Why Trump's Tariffs Would Be Bad for Washington State

Donald Trump is proposing a 20 percent tax, a tariff, on all foreign goods. The idea is partly to force some of those goods to be made here. It is also likely that, for other goods, Americans will pay higher prices. The tariff on those goods, collected from foreign sellers, will enrich the government.

The U.S. government has been run into debt for a very long time. In Trump’s first term, the Treasury had to borrow more than $8 trillion to raise the money for him to spend. Part of it was because of Covid, but it was also because Republicans and Democrats in Congress both like to spend more than they tax. (Also Trump, a former hotel and casino developer, had always bathed in a tub of debt. Sometimes he paid it back and sometimes he stuck someone else with it.) Under Trump’s 20 percent tariff, he would be making the Chinese pay, and the Japanese, the Germans, the French, the British, the lot of them — for the privilege of selling goods to Americans.

Compare this with Trump’s promise in 2016 to build a wall along the southern border and make Mexico pay to build it. Now he promises a wall against foreign goods, and to make the Chinese and others pay to jump over it.

In Trump’s first term, his promise to build the wall and make Mexico pay for it didn’t work out too well. The Mexicans are a proud people, and there was no way they were going to pay for Donald Trump’s wall. Unsurprisingly, Congress didn’t want to pay either. To circumvent Congress, Trump declared an emergency and ordered the wall built by executive order. Was that constitutional? Arguably it wasn’t, but the courts said it was. Even so, Trump got less than a quarter of the wall built, and it was paid entirely by the United States.

https://www.postalley.org/2024/10/16/why-trumps-tariffs-would-be-bad-for-washington-state/