Tariffs Are Awful, but the Income Tax May Be Worse
Source: Tariffs Are Awful, but the Income Tax May Be Worse - FEE
At the end of the day, a tariff is a tax. You can argue about who pays it but it is designed to and effectively does make products more expensive to import. This will put an upward pressure on prices which makes the consumer likely to bear the brunt of this increased cost. I am not a fan of new taxes therefore I am not a fan of tariffs.
Having said that, I definitely consider the income tax to be a worse form of taxation. If we could somehow replace the income tax with tariffs (reasonable ones anyway) that would be great. After all, if you agree that there has to be (or will be) at least SOME government then it needs some sort of funding. However, replacing the income tax is not what has happened so far. The U.S. has simply added tariffs to the already existing tax burden which of course includes the income tax. The income tax is unlikely to go away and in order to make it permanently go away, we would need a Constitutional amendment.
This article lists all kinds of reasons why tariffs (and the income tax) are bad. And it certainly may be that Trump is merely using tariffs as a bargaining tool to get better trade deals than what we had before and that most of these tariffs will eventually go away. I'll reserve judgement a little longer until we see how this plays out.
It is likely that the Democrats will gain another super majority after the Trump presidency. When that happens we will have both really high income tax and high tariffs.
The one advantage of the income tax is that voters actually see the tax that they pay. People are less critical of taxes that they don't see. For example, people are less critical of inflation than direct taxes. They are seduced by the free stuff that comes from the government while the government devalues the currency.
Tariffs are definitely more regressive, and therefore affect far more people. With income tax, there are always ways around it
why doesn’t each state in the US have one against the products of all of the other 49?
The commerce clause of USC explicitly makes this illegal. I think we should at least have free trade within our hemisphere, but Trump decided to tear up the USMCA that he himself signed just to be a contrarian on trade.