so the more you can toss hard numbers at me the better.   More importantly, it's fun.

[bert]

Opposing the free trade agreement will cost more jobs.

The American economy is driven by trade and any efforts to destroy trade destroy jobs.

[expat_panama]

Not only that, import tax-cuts mean more jobs, higher pay, and more import taxes collected. 

By cutting the import tax rate from a high of 59%  in 1933  to the current 5%, we've increased the percent of Americans with jobs by more than half, and real wages have gone up six-fold.   If that weren't enough, the amount of import taxes collected has also gone up, from just $300 million then to $21,414 million this year.

imho this thing of seeing things for ourselves on the internet beats Dan Rather all hollow.

[hedgetrimmer]

You claims have no data to back them up.

[expat_panama]

You claims have no data to back them up.

Not in my posts-- I tend to toss in too much as it is.  Just tell me which claims you want data for and I'll cough up a link.  Example:  if you question this, I can point you to the seventh and eight columns of this.