The problem is that US and in fact all western manufacturing now faces a more efficient competitor- China. China can and does minimise input costs to manufacturers by owning and controlling infrastructure and many manufacturing supply chains. The wests governments have sold off state owned infrastructure and now the dividends that shareholders demand must be paid- while China can supply core infrastructure inputs at cost. In addition to this the entire Chinese economy is structured consciously and purposely to leverage the advantage China has in terms of scale. For example- China can build Lithium processing plant for 1/3 the cost western processors can. Extend this example across the entire productive economy (with varying but consistent degree of advantage in Chinas favour) and tariffs are not going to fix the problem.

All Trumps tariffs do is buy time before the inevitable collapse of the USD. They do also come with significant pain in terms of consumer and producer costs going up- ie inflation and capital mis-allocation as investing in US industry that is simply and inherently not competitive with Chinese plant is quite explicitly mis-allocation of capital.

These tariffs are from the Keynesian era and they never worked except to distort the signals for capital allocation and to direct capital into irrational purposes.

Yeah, it is. I'm trying to post stuff from different sides of the tariff conversation, because there's more to it than most people acknowledge.

If they follow through on the offsetting IRS tax cuts, then I expect this to be a net positive.