S&p Affirms 'aa+' Credit Rating for Us, Cites Impact of Tariff Revenue

If by "all" you mean "import companies", yes. While it is true that taxing companies is "passed on" to consumers, it's not an excuse to not tax companies.

Please explain, I don’t follow.

How do you draw such a conclusion? Even an extremely progressive income tax cannot capture the earning channels that many wealthy individuals benefit from (especially when you consider unrealized gains and complex financial instruments).

Tariffs are a consumption tax. Wealthy individuals tend to leverage their wealth to spend more money.

Wealthy individuals own a larger share of businesses. Those businesses once again will bear the burden of these tariffs along with their consumers.

Compare this to a payroll tax. This is a direct tax that scales as a company’s employee base scales. This directly harms employees by decreasing their salary. It also decreases the number of employees a company can hire.

Compare this to a corporate income tax. This also increases prices and decreases employment. This is not much different than tariffs. However tariffs are targeted and create incentives to produce more within a nation (ie more domestic jobs).

Tariffs also provide a counterbalance against companies outsourcing (a technique that depresses domestic wages and encourages financial creativity to dodge federal taxes by establishing foreign based entities (eg Double Irish Agreement)

It does make you wonder what would cause a downgrade. The debates over the debt ceiling have certainly brought the U.S. closer to default than I would ever have thought. It's true that the U.S. can never run out of dollars, so in once sense it's not possible for a bondholder not to get paid back. But the political environment, the potential unreliability of previously iron-clad data, economic disruption from tariffs, and behavior from the Federal Reserve, these all seem to make an unlikely event much more likely.

The tarrifs may be ruled unconstitutional in November and the bond market might react abruptly if the US has to pay back much of the 150 billion or so collected from tariff payers so far. The Supreme Court hears the case on November 6th. If the tarrifs are a reason to maintain the bond rating, their sudden removal and the requirement to pay them back will be semi-catastrophic depending on who you ask. Lutnick laughs at the idea when pressed on CNBC, while Trump says it would be catastrophic for the country. (Lutnick claims to be out of the market but has said that Cantor-Fitzgerald has a “shit ton” of bitcoin, which could explain that divergence of sentiment regarding the upcoming hearing.)