Get the latest tech news

Tariffs in American History


When Alexander Hamilton became the nation’s first Secretary of the Treasury, he immediately began to prepare a schedule of tariffs, along with excise taxes on such commodities as alcohol and tobacco. The Constitution forbids taxing the exports of any state, and so American tariffs have always been laid only on imports.

In America’s colonial period, the east coast of the United States, with its many rivers and inlets that the small ships of those days could utilize, lent itself to smuggling, and the American colonists evaded British tariffs on a grand scale. Samuel Slater, who had apprenticed in the cloth industry and had a marked talent for mechanics, carefully memorized the needed plans for spinning and weaving machinery and sailed to America, having listed himself as a farmhand on the ship’s manifest. Congress’s Smoot-Hawley Tariff, the Federal Reserve’s keeping interest rates high in order to protect the gold standard, and the Hoover administration’s attempt to balance the budget in 1932 with sharply higher taxes, were the three huge public-policy mistakes that converted an ordinary stock market crash and recession into the Great Depression.

Get the Android app

Or read this on Hacker News

Read more on:

Photo of American

American

Photo of tariffs

tariffs

Photo of american history

american history

Related news:

News photo

Trump says his tariffs on Apple will also apply to Samsung

News photo

Trump needs Canada’s help for his American Golden Dome

News photo

Trump Threatens Apple With Tariffs of ‘at Least 25%’ on iPhones Not Made in U.S.