Replies

It’s a voluntary tax. No one forces you to buy a broom anywhere, but buying locally keeps the money here.

Which autos don’t have any components made in China?

Which appliances don’t have any Chinese electrical parts?

The problem is that with today’s supply chains the consumer has very little visibility, and therefore very little choice as to where the elements of the products they buy come from.

Do you honestly think think there’s a car made with no Chinese inputs?

There has never been “free trade” among countries. There is nothing sacrosanct about taxes on property, income, sales, imports, etc. A tax is a penalty.

Taxes run the government. The healthiest of taxes is one that encourages you to help your fellow tax payer down the street over helping some guy in China. Taxing income discourages earning reportable income. Welfare encourages people to get free stuff.

We had excise taxes from the creation of this country. It greatly encouraged our growth and independence, because those weren’t taxed. We became the single greatest country in the world in under 200 years due to that.

We do not exist to encourage any country’s growth but our own. If a citizen or company is cheating our supply chain out of the benefit that in-country taxation brings and has always brought, that citizen or company should pay a penalty. That they haven’t been shows they received benefits they, in the vast amount of our country’s history, did not have. They fundamentally disagree with our Founding Fathers and our history through at least the 1910s.

A lack of excise taxes is directly analogous to a country without any way to limit immigration. Both allow the outside to benefit without penalty, with the penalty only paid by that country’s inhabitants. If everything is perfectly healthy, both circumstances bring something that could help the country prosper with additional revenue generation we could not have achieved on our own. But, the reality is, there should be extremely little we cannot do on our own. When we do not encourage such “independence,” we are encouraging our destruction. Why not tax or limit negative behaviors? In discussing elimination of either untaxed trade or free immigration, we are not prohibiting the actions—we are merely taxing or limiting the velocity of the potentially bad behavior.

We are at an unhealthy juncture in our history. We have a Deep State, enormous national debt, huge numbers of unknown invaders, large percentages of people encouraging socialism, a general lack of understanding of the principles that served as the bedrock of our country, and a humongous government not capable of doing its fundamental job.

We need to unwind this. Our president is trying to do so, using methods the embedded cast of characters has difficulty countering, at this time.

I do not see any issue with using the excise tax. I also do not see anything wrong with reducing our income tax, either on business or individuals. Both are being done.

Do you not see how this is healthy?