> Different forms of taxation can have different economic consequences.
Yes, of course. Car tax has different economic consequences than [real] property tax. But a tariff on cars looks a lot more like a tax on cars than it does a tariff on real property.
Actually "tariff on real property" (meaning [high] property tax owed only by foreign nationals and corporations with foreign ownership) might be one of the best possible methods of generating government revenue.
> Thinking of tariffs as "taxing somebody else's economy" betrays a misunderstanding of the concept of incidence (as in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_incidence), since you're raising prices for your own imports.
It's not misunderstanding it, it's understanding it perfectly well. It's not that exactly 0% of the burden falls on the domestic economy, it's that it disproportionately falls outside of it.
When you have a tariff, there are two ways for a foreign supplier to lose.
The first is that there is a competitive domestic market for the same product. In that case the price won't change much if at all (minimal impact on consumers), the production will just shift to domestic suppliers who hire domestic workers. Then the tariff doesn't generate much if any direct government revenue, but it shifts a bunch of domestic citizens from collecting unemployment to earning taxable income, which is great in a different way.
The second is any case where the producer has to eat a tax in general, e.g. because there are substitute goods preventing the producer from raising prices, so they can't pass the burden on to the customer.
The domestic market only pays if domestic producers can't make [more of] that product and consumers are still willing to pay the higher price for it. But even then, it's not worse than generating government revenue from a purely domestic tax, it's just not any better in that unusual case.
And in practice it will typically be some combination -- domestic producers will appear charging slightly higher prices (but more than making up for it by creating domestic jobs), and then the foreign producers have to compete with them (and other substitutes) so they have to eat most of the tariff but not all of it. So the burden falls disproportionately on someone else's economy, as opposed to domestic taxes that fall primarily on your economy.