Interesting Tariff/Tax History

[PATAX]

I am reading an excellent article by Mr. John S. Gordon titled: Tariffs in American History. In 1789, the new State Department had five employees. The new Treasury Dept had forty employees. When Alexander Hamilton became first Secretary  of the Treasury, he promptly began to prepare a schedule of tariffs, along with excise taxes on items like alcohol and tobacco. The constitution forbids taxing the exports of any state and that is why U.S. tariffs have always been on imports only. Hopefully I didn't make any typos there. It is an excellent and very interesting article. 

[BobKamman]

Here's the link to the article.  At least the first five pages.  The narrative ends rather abruptly in the 1920s - is there more if you pay for it?  It's published by the ultra-right wing Hillsdale College, so consider the source.  

https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Imprimis_May_8pg_4-25NM.pdf

Slavery was the primary cause of the Civil War, but tariffs came in second.  The North liked them, the South didn't.  Then during the Industrial Revolution, labor wanted protective tariffs, capitalists did not.  (In today's politics, that's Democrats vs. Republicans.)  But today, insanity rules.  It's TACO time (Tariffs Always Change Opinions).  

Edited:  Here is a link to the full article:

https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/tariffs-in-american-history/ 

[BobKamman]

Who pays tariffs?  Here is the heresy from author John S. Gordon, in response to something he wrote for another magazine back in 2011:

"Economic historian John Steele Gordon offers Commentary readers the following assessment  of tariffs while responding to a reader’s criticism of an earlier article:

Tariffs are a tax ultimately paid by the consumer. And high tariffs allow domestic manufacturers to raise their prices without losing market share. That is just what the manufacturers would do, causing the cost of living to skyrocket. Perhaps Mr. Briskin wouldn’t mind paying $20 apiece for T-shirts made in Shreveport instead of $5 for T-shirts made in Sri Lanka, but the rest of American consumers most certainly would. Free trade has been the greatest engine of world economic growth ever discovered, both for developed countries like the United States and developing ones such as Sri Lanka."

As he writes in the Imprimis article,

"Never in human history has poverty fallen so far so fast. No small part of that triumph has been the lowering of trade barriers, first and foremost tariffs."

And then he takes a firm stand in favor of uncertainty:

"President Trump wants to level this playing field. To do so, he has started what some are calling a trade war and others are calling the greatest example of 'the art of the deal' in history. We will have to wait and see how it plays out."