Yes, Trump’s tariffs are a huge tax hike on Americans already struggling with the cost of living and they are tanking the stock market (the Dow is down nearly 1,300 points as I write this). But there’s a method behind the apparent madness and it’s not the “good for the economy” justification Trump and his cronies pretend.
Although the move seems like another deranged idea from the most ignorant and incompetent person ever likely to inhabit the White House, there’s a far more frightening method to the seeming madness.
Sen. Chris Murphy laid it out in a Blue Sky thread. “Those trying to understand the tariffs as economic policy are dangerously naïve,” he wrote. “They aren’t designed as economic policy” but a “new, super dangerous political tool.”
Murphy went on to note that kings and despots used taxes, which is what tariffs are, to control populations. “Our own revolution was spurred by the King’s use of heavy taxation of the colonies to punish our push for self governance,” he noted. “The King’s message was simple: stop protesting and I’ll stop taxing.” That is why our founding fathers gave Congress, not the president, the power of the purse.
