Sales tax is a transparent % added to a purchase anyone can easily calculate beforehand. Municipal, state and federal governments have flexibility to exempt certain categories of goods on a consumer level as needed. Most crucially, though, businesses are exempt from them entirely in B2B transactions. Tariffs hit early in the supply chain and (largely) do not change based on the finished product being made with the good/material. Raw steel and aluminum is taxed at 50% if it's used in the manifold of a bugatti, a rivet on a child's backpack, the PCB in a ventilator , or an iphone chassis. Likewise, the US Customs and Duties code along with the executive orders that modified them are incredibly vague because at the end of the day it's up the interpretation of a CBP chucklefuck stamping the paperwork at port of entry to determine what exactly consistutes the value of raw foreign material for an import and how far up the supply chain before it hits US shores that applies. With all this context of the nebulousness of rates, businesses in the middle of the chain don't want to sacrifice margins in the instance that their lawyers misinterpreted a vaguely worded statute from the White House so they take a very inflated estimate and price their margins accordingly and their customers don't know any better and assume the pricing is accurate and use their own inflated estimates to pass the costs on down. Every link on down the chain does the same thing which leads to higher prices than buying goods with a hypothetically equivalent sales tax. For the record, I am pro-tariffs for the purpose of allowing domestic goods to compete with cheap foreign labor; however, the government has to be predictable, steady, and incremental in their changes over a long period of time (a decade or more) rather than 50% announced on a Friday afternoon and takes effect the next business day.

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