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this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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Leopards Ate My Face
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I bet a coworker $20 that "tariff" and "tax" were synonyms. Motherfucker refused to pay up, calling merriam-webster.com, thesauraus.com, wikipedia etc. "fake news".
https://www.conservapedia.com/Tariff
Your mistake was referencing a woketionary.
I would've made you pay him. Every tariff is a tax but not every tax is a tariff. Of course your actual point still stands.
Synonyms of tariff
According to Merriam-Webster, "income tax" is a synonym of "value-added tax" and "property tax". And it can be, depending on context, but few people would argue that they are always synonymous. It's the same with "tariff" and "tax". Whether or not they are synonymous depends on context.
That's not what a synonym is.
My point exactly. The bet was about whether "tariff" and "tax" are synonymous. They aren't synonymous if they describe different things, even if one of those things is a subset of the other. (This is complicated a bit by the fact that synonymity is context-dependent so in some contexts they can be synonymous. I'm assuming a general context.)
To give a different example, every iPhone is a smartphone but not every smartphone is an iPhone. The two terms aren't synonymous except in specific contexts like when discussing the inventory of an Apple store.
In a general context, I would argue that the bet is lost β tariffs are taxes but taxes encompass more than just tariffs. The definition of synonymity is not fulfilled.
The actual point of the bet, namely to illustrate that tariffs are paid by people in the country that raised them (because they are taxes on imported goods and services), remains valid.