“Reciprocal tariffs” are framed to sound like a simple matter of fairness. But there’s nothing fair about letting other countries make U.S. tax policy, and that’s what the Trump administration’s proposal amounts to.

The basic principle of national sovereignty on taxation was a major flashpoint during the Biden administration, when Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen was trotting around the world trying to create a global corporate-tax cartel. As NR’s editors said of Yellen’s attempt at creating a global minimum corporate tax, “Taxation and sovereignty are inextricably intertwined. Different countries have different taxing and spending priorities.”

“Reciprocal tariffs” would similarly outsource U.S. tax policy to other countries. The administration’s as-yet-unclear proposal would reportedly include considering non-tariff factors such as other taxes, subsidies, regulations, and exchange rates along with tariffs in setting the “reciprocal” rate for the U.S.

Of course, the U.S. does plenty of subsidizing, regulating, and non-tariff taxing of its own, in some cases more so than other countries. So the guys who want the government to be more “efficient” are now saying they want bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., to study every single product on the market and all the government policies related to it so they can set a tax rate to make it “fair.”

How much work would that involve, if they were really going to do that? Trade economist Douglas Irwin has the numbers in the Wall Street Journal: There are about 13,000 line items in the U.S. tariff schedule and about 200 countries in the world, so that would mean about 2.6 million tariff rates. The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative employs about 200 people total, so if they divided the work evenly, each of them would be responsible for setting 13,000 tariff rates. Is the administration of DOGE about to go on a hiring spree for bureaucrats so it can raise taxes?

The fundamental problem here is that Trump believes tariffs are paid by people in other countries, not the country imposing the tariffs. That’s the only way you can view it as “unfair” to one’s citizens to have a lower tax rate than another country. Foreign governments taxing their people more is a terrible reason for the U.S. government to tax Americans more.