US average tariffs rate since 1790
Published 27 February 2026
Tariffs are a tax on imports. That is simply how they function. Now the US Supreme Court struck down Trump's emergency tariffs. He responded by imposing a 15% global tariff under a different law. But let's focus on the data.
What we see is here is that the US effective tariff rate is at levels not seen for decades. Yes, tariffs were higher in the nineteenth century and in the early 1930s. But the US was a very different fiscal state back then.
Before 1913, there was no permanent federal income tax. But the federal government barely did anything. No Medicare. No Social Security. No national defence budget worth mentioning. Federal spending was under 3% of GDP. Tariffs could cover that. They cannot cover what the US government spendstoday. And it spends a lot...
Tariffs also turned out to be really unpopular. In 1930, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act hiked tariffs on thousands of goods and helped deepen the Great Depression. After that, the US shifted steadily towards trade liberalisation. The reason was because high trade barriers imposed real costs on Americans.
The idea that America once comfortably funded itself through tariffs instead of income tax ignores the arithmetic. In a modern economy, the import base is far too small relative to federal spending to replace income tax revenue without extreme rates.
Tariffs will not fix America's debt. They will not reindustrialise the economy. But the costs will show up. They always do.
What do you think?