The Daily Populous Thursday April 3rd, 2025 night edition
Authored by huffpost.com and submitted by dank2918

WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump is set to announce Wednesday his decision to unilaterally raise taxes on American importers by trillions of dollars over the next 10 years, potentially the biggest tax hike since World War II, with that cost getting passed along to consumers.

“It’s an extraordinary tax increase,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a conservative economist with the American Action Forum and formerly the director of the Congressional Budget Office.

Trump has been touting his announcement of his new import taxes — which he is doing on his own, without congressional approval — as “liberation day” for weeks. White House officials declined on Tuesday to reveal exactly how large a tariff Trump would impose and on which countries, although his statements in recent days have suggested that it would be across the board.

“Essentially all of the countries,” he told reporters on Air Force One on Sunday.

Earlier that day, Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro told Fox News: “Tariffs are going to raise about $600 billion a year, about $6 trillion over a 10-year period.”

If that figure is correct, that would make it the third biggest tax increase in U.S. history, at 2% of gross domestic product. Only the tax increases approved in Congress in 1941, 2.2% of GDP, and 1942, 5%, were larger, according to statistics compiled by the Tax Foundation.

“It would be the largest peacetime tax increase in history and the third largest overall tax increase behind only the 1941 and 1942 revenue acts to fund WWII,” said Erica York, the Tax Foundation’s vice president of federal tax policy.

She and other economists, though, think that Trump and his allies are wildly overstating the amount of money the tariffs will send to the Treasury because Americans will quickly switch to cheaper substitutes.

“I highly doubt that score is real,” said Jason Furman, an economics professor at Harvard University and a former top economic adviser in the Barack Obama White House.

Trump, nevertheless, has even suggested the elimination of the Internal Revenue Service and replacing it with an “External Revenue Service” to push the idea that other countries pay our tariffs.

But a federal agency already exists to collect tariffs and has existed for two centuries: U.S. Customs. And the way it operates belies Trump and some of his top aides’ claims about how tariffs work.

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When foreign goods come to the United States, whether by ship or plane or truck, the U.S. importer — whether that’s a private individual, a manufacturer, a wholesaler or a retailer — must pay the tariff before the goods are released to enter the country. Manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers all pass along that import tax down the line to consumers in the form of higher prices. When the tariff, or import tax, is increased, that is passed along as a price increase to consumers.

“The only way the other country would pay the tariff is if they lowered the price of the good by the amount of the tariff,” Holtz-Eakin said, adding that while that has occasionally happened in the past when a tariff is first introduced, exporters almost never continue keeping their prices that low for very long.

dallasdude on April 2nd, 2025 at 13:47 UTC »

So

— we pay WAY MORE in tax

— we pay WAY MORE for goods and services

— we get no government services because they destroyed it all

— billionaires get to commit as many crimes and launder as much dirty money as they want for whoever they want as long as they buy a pardon for $2 million and pay a $5 million fee to have a meeting with trump

Did I miss anything?

Can we impeach convict and remove this crook?

PatronSaintOfBitches on April 2nd, 2025 at 12:56 UTC »

On a related note, my favorite thing at family events with Trump relatives is to bitch about my fictional accountant, Steve.

I never accuse Steve of anything overt that he’s done with my money that would make their horror about him valid, but simply say things like “I’m not sure he’s cut out for the job,” at the accounting firm we’ve always been with. When I started this back in 2016, I started in with vague anecdotes:

Steve turned to accounting when several of his businesses collapsed;

Steve has six bankruptcies;

Steve has said things about sexually assaulting women;

My Trump family members were horrified and said things like, “he shouldn’t be in that job!” and “why you to trust a guy with your money who can’t even be trusted with his own?”

Every year, I turn it around and am like “well, you voted for Trump and are trusting him with your money and mine, too!” and magically they turn and make excuses like, “can’t blame a man for availing himself of a legal loophole!”

So far, I’m almost a decade in and they have not caught on that Steve is entirely fictional but I still break him out when I’ve had too many eggnogs with some of my greatest hits like:

Steve has posted pictures to his instagram hanging out with tax cheats and pedos;

Steve overtly makes fun of disabled folks and calls women ugly when they challenge him;

Steve has been caught by the firm storing confidential information in his bathroom;

Still, they’ve still never caught on (see above part where they’re gullible Trump voters). It’s always interesting to see them fawn over this guy that - if in any other position - they’d want fired.

Choice_Cup_3624 on April 2nd, 2025 at 12:36 UTC »

Yay, it’s Liberation Day!! Will people be let off work, or will they need to stay later to pay for the largest tax increase on the working classes in history? Work will make you free!