Trumps tariffs are the wrong way to bring jobs and revenue back to the United States. At best the tariffs might generate $100 Billion a year. That’s a tremendous shortfall of the $4.5Trillion debt incurred by allowing Corporate Tax cuts to sunset.
Corporations now pay $580 Billion in IRS taxes and the rest of us contribute $4.2 Trillion? Where’s the equivalent taxation? Even if the Corporate tax cuts revert back to 39%, with loopholes, they generate too little money collected by the lower and middle classes.
Let the Corporate tax cuts lapse. They were a bad idea and Corporate taxes don’t decrease our deficit.
- Stop chopping the lower and middle class safety nets.
- Stop our state of inequity and start taxing Corporations, enabling them to contribute to the tax base equivalent to our contribution of $4 trillion!
- Let’s revert to “taxation with representation “, instead of what we have now ? # Taxation without representation!
Trump said worldwide automobile taxes, er, tariffs will come into effect next week, on April 3, alongside Trump’s so-called reciprocal tariffs, due April 2.
The new 25 percent tariff will be applied to autos parts, as well.
All other countries already face a 2.5 percent tariff on their passenger car exports to the United States and a 25 percent tariff on light trucks. Trump says his new duties will be in addition to those, raising the tariff rate for passenger cars to 27.5 percent and the rate for light trucks to 50 percent.
Cars imported from Canada and Mexico will be taxed based on the amount of non-U.S. content in the vehicle. So, if a car made in Mexico contains 50 percent American content and 50 percent foreign, the 25 percent tariff rate would be cut in half to 12.5 percent.
A 25 percent tariff could increase the average price of a car purchased in the United States by between $3,000 and $10,000.
Hard to remember that Congress decides on tariffs, not the president. But as with so much else, Trump is just fine with America’s attention-deficit disorder and supine Republicans in control of Congress.
In reality, slapping taxes on car parts imported from Canada and Mexico will hurt U.S. automakers — which have extensive operations in both countries — harder than their competitors offshore.
U.S. auto dealers have warned the Trump regime that tariffs will make cars less affordable to American consumers at a time when many Americans remain concerned about inflation.
Trump has waved away such concerns, insisting his tariffs will raise revenue — enabling him to lower taxes. The White House calculates that his tariffs could raise $100 billion annually. But the mere threat of such tariffs has erased more than $100 billion from the largest carmakers’ market capitalization in recent weeks.
Plus, as I’ve shown, his tariffs are a regressive tax that will be paid mostly by lower-income Americans, while his planned tax cuts will mostly benefit higher-income Americans. The result: A huge hidden upward redistribution.
The Trump regime also believes the car taxes-tariffs will bring automobile manufacturing back to America. Over the long term, maybe. But the costs will be gargantuan. And because manufacturing increasingly will be done by AI-driven machines in any event, it’s hard to make the case that there’ll be more auto jobs here.
In economic terms, Trump’s tariffs — on cars and other goods — are analogous to the Signal group chat: A dumb move that’s not just a gross mistake, but also indicative of a deeper failure to understand even the basics.