[PeaRidge]

Your posting of the tariff tables from Wiki (see your post 164) is data copied from “The Historical Statistics of the United States.”

It is accurate but your assertions are incorrect.

Your error was in quoting what you believed to be tariff income from column 3 which is clearly marked Federal Receipts.

Column 3 or total federal receipts from that year, was the sum total of tariff collections, income from the sale of public lands, and other sources of income for the government.

The tariff revenue by year is in column 1, and is, as you can see, less than the total revenue.

Unfortunately that makes all of your assertions and conclusions invalid.

[donmeaker]

I will note that the tariff income is described as a percent, but that is a percent of the imported item, itself given an arbitrary value that imperfectly matches its real value.

It may be instructive to compare federal receipts for a few years to nominal estimates of the GDP.V
http://www.measuringworth.com/datasets/usgdp/result.php

Just to be completely arbitrary, lets pick 1800, 1825 and 1850. GDP and tariff dollars in then year nominal millions of dollars.
year____GDP_est._____tariff_____Percent
1800_____476_________9.1______1.9%
1825_____814________20.1______2.5%
1850____2556________39.7______1.6%

It is important to realize that tariff incomes were minimal, and the US federal government was much closer to the libertarian ideal than we can imagine today. This puts the lie to the pretense that the tariff rates in the above years were fit cause for major whining.

[BroJoeK]

PeaRidge: "The tariff revenue by year is in column 1, and is, as you can see, less than the total revenue.
Unfortunately that makes all of your assertions and conclusions invalid."

Your are correct that the tariff income in "column 1" is less than the total of Federal receipts in "column 3".
My mistake.

But if you'll do the math, you'll see that tariff income generally amounted to 95% of total receipts, and that every statement made about those total receipts is also true of tariff income.

So your conclusion, "that makes all of your assertions and conclusions invalid," is false.

My point was that over the decades before 1860, tariff rates went up and down, responding to political pressures, that when they went up tariff income fell or grew more slowly than when rates went down -- a lesson with some application to our current political debates.

In 1860 tariff rates of 15% were as low as they had been in 1792, when George Washington was President.