Tariffs are in effect a consumption tax, not a tax on labor and capital. Therefore, a country with a consumption tax instead of an income tax will have higher growth and higher living standards.
All of this completely obvious and correct information has been ignored in the United States since 1913, a period of 113 years. For over a century American GDP and personal incomes have been held down by the liberals and leftists who have the outlook of communists and prefer equal incomes in poverty to higher incomes with inequality.
It is extraordinary that Donald Trump, a real estate developer, understands this, but the American Economic Association is incapable, being brainwashed as it is by a century of indoctrination.
When you read economists, you learn that their only concern about the income tax is that it is fair. By fair, they mean that it must fall heaviest on the higher incomes. A flat tax rate that taxes everyone at the same rate, which seems consistent with the Constitutional mandate of equal treatment under the law, is considered unfair.
The fact that a tax on income means that the taxpayer has lost his freedom and now owes part of his labor to the government, the equivalent of a feudal lord or 19 century plantation owner, is beyond the comprehension of economists.
The consequence is that we will remain serfs and slaves with only a partial ownership of our own labor.
