and it is only the tariffs (ie, a tax on American companies/consumers)
What exactly do you think all of the other taxes are?
Right, but the difference is that Trump regularly lies and says that the Tariffs are not taxes on Americans, so it's worth pointing out that they are.
So would you say every EPA regulation or minimum wage hike is a tax on the American people?
Would
I say that? No, because that makes no sense, because neither of those things are taxes.
Do you really know what Trump's
Tariffs are? For the uninitiated:
Trump is unilaterally imposing an import tax (a "tariff") on goods we import from China. So if Ford wants to buy aluminum for example, they can either buy aluminum produced in America for whatever the going rate is here, or they can buy aluminum from China for whatever the going rate is there and then pay the US Government the 25% (or whatever) import tax.
The theory here is that that incentivizes Ford to buy from American aluminum producers, thereby helping the American economy. Which is great and true for aluminum producers. But for literally everyone else in the economy all that's doing is making aluminum more expensive and/or taxes higher, hurting them exactly as much as it helped the aluminum producers.
Ford of course is not just going to eat the higher cost of aluminum by itself. So it raises the price of the F-150 accordingly. So now Joe Farmer has to pay more for his work truck as a 2nd-order effect.
But regardless of deep you want to go, whether just the 1st-order "Ford has to pay the import tax" or the 2nd-order "Joe Farmer pays the import tax in the form of more expensive goods", either way import taxes are
taxes on
Americans. Not a single dollar flowed from China into the Federal budget.
Maybe we succeeded in hurting China's economy along the way. And it looks like we have. And in retaliation maybe they announce their own tariffs or stop buying soybeans or something and they succeed in hurting our economy. And it looks like they have.
But either way
tariffs are taxes on Americans, and this is such an uncontroversial and universally-known fact that I can't believe I'm having to defend it. Just because you're a Republican doesn't mean you have to believe all of Trump's blatant lies. In fact in this case it should make you super suspicious, the pre-Trump Republican party was
all about free trade.