President Donald Trump has been promising to make America great again’ for the past decade, and one of his solutions is to impose harsher tariffs.
The 78-year-old spoke at the House GOP retreat at his golf club, the Trump National Doral, in Miami, Florida, and disclosed his aspirations to make the United States “more powerful than ever before,” shocking many.
“America is going to become tremendously wealthy again, and it will happen rapidly. “It’s time for the United States to return to the system that made us richer and more powerful than ever before,” President Trump declared only one week after his inauguration.
“Do you know that the United States abolished all tariffs from 1870 to 1913—and it was the wealthiest time in American history, comparable to other countries—and established the Great Tariff Commission in 1887?
Our commission had one job: to decide what to do with all the money we collected. They formed a blue-ribbon committee in 1887 due to its vastness.
There’s a lot of chatter about tariffs, so let’s define them: they’re levies put on foreign goods, which means that many of them will cost more to sell in the United States.
While Trump has promised to eliminate federal income taxes, this does not mean that citizens would be exempt from paying them. We project a rise in prices for foreign-made items, leading to higher consumer costs.
Tariffs went out of favor in advanced countries after World War II because they frequently resulted in “reduced trade, higher consumer prices, and retaliation from abroad,” according to the Council on Foreign Relations.
The government of the importing country collects tariffs, which are taxes on goods made abroad.
Return to Trump’s address…
The president went on to say, “And what should we do with all of our money? And, once again, Teddy Roosevelt [26th POTUS] benefited because, when [William] McKinley [25th POTUS] was assassinated, he took over this tremendous quantity of money and established all of those national parks and other projects.
“And I’m not knocking him, but he was given a large sum of money, which was entirely funded by tariffs since we had no income tax. We introduced the income tax in 1913.
“As I stated in my address last week, instead of taxing our taxpayers to enrich other nations, we should tariff and tax foreign nations to benefit our citizens. Does this make sense? Right?”
In short, Trump intends to slap taxes on foreign goods.
The proposed move stunned US residents after a portion of his speech went viral on Twitter.
“Wow,” one user simply stated, while another commented, “Not a huge fan of him, but reducing or completely canceling the income tax would make a huge difference to us.”
And an additional person said, “American citizens shouldn’t pay; we should tariff all of the other countries that have used our economy as a piggy bank.”