There was hardly any enthusiasm online, even by right-wing accounts I follow, about the Canadian tariffs. Tariffs were tried in 2025, and it’s clear they failed on all counts: they didn’t create jobs, but at the same time, they created significant disruptions for small businesses. Large businesses such as Walmart and Target have enough pricing power and passed costs to consumers. It’s a losing issue, and reflected in the polls. You can see there has been zero polling pump for Trump after the latest round of Canadian tariffs:
A common argument is that tariffs raise government revenue. But what good does that do when the national debt keeps going up, and no one is getting any of that extra revenue back, anyway. Or any revenue is negated by inflation or retaliatory tariffs. It’s not a “left vs right” issue: There’s no free lunch, as it’s said. Moreover, the extra “revenue” was refunded when the Supreme Court in 2026 eventually overruled the bulk of the tariffs. Meanwhile, companies raised prices in response to the tariffs, which they left in place.
For these reasons, enthusiasm for the Canadian tariffs has been much more muted, according to sentiment online from the accounts I follow, compared to 2025. People keep seeing prices going up and are like, “This again? Let’s try something else.” These right-wing anon accounts know that tariffs don’t live up to their promises. They just create disruption and don’t otherwise move the needle much. It’s an insult to voters’ intelligence to be told something is true, when it’s clearly false. What those anon accounts care about is affordability, immigration, and to a lesser extent, “defeating wokeness” (however that is defined), not tariffs.
As for the premise of “making Canada pay” or to otherwise inflict harm on Canada’s economy, its stock market is at record highs, seemingly unfazed. When news broke of the tariffs, its market didn’t even flinch. This is the collective wisdom of the market saying these tariffs are ineffectual.
This leads to a common misconception of treating tax windfalls as like personal wealth, or conflating the two. The promise of tax windfalls are invoked by either side of the aisle as justification for policy. This can be building datacenters, for the center-right. Or wealth taxes, as promoted by the left. A similar argument is that everyone in California is “collectively wealthier” because of tech billionaires. The underlying belief is that when a state collects more revenue, everyone gets richer. But this isn’t really true.
There are two possible exceptions: tax cuts or other stimulus as seen during Covid, which wasn’t from a windfall anyway. Instead, the national debt surged to pay for it. A second possible exception is indirect wealth, such as real estate. If all of California’s tech billionaires were to relocate their businesses, real estate prices would presumably fall. So it’s a windfall indirectly in the sense people are collectively wealthier through asset appreciation, but this is not the same as a tax windfall. And only existing homeowners benefit. I think this is a stronger argument than the tax windfall, but it’s harder to sell policy that makes “wealthy homeowners even wealthier.”
A windfall is typically first funneled into bonds or other government reserves, or used to pay bureaucrats. Whatever is left is distributed among the entire population of millions indirectly on programs that are of little applicability to most people (e.g. woke colleges or illegals’ healthcare and legal representation). The amount of actual wealth that remains on a per capita basis amounts to pennies on the dollar when converted to actual utility or QALYs (Quality-adjusted life year), after being diluted through endless middleman or unwanted or unneeded services.
If you’re not a kid or don’t have kids, sure, better schools are nice in principle, but this doesn’t directly benefit you in the same way as getting a raise does, yet tax windfalls are marketed in such misleading language. The whole point of money is it can be used for anything, not only on services deemed necessary by governments. There is also the issue of direct externality. Living in close proximity to a noisy or unsightly powerplant or datacenter subtracts far more QALYs on an individual level, versus better-funded schools or state parks. This was among the biggest criticisms of Obamacare: Costs went up for for existing policy holders to subsidize care they never needed or wanted.
Again, this is not a partisan issue, and both sides are guilty of invoking this flawed logic, whether it’s wealth taxes, tariffs, or datacenters. It also insults the intelligence of the public to assume they cannot make a distinction between the state becoming collectivity wealthier, versus what is realized on an individual level.