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Taxation Thoughts: Tariffs
Sep. 14th, 2018 08:02 pmWhen reading about tax systems and the reasoning behind them, sometimes I like to try my hand at making up my own approach to them. Recently I told my dad about one that I think could be nice as a substitute for tariffs, and he said I should write it down somewhere, so I guess I'll try doing a series of posts on various tax ideas I have. Not that I think these are necessarily the best way to go based just on my personal guesswork, but maybe they're interesting enough to be worth talking about and critiquing.
Anyway, as far as tariffs go: The idea is that such a tax protects local businesses when imported goods manage to be cheaper, to preserve the ability to produce things internally. And it would seem that currently, a major contributor for prices of imports being low would be the workers who make those imported goods having lower wages. I'm wondering if it would be useful to have something that's like a tariff, but proportional to the difference in minimum wage between countries. And instead of the government keeping this tax, it would be distributed directly to the workers who make those products.
If actually actually keeping track of where the money needs to go is feasible, it'd be nice in that it'd fulfill the goal of a tariff domestically, which is to keep the prices of locally produced things competitive, while in the countries targeted by it, it'd result in increasing the purchasing power of their own domestic market, reducing their economy's reliance on exports to begin with. This benefit to the foreign country's economy would hopefully make this form of tax less of a problem in terms of international relations.
Anyway, as far as tariffs go: The idea is that such a tax protects local businesses when imported goods manage to be cheaper, to preserve the ability to produce things internally. And it would seem that currently, a major contributor for prices of imports being low would be the workers who make those imported goods having lower wages. I'm wondering if it would be useful to have something that's like a tariff, but proportional to the difference in minimum wage between countries. And instead of the government keeping this tax, it would be distributed directly to the workers who make those products.
If actually actually keeping track of where the money needs to go is feasible, it'd be nice in that it'd fulfill the goal of a tariff domestically, which is to keep the prices of locally produced things competitive, while in the countries targeted by it, it'd result in increasing the purchasing power of their own domestic market, reducing their economy's reliance on exports to begin with. This benefit to the foreign country's economy would hopefully make this form of tax less of a problem in terms of international relations.
