— Why
"having Congress openly discuss and debate tariffs", if you wish to tax the poor with tariffs to pay for the investments of the rich, and the poor is your voter?
The main goal of an import tariff is to encourage Americans to buy the products of domestic—rather than foreign—manufacturing. For that to work, companies that may consider investing billions in factories here in the U.S. need to know that the tariffs aren’t just a whim or election stunt like they were with Trump, but will be around for the coming years or even decades necessary to recover their initial billion-dollar investments in new manufacturing facilities.
Tariffs also need to be brought in on an item-by-item basis, organically, with each imported item that we want to put a tariff onto examined for the tariff’s impact, both on domestic inflation and international relations.
(...) the manufacture of cars, steel, chips, computers, toys, clothes, pharmaceuticals, and hundreds of other products and categories of goods can be brought back to the U.S. by appropriate tariffs, introduced gradually and predictably, done in a way that allows both foreign companies and U.S. entrepreneurs to adjust without major disruptions.
(...) We don’t want to start trade wars—like Trump did the first time with his tariff stunt and is threatening to do again in January—or wipe out people in poor countries (like Bangladesh or Malaysia, where much of our clothing is made), but we do want the “wealth of [our] nation” to be built and kept here.
We do this by having Congress openly discuss and debate tariffs, apply them gradually, and accompany them with supports for the poorer parts of the world that may be harmed by them, assisting them in developing sustainable domestic industries to replace their export losses.
This is not a radical idea.
(...) This is not a black-and-white issue. Yes, tariffs are a tax and, until domestic manufacturing replaces foreign imports, they’re a tax that’s mostly passed along to consumers, resulting in higher prices for goods.
How Dems Can Take Advantage of Trump’s Tariffs to Reverse the Reagan Revolution | Common Dreams (access: 2025-01-03, 13:16 UTC)
As he shatters the neoliberal tariff consensus, Democrats should rise to the occasion and argue for rational, targeted, and gradual tariffs, taking the party back to its pre-1980s positions on trade.
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