Donald Trump recently floated the idea of eliminating the personal income tax on (almost) everyone and replacing it with a tariff on all imported goods. The quid pro quo in this deal (that should be declared illegal) is that his billionaire friends would have to send him $1 billion to pay for his political campaign. There are several weaknesses in his proposal that don’t pass coherency tests, or 3rd grade logic, to say nothing of the infamous "giggle" test—the kind you hear from lawyers when you tell them Dickens said “the law is a ass.”

First, eliminating the income tax would be regressive, meaning it would fall heaviest on the poor. That is because tariffs on imports are paid by the importer who passes them on to US consumers. Such a tax would amount to about 140 percent on total imports to raise enough cash to replace the income tax. Now think of all the items you see in any Walmart store. They are nearly all imported, and they number about 150,000 per store. Almost every item would go up in price by 140 percent. And who does their shopping at Walmart? Only you and me and all other relatively poor people. I’m certain that billionaires do not shop at Walmart. Now add in K-Mart, the Dollar Store, and the Dollar Tree and we’re talking real money.

And so, the ultra-wealthy and the poor are now separated by $140 trillion. You would see that huge gap spread a lot wider. Even a $35,000 car would jump up in price by $14,000 just to pay for the new tariff.

Enter Smoot-Hawley. Back in the early days of the Great Depression, the US economy was stalling and sputtering. Two Republican legislators (Smoot and Hawley) jumped up and said, “No problem. All we need to do is raise our tariffs to keep all those inflation-producing products away from our shores.” The first problem was that those other countries also raised tariffs on their imports from us. And like clockwork, international trade came to a halt, while the US and all other economies sand into a Deep Depression. It was so bad that it took WWII to fire up our production lines to yank us out of our big problem.

That's about all I can remember from my old econ texts about tariffs and the Great Depression. That subject is also very depressing. The Donald tried to raise tariffs on Chinese imports back in 2017. It was a dumb move then also. Inflation rose, jobs left us, and too many Americans died from delays in taking faster action against the covid virus.