Auto tariffs are currently keeping far less expensive - yet much more advanced - Chinese EVs out of the US market, costing American consumers thousands of dollars on every car purchase.
While not allowing an entire industry and supply chain to die. One of the last heavily industrial and manufacturing industries left in the US at any decent sized scale.
You need such things for national security, so it's very likely "worth it" even all the way down to the American consumer level.
Look at the shipbuilding industry if you want to see what happens to that capacity without it. Due to the lack of commercial shipbuilding in the US, we can't even keep up with building for our Navy during peacetime. If a war ever were to attrit naval forces to any meaningful degree there would be zero hope of scaling up that supply chain in a relevant timeframe.
Arguments could of course be made if the auto manufacturing industry (and it's suppliers) are useful in an actual hot war, but I think without them we'd be in even heavier dire straights in that regard.
The US ship building industry is barely kicking along .. by intent, for whatever reason the US is not competing for the 90% of global commercial ship building demand currently met by China, Korea, and Japan.
This does not mean there is zero hope of scaling up should wartime demand come into existence.
Although U.S. shipbuilding is greatly diminished today, it is not the national security concern many would lead us to believe. America’s rapid expansion of ship production during World War II serves as a reminder of what allowed America to increase its ship production historically. Orders surged from the US government and other allied nations for commercial ships. Companies converted capital and entered the ship building business to meet the orders; Henry Kaiser built a shipyard in Richmond and got it operational in 78 days.
You could make a rational argument for short-term protectionism if the US government were simultaneously pushing the domestic auto industry to modernize, but the government is doing the exact opposite: it opposes electric vehicles.
The large American manufacturers are able to keep on selling technologically outdated, overpriced vehicles in the US, because they have a captive market.
When the Chinese imposed protectionist measures in the auto industry, they were aimed at allowing Chinese domestic manufacturers time to catch up technologically, and they were scaled back as that happened. Any international car manufacturer can now set up shop in China and compete directly with the local brands on an even footing. But the US has imposed drastic protectionist measures with no end-game (worse than that: US policy is backwards-looking and intended to maintain an old technology). It's just a permanent state of affairs.
Someone mentioned a week or two ago on HN that the point of the auto tariffs was national security (maintaining the industry/expertise/etc. in the US, I assume), not economic.
They’re wrong. Lyndon Johnson imposed the 25% Chicken Tax during trade skirmishes with Germany to make Volkswagens more expensive, and later tapes surfaced showing this was actually done for political favors. It had zero to do with national security. As a result Americans pay about 25% more for light trucks of inferior quality ever sense, as a giant handout to the car industry.
So as usual, tariffs cost the country imposing them, returning less net goods, and moves money into the protected class at the expense of the wider public.
How do you feel about allowing the import of goods from nations using slavery to create those goods? Would you be okay with a foreign nation undercutting domestic production as a strategy to destroy your industry to control a market?
That's aside from my position that most taxes should be at a point of trade/exchange.
The question was for a specific example, not some moral vague strawman.
The question is a good one, right to the heart of the claim. Without specific examples, especially ones that are not post selected (i.e., pick all tariffs at a point in time and see of that was beneficial), it is silly to claim tariffs are useful when there is ample evidence of when they cause significant harm to the economy.
So, have a case for a timepoint where the set of tariffs ended up being demonstrably beneficial for an economy?
You have to see there's a hefty dose of hypocrisy in this, right? American might has been used, quite extensively, to impose unfavorable conditions to local companies in their own soil in favor of American companies. Multiple American multi national corporations have used exploitative labor conditions in underdeveloped countries to prop up their own margins. The American government has used multiple coercive tools to de-industrialize many nations and has, in the 21st century, an explicitly paternalistic attitude towards the Western Hemisphere with literal stealing of their resources.
I understand and even respect when someone says "I'm American so I wish to maintain the status quo where the US can undercut other nations but they can't undercut us". But if there's some rose tinted view of how the US is actually the morally aggrieved one, I just can't bear it.
You can just ban imports from people who use sweatshops, or hash that out in trade agreements.
Because Trump is so fixated on tariffs, it's centered tariffs in too many conversations on these trade topics. People have developed a kind of tunnel vision here.
There are other kinds of policy levers besides tariffs for securing supply chains, promoting domestic manufacturers, or cutting out businesses that rely on slave labor from international trade. Most of them are cheaper and more effective than tariffs.
