I spent the past 30 minutes calculating this all manually using the sources listed below:
The practical takeaway is that the average household will spend $3,488.27 more as a result of the tariffs. Clothes, furniture, toys will be (mean) 26.9% more expensive, electronics will be 24.4% more expensive, tires and jewelry 16.2% and 17.1% more expensive, respectively.
If this is more acceptable to you, please voice your approval.
That actually checks out. If you take the median U.S. household income ($74,580) and factor in the effective tax rate (10.9%), eliminating federal income taxes would save the average household $8,167.50 per year. Subtract the $3,488.27 in extra costs from tariffs, and the net savings is still $4,679.23.
So yeah, if those numbers hold up, the median American household actually comes out ahead after everything is accounted for.
I'm sorry, what? Federal income taxes have not been eliminated. Trump can't even do that; Congress would have to, and they won't.
The federal government currently collects on the order of $2.5 trillion in income taxes. These tariffs would only generate $500 billion of federal revenue. But in reality they'll generate less, due to any amount of second-order effects where less stuff is imported due to higher costs. It's very myopic to only look at the household finances and not have anything to say about a proposed loss of $2 trillion of federal revenue.
With allies like you in this discussion thread, who needs enemies?
I spent the past 30 minutes calculating this all manually using the sources listed below:
The practical takeaway is that the average household will spend $3,488.27 more as a result of the tariffs. Clothes, furniture, toys will be (mean) 26.9% more expensive, electronics will be 24.4% more expensive, tires and jewelry 16.2% and 17.1% more expensive, respectively.
If this is more acceptable to you, please voice your approval.
[0]: https://wits.worldbank.org [1]: https://dataweb.usitc.gov [2]: http://atlas.hks.harvard.edu
That actually checks out. If you take the median U.S. household income ($74,580) and factor in the effective tax rate (10.9%), eliminating federal income taxes would save the average household $8,167.50 per year. Subtract the $3,488.27 in extra costs from tariffs, and the net savings is still $4,679.23.
So yeah, if those numbers hold up, the median American household actually comes out ahead after everything is accounted for.
I'm sorry, what? Federal income taxes have not been eliminated. Trump can't even do that; Congress would have to, and they won't.
The federal government currently collects on the order of $2.5 trillion in income taxes. These tariffs would only generate $500 billion of federal revenue. But in reality they'll generate less, due to any amount of second-order effects where less stuff is imported due to higher costs. It's very myopic to only look at the household finances and not have anything to say about a proposed loss of $2 trillion of federal revenue.
With allies like you in this discussion thread, who needs enemies?