Tariffs were controversial before the Civil War. Their benefits and detriments were not equal throughout the country. Brenda Wineapple reports in The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation (2019) that in 1832 the South Carolina legislature said that, if not repealed, a federal tariff was null and void and a ground for secession.
Tariffs were also controversial after the Civil War. They were the chief source of federal revenues until the early twentieth century. The issue was not whether tariffs should be applied but at what rate. As Troy Senik wrote in A Man of Iron: The Turbulent Life and Improbable Presidency of Grover Cleveland (2023), tariffs had conflicting goals. Should they only be high enough to fund government or go further to protect American industry from ruinous foreign competition? Industry was best protected when tariffs were so high that almost no foreign goods were imported, but then little revenue was collected. On the other hand, tariffs set best for funding the government did not protect industry as much as higher taxes.
Troy Senik also says that Grover Cleveland correctly saw another conflict in tariffs: They helped to raise wages in protected industries, but this gain was offset by higher prices workers had to pay for goods
Friends talk about fleeing to Canada. But what is the point if Canada becomes the 51st state?
No friend talks about fleeing to Greenland. Perhaps that will be different when Trump builds Mar-a-Lago Northeast there.
Deputy Attorney Genereal Todd Blanche said recently that the Justice Department is opening a criminal investigation into a leak of “inaccurate, but nevertheless classified” intelligence about the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. It comes as a shock that anyone in the Trump administration wants to keep false information secret.
Present policies show that the Republican party has abandoned much of what Ronald Reagan stood for. Nicole Hemmer in Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s states that Reagan, fueled by anticommunism, had “a preference for more open borders and higher immigration levels, for fewer tariffs[,] a stingier social net, [as well as] a more aggressive posture toward the Soviet Union.”
Under Reagan, the federal workforce grew by 200,000.
Because of tariffs, the United States has intervened militarily and politically in foreign countries. Sean Mirski in We May Dominate the World: Ambition, Anxiety, and Rise of the American Colossus (2023) maintains that our interventions in Latin America at the turn of 20th century and beyond were not primarily to protect American business interests but rather to keep European governments outside the hemisphere. Some Latin American countries borrowed profligately from Europe and often could not pay the money back. Under international law, the lender countries were entitled to use force to service the debts. This was often a simple procedure: Seize the customhouse and collect the tariffs. The United States was concerned about this potential European presence in the Americas and feared further that the Latin American countries would grant the Europeans concessions that would disfavor the United States. Consequently, the United States thought it was better to intervene in the debtor nations and use the customs revenues to pay the Europeans. Frequently, this was good for the invaded country since the Americans did not skim from the tariffs, or at least not as much as before, and the Latin American country often saw its revenues increase. Moreover, Europe learned that interventions in the Western Hemisphere were expensive. The European powers then often blustered about intervening to get America to do the expensive work. America soon recognized that the problems would recur unless the debtor countries became stable and lived within their means. As a result, the United States became more and more involved in the internal affairs of Latin American countries.
