On Wednesday afternoon at the White House, “President” Donald Trump proved yet again that he’s the dumbest man ever to hold the highest office in this country.
According to Trump, his imposition of new tariffs as part of his “Liberation Day” declaration is proof that they work because tariffs were what made the United States prosperous right before the Great Depression began in 1929.
“Then in 1913, for reasons unknown to mankind, they established the income tax so that citizens, rather than foreign countries, would start paying the money necessary to run our government. Then in 1929, it all came to a very abrupt end with the Great Depression, and it would have never happened if they had stayed with the tariff policy, it would have been a much different story,” Trump remarked.
So, the income tax led to the Great Depression? That’s simply not true, as the Washington Post explains.
“This is nonsense history. The income tax was intended to shift the burden to wealthier Americans as the cost of tariffs fall mainly on lower-income people. Tax revenue was also considered a more stable source of funds. One big advocate for an income tax was Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican. As for the Great Depression, many historians credit the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, signed into law in 1930, as worsening the economic slowdown because it sparked a global trade war.”
The main causes of the Great Depression were an unregulated stock market, a crushing drought in the United States, a global tariff war, and bank failures that wiped out what little savings most Americans had.
The national income tax had absolutely nothing to do with the American financial collapse. Other nations weren’t impacted by the imposition of an income tax in the United States. Such a move didn’t affect them one whit. Instead, it was the inability of interconnected economies across the world to realize that free trade was in everyone’s best interest.
As of 10:24 a.m., the Dow Jones Industrial Average is down 1,500 points and likely headed for what can only be called a borderline crash.
Donald Trump knows nothing about history and even less about economics, which explains why he’s always been a failure as a businessman. And now he’s on the verge of destroying the U.S. economy simply because he’s too damn stubborn and stupid to admit that he’s wrong.
