President Donald Trump’s call to reindustrialize the United States taps into a widely shared sense that something fundamental has gone wrong in the American economy. Manufacturing employment has collapsed, entire regions have been hollowed out, and supply-chain disruptions during the COVID era revealed how dependent the United States has become on foreign production for even basic goods. Trump’s proposed remedy—high tariffs on imports combined with subsidies and industrial policy at home—aims to reverse decades of deindustrialization by forcefully redirecting capital back into domestic manufacturing.

The goal is not irrational. The United States does face strategic vulnerabilities from industrial dependence, and the post-Cold War faith that global markets would automatically allocate production in socially optimal ways has proven naïve. But the means Trump proposes are unlikely to work.

Politics_And_Law

econ

By Joseph Solis-Mullen

> President Donald Trump’s call to reindustrialize the United States taps into a widely shared sense that something fundamental has gone wrong in the American economy. Manufacturing employment has collapsed, entire regions have been hollowed out, and supply-chain disruptions during the COVID era revealed how dependent the United States has become on foreign production for even basic goods. Trump’s proposed remedy—high tariffs on imports combined with subsidies and industrial policy at home—aims to reverse decades of deindustrialization by forcefully redirecting capital back into domestic manufacturing.

> The goal is not irrational. The United States does face strategic vulnerabilities from industrial dependence, and the post-Cold War faith that global markets would automatically allocate production in socially optimal ways has proven naïve. But the means Trump proposes are unlikely to work.