Tariffs

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President Ronald Reagan, and a young Donald Trump, meeting with the Taliban in the White House (1985).

Tax Foreigners Not Americans

Everyone has been up in arms because President Trump recently imposed a 25% tariff on our trading partners. The problem isn’t that we have tariffs—we have always had them—it’s that they’re just too darn low. We all know, deep down in our hearts, that foreigners, and their strange foreign languages, ideas, and ways, are really scary. And obviously, if history is a guide, we can't trust them either. Take the recent dustup with Canada. Who do we always get into wars with? Foreigners—well, except that one time. And that one time, the Civil War, got the Senator thinking about our first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, and how he paid for that war with a tariff on imports. 

The Senator will immediately propose legislation that would reinstate the tariffs on foreign goods that Abraham Lincoln mandated during the Civil War. That tariff was 44%, and Old Abe was at war with only one adversary, and they weren't even foreign. Today, we find ourselves in many wars, with many foreign people, even the Taliban, who were feted by President Ronald Reagan in the White House a mere 30 years ago. A good way to pay for those wars, and offset tax cuts here at home, is with a tax on foreigners and their exports, and that tax is called a tariff. Heck, foreigners are the ones we're fighting, let them pay for all their wars, just like Mexico is paying for its wall.
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