Our Founders had no issue with tariffs. They use them to fund the country for about the first hundred years, until the Wilson era.
I think this gets to the heart of the problem.
We are supposed to have LIMITED government. And for a long time we did.
We didn't have welfare, we didn't have social programs, we didn't have busybody agencies looking at us through microscopes. The government did a few relatively small tasks, and life was mostly OK.
Then the Progressives arrived. They had big plans. They wanted to punish the rich, lift up the poor, expand government, and make the world a perfect place. But the revenue from tariffs was insufficient for such utopian dreams. And that's why Income Tax became so necessary.
I'd like income tax to go away, tariffs to become more central, and government to become a whole lot smaller. It worked before. It could work again. But we would have to cast aside the dreams of the Progressives.
And if we replace Income Tax with some sort of national retail sales tax, that might be OK too.
RE: Our Founders had no issue with tariffs. They use them to fund the country for about the first hundred years, until the Wilson era.
The same observation made in Post #34 is what I would have said, but he did a better job than myself.
If we are to return to the tariff system that made us prosperous at the turn of the century, then we have to return to the tax and non-welfare system that we had then as well.
One of the reasons companies move manufacturing internationally is because of COST. It is currently impossible to remove all of the costs involved in manufacturing here -— Payroll taxes, state and local taxes, environmental regulations, OSHA requirements etc. Those things were not issues of concern during the time of the founders up to the turn of the 20th century.