Say what? On Tuesday night, Kamala Harris said that Donald Trump was talking about a national sales tax.
Harris talked about a “Trump sales tax” and said that it would make things cost 20% more.
Fact check: Not true.
There is no plan for a national sales tax from President Trump.
It’s likely that Harris was talking about Trump’s plan to raise taxes on goods. Retailers are the ones who pay tariffs, not customers. They’re not a tax on goods sold.
Researchers who looked at the taxes Trump put in place from 2017 to 2021 found that some of the costs were borne by imports and some were borne by countries that exported. The low level of consumer inflation during the Trump years shows that the tariffs did not affect consumers and did not act as a tax on families.
In general, tariffs don’t make prices go up for consumers. The research and statistics group at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Stephen Redding from Princeton University, and David Weinstein from Columbia University wrote in one of the most-cited studies of Trump’s tariffs that “trade theory has long stressed that tariffs, when applied by a large country, should drive down foreign prices.” By the way, that study wasn’t good for taxes. It came to the conclusion that Americans paid most of the taxes. But it didn’t find that companies passed on the taxes to consumers.
On Monday, Breitbart Business Digest said:
A lot of Trump’s foes said right away that the president was starting a trade war when he promised to break up foreign deals and put tariffs on goods. Establishment economists on both the left and the right were sure that Trump’s tariffs would hurt the U.S. economy and make prices go up for consumers.
For whatever reason, imports aren’t a big part of what people buy, so even if taxes cost people more, it wouldn’t be the same as a national sales tax.
People also said that tariffs would make prices go up for consumers when Trump put them in place in 2019, but prices did not go up for consumers.
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