Tariffs are taxes. Are you really going to be happy if you pay less in taxes but make up for it by paying tariffs?

But I wouldn't be so quick to rejoice. During Trump's previous term much of the money collected was given to farmers as subsidies for their losses from the counter tariffs.

FWIW, there are proponents of something called Fair Tax, which replaces income tax with a national sales tax. Either 25 or 30% IIRC. I never looked at it to determine if it was viable, but it seemed to have some level of support because I kept seeing it pop up.

From what I can tell, that isn't completely different to the idea of replacing income taxes with tariffs, I guess, except that it doesn't apply to US goods.

So this will not bring in more money. All the tariffs are paid from money that already exists in the domestic US economy.

Furthermore, tariffs are passed to consumers. Transitively this is an increased tax burden on consumers. Our taxes have, in effect, gone up.

That’s actually not a crazy assumption for targeted tariffs. Imagine we only added a tariff to German cars. BMW and VW would have to compete with normally priced sedans, and lower their margins.

Of course, that doesn’t work if you tariff 100% of the suppliers of essential goods.

What will keep the US auto makers from just being 5% under the imports' price? They will still win on cost, can blame Trump, and also capture all the money on the table.

So far this FY we're at $959 billion in revenue from income tax.

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/imports

Those numbers are monthly and include services, but summing up the US imports over the same period (October 2024-February 2025) we get $1.86 trillion dollar. To replace our income tax revenue over this period we'd need a 50% tariff on all imported goods and services.

What level of tariffs should we aim for so that we can reduce our federal income tax rates and increase or maintain overall revenue as you claim will happen?