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Comment by mullingitover | Hacker News Reader

It's long been a conservative dream to eliminate progressive taxation, and moving entirely to a tariff-based system is a fantastic option for forcing the tax burden onto the poor. The genius of it is that you get to invoke nationalism as you do it. Someone who complains simply doesn't love America and isn't a patriot.

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I've often seen the statistic where the US Government at point was almost entirely funded by tariffs (and that this was to justify removing the income tax), but this seems to be misleading as from what I remember, at that time the Government was also much less powerful and didn't have as much of an active role providing services to citizens so I doubt tariffs would be able to supplement what other plans the Trump admin has.

Any info on this?

> often seen the statistic where the US Government at point was almost entirely funded by tariffs

Most old societies were. It’s easy to tax at a limited number of ports. And we didn’t understand comparative advantgae because we didn’t need to; most societies were—most of the time—Malthusian/zero real growth. (You’d also go to war more often. Industrial warfare and nukes sort of birthed the modern trade war.)

> long been a conservative dream to eliminate progressive taxation, and moving entirely to a tariff-based system

Since when? Free trade has been a conservative staple until the Tea Party and Trump.

Free trade is orthogonal to this goal. For my entire life, the right-wing/libertarian tax proposal has been for the 'flat tax' or 'fair tax', which basically means an across-the-board high sales tax funds the government. This is of course a regressive tax, since the upper echelon classes only spend a small fraction of their incomes, while the lower classes generally spend at least 100% of theirs.

Don't believe that once a high consumption tax has been enacted to replace income taxes, and once trade disputes are settled, that conservatives would ever allow the return of a progressive income tax.

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