In 2025, the United States has essentially imposed, for the first time, a 10% national sales tax on the wholesale value of everything imported into our country.

Even agricultural products that we do not produce in the United States are now faced with a minimum 10% tariff, which ultimately is paid by each of us when we buy that agricultural product at the grocery store. That 10% tariff, therefore, winds up being similar to a 10% national sales tax at wholesale.

The minimum 10% tariff is paid to the Federal Government’s Treasury. It is, therefore, essentially the same as a 10% national sales tax paid to Washington, D.C. The tariffs are similar to what we experience at the gas pumps. We only see the retail price of gasoline at, for example, $3.39 per gallon, without seeing all the gas taxes hidden in that retail $3.39 cost to us.

The new tariff income to the United States Treasury is consistent with candidate Donald Trump’s statements in 2024 that he preferred the “External Revenue Service” to the “Internal Revenue Service.”

Since World War II ended in 1945, 80 years ago, the United States has imposed tariffs only on a select, targeted and limited basis, never on an across-the-board basis.

Midway between 1945 and 2025, President Ronald Reagan’s 8 years in office stood out as a conservative’s champion of free trade.

President Reagan, for example, entered into a free trade agreement with Canada in 1988, eliminating all tariffs between the two countries.

President Reagan said at the time, “The people of the United States and Canada have a long and harmonious friendship that is the envy of the world. Now, in addition to sharing the world’s longest undefended border, we will share membership in the world’s largest free trade area.”

In 1986, President Reagan declared,” Our trade policy rests firmly on the foundation of free and open markets. I recognize…the inescapable conclusion that all of history has taught: The freer the flow of world trade, the stronger the tides of human progress and peace among nations.”

The Cato Institute, a conservative “think tank” noted that even President Ragan made some exceptions to free trade. “Reagan negotiated ‘voluntary’ import quotas for steel and Japanese cars and imposed…tariffs on imported motorcycles to protect Harley Davidson. Built these were the exceptions and not the rule.”

As of 2025, our Country is imposing at least a 10% tariff on all imports as the rule; a 180 degree turn from Reagan’s policies.

In the 1990s, President Clinton, a Democrat, continued President Reagan’s vision of the great value of free trade in general.

The Heritage Foundation, another conservative “think tank” wrote positively about President Clinton supporting the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

“By supporting the NAFTA, the Clinton Administration and a majority of Congress wisely rejected calls for a return to the same protectionist policies, demonstrated by the Smoot-Hawley tariff laws, which helped create the Great Depression.”

The Heritage Foundation noted: ‘The NAFTA win is a great victory for free trade conservatives. It was they who first championed the notion of free trade with Mexico. And it is they who will carry the banner of free trade in the future–a banner under which Bill Clinton now marches.”

If any “free trade conservatives” in Washington still “carry the banner of free trade” it must be a puny parade indeed.

In 2025 it is fair to ask, where are the free trade conservatives?

In 2025 it is also fair to ask if this new minimum 10% national sales tax, under the name of “tariffs” is really about “protecting” America or is it mostly about President Trump’s musing about changing the name of the Internal Revenue Service to the “External Revenue Service”?

President George W. Bush in 2002 imposed targeted tariffs of up to 30% on most steel imports (but not on steel from Mexico or Canada). A number of studies found that more Americans lost their jobs due to higher steel prices than there were Americans employed by the steel industry.

Under President Obama the average rate of tariffs was only 3.5%. Like many Presidents since WW II, President Obama occasionally made a tariff exception, in his case for Chinese tires, slapping a 35% tariff on them in 2009 after Chinese tires in America soared from 4,000,000 in 2000 to 40,000,000 in 2006. Again, a high tariff was the great exception, not the rule.

Only time will tell what high American tariffs across the board will do to our economy. We do know, however that the Federal Reserve Board Chair recently said publicly that the Board would have already lowered interest rates for us, but for the economic uncertainty caused by the Trump tariffs.

Fred Larson is a graduate of Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Yale Law School, a private practice attorney for 38 years and a retired Jamestown City Court judge.