Like you observed, no one with a grasp of economics thought exporters would absorb the cost of these tariffs. That includes myself, a person who supports tariffs. I don't think it should be necessary to explain why tariffs might be desirable, because they were not invented by idiots, but I will explain briefly.
Tariffs make foreign imports more expensive. This dissuades people from buying them. Some of those people will instead buy equivalent American made products, now that the price difference has lessened. I consider that a good thing. There will be pain while local manufacturing ramps up (or forever, if it never does) for products that have no domestic equivalent. That sucks, but sometimes things need to suck before they improve. Paying off the national debt, for example, is something I support, even if we have to slash a lot of useful spending for awhile. I think most rational Republicans are voting for these sorts of things despite knowing they will make things temporarily worse, in the hopes of an eventual better. The left tends to never do this, for they are very attuned to the immediate suffering their plans cause. The right tends to be less sensitive to the short term suffering their plans cause; the right thinks that the alternative, a slow decline, is worth the pain to avoid. Trump has bungled the implementation of the tariffs, but I still support their use in general.
Fundamentally it makes no sense to me to support a minimum wage for your countrymen, but also support them importing massive amounts of slave made goods. You are creating rules on the supply side that the demand side does not have to follow, which only harms your own domestic businesses. Your own country's businesses have to compete against slave labor while paying living wages; for most manufacturing this is just not possible. You are incentivizing off shoring, which harms your working class, who have to compete with subminimum wage workers. Workers rights must be paired with tariffs, or every additional worker right is a demerit on his hireability against foreign workers without those rights! If you want your country to produce anything, and to have a strong working class, you either remove minimum wage, or you implement tariffs. We cannot simultaneously support strong domestic workers rights and mass importation of sweatshop goods that were made without them. It hollows out the country.
Edit: I am rate limited though I would like to reply to some of my interlocutors. I will reply later.
First, there have been huge numbers of manufacturing jobs in the U.S. that Americans simply didn’t want to do, so adding more manufacturing jobs they also don’t want to do isn’t going to help the economy. It’s the proverbial, “Americans don’t want to screw tiny screws into iPhones.” situation.
Second, for there to be any prayer of the tariffs working to boost local production (whether staffed or automated), they both cannot be capricious nor can they be applied to the goods and services necessary to acquire and deploy in service of increasing that productive capacity. If the tariffs can be waved around randomly like a threat of grounding a child, then they work only as an instrument of short-term extortion, not as a mechanism to expand an economic base. If the goods and services required for expansion are tariffed, then there’s a giant margin and time-to-ROI disincentive to make the investment as well.
Third, there is absolutely no good reason to apply tariffs to goods and services for which you have no plausible domestic substitute. There’s no point in putting tariffs on bananas and coffee in the U.S. unless what you want is to basically put the equivalent of a “sin tax” on bananas and coffee because you’re weirdly morally opposed to people eating bananas and drinking coffee or something.
Fourth, tariffs don’t ever make domestic equivalents cheaper or more affordable for consumers relative to comparable foreign imports. They just drive the price of all available options up to or near the baseline cost of goods plus the tariff. In the absolute best case scenario where everything about tariffs works out as perfectly as possible, you’re just adding margin for producers.
Trying to be globally competitive economically by using tariffs makes no sense. Trying to improve domestic economic conditions by using tariffs makes no sense. It’s a ridiculously shallow, nonsensical approach to attempting to do either of those things even when they’re used carefully and responsibly, but they were never going to be used carefully and responsibly.
The point of them was always going to be to use them as a means of paying for indulgences and dispensations.
Though perhaps that’s a preferable policy than to re-shore sweatshops and child labor to the U.S. as you’re implicitly suggesting should be done?
I appreciate the moral stance behind your tariff support. I read it as a way to discourage slave labor (even abroad) and encourage decent wages/allowing people to live with dignitiy.
I can see how this stance can be justified for imports from countries who do not provide a meaningful minimum wage.
I do not see how this stance can be justified for tariffs on EU countries (where worker rights are strongly protected), especially when the basis for that tariff is to "punish" those countries for not wanting to change national borders against the will of the people inside those borders.
It's one thing to vote in support of politicians who want to use tariffs to reduce imports / increase the price of goods to support US manufacturing. It's quite another to vote for a politician who wields tariffs in inconsistent and arbitrary ways and claims that it won't increase prices.
Let's say it works and we're in the future where the manufacturing has returned to the US and you have US citizens building iPhones in large-scale factories and they are earning minimum wage. But why? Why would a US citizen want to be snapping mobile phones together for 6-12 hours every day? Do you have faith the US has an edge in manufactoring automation and won't need these semi-slaves? Do you have faith the national manufacturing will ever reach the same prices on finished goods that the foreign manufacters were able to provide before the tariffs? I'm asking these questions sincerely as I don't see how this advances the US society in any way (unless you trust the US could have been doing a much better job than China and others in manufacturing consumer goods).
> ...you have US citizens building iPhones in large-scale factories and they are earning minimum wage. But why? Why would a US citizen want to be snapping mobile phones together for 6-12 hours every day?
The observation was that the wage boost of a minimum wage can be undercut by importing cheap goods made with slave labor. Workers can't get hired, domestic manufacturers cannot afford to hire.
The point is not that snapping phones together is some aspirational career. The point is that a legally mandated wage floor is meaningless if domestic producers cannot hire at all because they are competing with goods made under conditions that would be illegal here.
If you support minimum wages and labor standards, you either accept trade barriers that enforce those standards at the border, or you accept offshoring as a structural feature that permanently shrinks the set of jobs available to low-skill workers. You cannot have both.
No one is arguing that people should be forced into factory work. The argument is that a living wage should be available to anyone willing to work, and that requires domestic production capacity. Whether those jobs are in manufacturing, logistics, or automated facilities is secondary. What matters is that the price system does not systematically reward labor exploitation abroad while penalizing it at home.
I'll respond with a question: why wouldn't you want a living wage available to anyone willing to work? One way to enable that might be to ramp up US manufacturing and production.
Definitely support a living wage available to anyone willing to work.
However, as evidenced by the current situation, the US economy doesn't support manufacturing all types of consumer goods that it demands.
I understand the pressure points you're arguing for but I don't think that the US society will be in a better place once those are enforced.
If everybody willing to work doesn't have access to a job that pays a living wage, isn't that a different issue? Maybe the government could have educational programs so everybody has access to getting the education needed for jobs that pay a living wage (those not offshored to China and others) but I guess that's too much socialism for the US.
I see little to no sign that a living wage isn’t available to anyone willing to work and lots of signs that there are plenty of people who simply don’t want to work. They want a handout, not a wage.
I don’t doubt that there are people who choose not to work, but that’s not really the claim being discussed.
"A living wage being available to anyone willing to work" is not about whether every individual takes a job. It’s about whether the labor market reliably offers full-time work that covers basic costs like housing, healthcare, and food. On that question, the data are mixed at best. Many full-time workers still rely on subsidies, and job availability varies sharply by region, skill level, health, and caregiving obligations.
Some people will always opt out of work. That has been true in every economic system. The harder question is whether the structure of the economy provides viable options for those who do want to work but lack leverage, credentials, or geographic mobility. Pointing to the former doesn’t really answer the latter.
> But why? Why would a US citizen want to be snapping mobile phones together for 6-12 hours every day?
I live in the US and don't support the tariffs but I'll give my best shot at answering.
The US is fairly poorly educated on the whole. In order for people to survive, there need to be an abundance of low skilled jobs. AI and automation is threatening to remove these jobs. What are the poorly educated going to do? Decades ago, someone could work in a factory for their whole life. Yes it was monotonous work but it would provide a living and allow someone to buy a house and life their life. I know because my grandparents came over from Europe after WWII and did this. They spoke poor English but could work in a factory and have a house and a car and live a good life. That's not the case anymore. With further automation and the pace of change increasing, it worries a lot of these types of people. If you have no education and your factory closes, there are not many other options for you.
The idea isn't to bring just one manufacturing plant for snapping phones together. It's to bring many, many plants back to provide these jobs for the poorly educated. So instead of just having one plant in your town, you have several. That means there will be competition for workers and wages will rise.
That's the idea anyway. Do I think it's possible to rollback to that time? No, I don't. But this is what people, mainly in rural areas, want to hear.
Part of the problem is that the US doesn't want to invest in education as a whole. Education would be a better long-term solution. Instead, this leads to the visa situation where the US needs to import a lot of technically skilled workers rather than developing them locally.
I think the right mostly doesn't believe climate change is a problem or manmade. If you could convince them that it was a real, fixable, harmful thing, I suspect the right would support strict green policy that would look much different than the green new deal. For example, there would be no "environmental justice" focus which is a big thing in the GND; it would probably just focus on reducing total emissions even if that harmed the middle class / poor disproportionately.
> Tariffs make foreign imports more expensive. This dissuades people from buying them. Some of those people will instead buy equivalent American made products, now that the price difference has lessened.
But what about the other side of the coin - that exports will now become more difficult, because of retaliatory tariffs? How does that help your domestic economy?
Trumps solution seems to be to try to bully other countries into accepting tariffs and not imposing tariffs on American goods. But how is this supposed to work? Quite apart from the appalling moral and fairness aspects of this strategy, trashing the economies of other countries is a bad idea, because you want other countries to be wealthy so they can buy stuff from you.
Free trade has built the modern Western world, and has already made the US the world's leading economic superpower. I can't even see what Trump is trying to achieve.
I think your second point is a good one, although most economists would probably say this is an argument against the minimum wage rather than an argument for tariffs.
The ultimate problem with your first point---that tariffs boost domestic industry---is that the time horizon for reshoring manufacturing and domestic supply chains is longer than the expected lifetime of these tariffs. Trump is a second term president, there isn't broad consensus or even majority support for the tarrifs, and there is a great deal of opposition from business owners: all signs the tariffs are not for long. Who wants to invest in an expensive factory and workforce when the only thing guaranteeing your competitiveness is the remaining years of Trump? It's actually much worse than this, of course, because the tariffs are being used primarily as diplomatic leverage rather than economic policy, so they change frequently and unpredictably.
There are also serious downsides to the Trump tariffs that don't exist for traditional tariffs that are predictable and operate on a long time horizon. These tariffs create price shocks to domestic industry and retailers, which tend to disproportionately hurt smaller businesses and those with slimmer profit margins. They've also damaged the US's reputation with long-term partners, particularly Canada and the EU, which are now exploring competing trade deals with China and are figuring out how to extract themselves from dependence on US arms and tech companies, two major exports.
The effect of these tariffs is not going to be short-term pain for long-term gain. A great deal of US economic competitiveness comes from investments in diplomatic and military partnerships that have now been undermined. These tariffs will spur reciprocal tariffs from other nations and will accelerate the remodeling of the global economy away from US exports, trading competitive US exports for uncompetitive and commodified domestic industry.
Tariffs make foreign imports more expensive. This dissuades people from buying them. Some of those people will instead buy equivalent American made products, now that the price difference has lessened. I consider that a good thing. There will be pain while local manufacturing ramps up (or forever, if it never does) for products that have no domestic equivalent. That sucks, but sometimes things need to suck before they improve. Paying off the national debt, for example, is something I support, even if we have to slash a lot of useful spending for awhile. I think most rational Republicans are voting for these sorts of things despite knowing they will make things temporarily worse, in the hopes of an eventual better. The left tends to never do this, for they are very attuned to the immediate suffering their plans cause. The right tends to be less sensitive to the short term suffering their plans cause; the right thinks that the alternative, a slow decline, is worth the pain to avoid. Trump has bungled the implementation of the tariffs, but I still support their use in general.
Fundamentally it makes no sense to me to support a minimum wage for your countrymen, but also support them importing massive amounts of slave made goods. You are creating rules on the supply side that the demand side does not have to follow, which only harms your own domestic businesses. Your own country's businesses have to compete against slave labor while paying living wages; for most manufacturing this is just not possible. You are incentivizing off shoring, which harms your working class, who have to compete with subminimum wage workers. Workers rights must be paired with tariffs, or every additional worker right is a demerit on his hireability against foreign workers without those rights! If you want your country to produce anything, and to have a strong working class, you either remove minimum wage, or you implement tariffs. We cannot simultaneously support strong domestic workers rights and mass importation of sweatshop goods that were made without them. It hollows out the country.
Edit: I am rate limited though I would like to reply to some of my interlocutors. I will reply later.