Filtering money from poor people into the pockets of rich people, and also feeding the war machine funds.

I was reading an article talking about how the people most-severely being taxed by the tariffs are relatively poor. First, tariffs are a regressive tax anyway — it’s a tax roughly linked to consumption. Consumption taxes are regressive anyway, and I’ve talked about that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumption_tax

Flat consumption taxes are regressive (shift the tax burden to the less well-off). The ratio of tax obligation to income tends to shrink as income increases because high-earners tend to consume proportionally less of their income.[25] An individual unable to save will pay taxes on all his income, but an individual who saves or invests a portion of his income is taxed only on the remaining income.

But secondly, what the article was pointing out was that it’ll hit inexpensive household goods out of China, stuff like clothing and whatnot, and the people who get whacked by that the hardest are people buying inexpensive everyday items.

It’s kind of amazing, actually. West Virginia was the most pro-Trump state in the elections. But they have the highest rate of Medicaid dependence, something that will take a hit, and then they’re going to take a clobbering from tariffs on inexpensive items. The tax cuts that Trump’s passing that all this is paying for are principally for the wealthy, aren’t going to be very helpful for them.