Let’s say you’re a 1 percenter like Trump is. Of course you only want minimum taxation on all of your doings. The best case of all would be if that tax were zero.
Now Trump also got elected because the lower classes of Americans wanted there to be less tax, too. The poor don’t want to pay tax and neither does the middle class. So Trump has decided that he will give everyone what they want.
Now something has to give when you have the biggest, most expensive military in the world and you want low or no taxation on your citizens. Trump has found his solution or so he thinks. Why he can tax people from abroad.
Except that he can’t tax people from abroad without taking over those countries first. So he has done the next best thing in his mind. He has applied tariffs to the goods that those other countries produce.
And that’s right, tariffs aren’t a feature of his economic policy, they are the main plank of Trump’s economic policy. The Tea Party is almost set to rejoice. Except that even they aren’t sure that tariffs are a good thing only. Other countries have retaliated with tariffs of their own.
Trump is trying his best to have things his own way. He has blamed trade negotiations between his government and Canada on the fact that Canada has too many tariffs on the American goods. When in fact Trump slapped Canada with 50 billion dollars in tariffs and all Canada has done is retaliated with, you guessed it, 50 billion dollars worth of tariffs on American goods.
Perhaps this is all a ruse so Canada won’t notice that because Trump acted weeks before Canada that Americans got weeks of tariffs free and clear. Watch for Trump to slap on more tariffs knowing that he is first to act. Watch him make the biggest fuss if he agrees to stop them that Canada and all other trading partners of the US must stop their tariffs at the precise moment Trumps stops his tariffs.
This few weeks thing is Trumps’s plan. Watch as every few weeks he slaps more tariffs on more countries. He will only give up on them if his own conditions are met.
And that’s how Trump intends to tax the world.
