A tariff is another word for tax. Do you know what the Treasury does with taxes it collects? It deletes them after reducing the national debt by the same amount. This is why the currency issuing government never “has” money. It simply doesn’t need it and holding money, especially when we did the gold standard nonsense, introduces unnecessary complexity to accounting. Treasury holds debt and the fed holds an equal amount of “money”. Both disappear whenever they get together in the same sector, balancing to zero, which is why the Fed is a semi-private institution. If you’re ever curious about how much “NET” money (after private sector bank debt is settled) is in the economy simply look to the national debt.

Trump’s tariffs placed a tax on the goods purchased mostly by the poor and middle class and used it to reduce the debt that his tax cuts caused. It is such a huge blatant giveaway wealth transfer to the oligarchs that it almost rivals RayGun’s increased payroll tax in regressiveness. I’ve given up swimming upstream in an attempt to make the working class understand economics, so I can now sit back and chuckle at the sheer audacity with which the ruling class strips every last dime from their ignorant asses. For all of their bravado, they are just future eaters anyway when AI and robots take the last of the “jobs” and their decades-long efforts to reduce their government to a size they can drown in a bathtub makes it incapable of saving them. It won’t be pretty, but it promises to be amusing.