EvaBaadB

Yeah, I know I'm not supposed to notice or draw attention to the fact that my kids are white, and I'm definitely not supposed to take issue with any psychologically harmful social programming that will be directed at them because of that. Real Nazi stuff!

IMO: tariffs are not "obviously" a bad idea. They are likely still a bad idea, but for subtle reasons The old argument for broad-based income taxation to fund government is this is least distortionary, relative to taxing individual sectors. But, if you can raise revenues in a way that doesn't distort at all - say, selling land or oil revenues - this is better Tariffs are thus attractive because their incidence is partly on foreigners. In the edge case where foreign production is inelastic and domestic demand is elastic, then tariffs actually are totally borne by foreign producers, and you essentially get free non-distortionary money for domestic consumers, similar to if you sold land or oil or spectrum rights for revenues. Obviously in the general case, incidence is partly on domestic consumers, but the intriguing thing is that tariffs do partly have the effect of giving you some non-distortionary money taken from foreigners One important caveat is if you think foreigners will retaliate by imposing tariffs on you also, which obviously is distortionary and raises prices Another important caveat is if you think tariffs are naturally regressive, because the poor consume more traded goods than the rich. I actually still don't think this is a good argument against tariffs, because the redistributionary role of a taxation system should be analyzed separately from its distortionary properties. Like, if you think tariffs take some money from foreigners, but are more regressive than desirable, just combine tariffs with making income taxes more redistributionary (that is, raise tariffs, and also lower the taxes on the poor). Obviously politically this is not feasible, but the point is that in theory the regressiveness of tariffs can be fixed with other instruments To be clear I still don't necc think tariffs are a good idea; I do think we should think clearly economically about it, and the arguments for and against tariffs are very far from black-and-white as far as I can tell