On Tuesday’s presidential debate, Vice President Kamala Harris went right after former President Donald Trump‘s proposal to increase tariffs if elected president in November, calling it a “sales tax on the middle class.” It was a reiteration of what she said at the Convention, that economists say people will pay $4,000 more for imported goods if Trump put a 10 percent tariff on non-free trade nations.
The only problem is, it’s nonsense.
The foundational argument that tariffs are a tax has three sources: A spring paper by the Peterson Institute for International Economics was followed by 16 Democratic Party linked Nobel Prize winning economists writing a note to who-it-may-concern that Trump’s tariffs would be an economic disaster, which was then followed by a report by the Tax Foundation alleging that GDP would fall by 0.2 percent if Trump had his way—not a huge fall, as it happens, as economies rise and fall by that number every quarter for a variety of reasons.
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