Trump is the FIRST PRESIDENT to get it.
The first one.
This is why he won the election. Because voters, unlike our “leaders”, get that America needs to make things right in America.
Reagan successfully used tariffs, and so did our founders.
As late as 1912 Tariffs were 30% of our budget.
By the way, this is when the American quality of life was unparalleled anywhere on planet earth.
Total revenue: $992 million
Tariffs $311 million
Postage stamps & fees $245 million
Liquor taxes $230 million
Tobacco taxes $77 million
Corporate income taxes $35 million
Panama Canal receipts $33 million
All other* $96 million
* Land sales, fines, fees for patents and forestry.
In his 1790 State of the Union Address, Washington justified his tariff policy for national security reasons:
A free people ought not only to be armed, but disciplined; to which end a uniform and well-digested plan is requisite; and their safety and interest require that they should promote such manufactories as tend to render them independent of others for essential, particularly military, supplies.
Henry Clay
In 1832, then the United States Senator from Kentucky, Henry Clay said about his disdain for “free traders”[9] that “it is not free trade that they are recommending to our acceptance. It is in effect, the British colonial system that we are invited to adopt; and, if their policy prevail, it will lead substantially to the re-colonization of these States, under the commercial dominion of Great Britain.”
Clay said:
When gentlemen have succeeded in their design of an immediate or gradual destruction of the American System, what is their substitute? Free trade! Free trade! The call for free trade is as unavailing as the cry of a spoiled child, in its nurse’s arms, for the moon, or the stars that glitter in the firmament of heaven. It never has existed; it never will exist. Trade implies, at least two parties. To be free, it should be fair, equal and reciprocal.
Clay explained that “equal and reciprocal” free trade “never has existed; [and] it never will exist.” He warned against practicing “romantic trade philanthropy… which invokes us to continue to purchase the produce of foreign industry, without regard to the state or prosperity of our own.”
Andrew Jackson
Henry Clay’s longtime rival and political opponent, President Andrew Jackson, in explaining his support for a tariff, wrote:
We have been too long subject to the policy of the British merchants. It is time we should become a little more Americanized, and, instead of feeding the paupers and laborers of Europe, feed our own, or else, in a short time, by continuing our present policy, we shall all be paupers ourselves.
In contrast... republican and conservative hero Woodrow Wilson made a drastic lowering of tariff rates a major priority for his presidency. /s