Trump's 'All Tariff' Proposal is Class War for the Rich

[Passages]

8. Yep. They'll be fine.

Trump seems to have learned that he can mask the taste of regressive policies by slathering them with magic Tariff Sauce. His “all tariff” policy doesn’t just replicate the flat tax, it is actually far more extreme. It effectively takes a progressive tax system and inverts it, leading the poorest Americans to pay the greatest percentage of their incomes.



snip While tariffs are technically a tax on importers, businesses pass much of the cost on to consumers in the form of price hikes. Replacing income taxes with an “all tariff” policy would require the poorest Americans to pay a much greater percentage of their incomes in the form of higher prices. And like the first Trump trade war, it will surely invite retaliatory tariffs from China and other nations that will hurt American manufacturing and cost more jobs.



snip
This tariff proposal should remind us of another, subtler danger of Trump. He has figured out a way to define himself as a crusader against the “elite,” while enacting an agenda to make them more powerful at the expense of everyone else. It demonstrates how “populism” from the right is always pseudo-populism. And a continued failure of our leaders to address the material crises in this country—wages that are insufficient, unaffordable housing, exorbitant healthcare costs, and so forth—means that pseudo-populists will continue to appeal to people, and our politics will continue to lurch further, dangerously, to the right.