Newly, across hundreds of trade categories, the current administration has necromanced into re-existence new special interest groups with a vested interest to keep the tariffs that benefit them alive. America invented a free trade regime and spent decades slowly unwinding as many trade-minded special interests as possible. RIP to that.

The most fancy complicated things the world makes are assembled with a global supply chain, consciously created by hundreds of thousands of separate foreign direct investments synchronized over decades. We are pulverizing that.

Tariffs mean the price of goods we import will go up. Domestic producers will raise their prices, because they can (because who is going to stop them? There aren’t any price ceilings imposed).

It will take time to onshore production of many of the things we import. Years in some cases.

Setting tariffs based on the implicit and wildly oversimplified assumption that a trade deficit is bad, is bad thinking. Can’t there be fundamental reasons a trade deficit exists? Can’t we exist in a relationship with a country where they sell us shoes and we sell them treasury bills? That feels like a good arrangement.

It’s actually possible that other countries form free trade agreements and exclude America, the previous global beacon of free trade agreements.

Some of those sectors should probably be protected, especially things that matter for national defense and energy and maybe some drugs etc, sure I’ll admit that. But blanket tariffs disregard that complexity.

America has lost some jobs and some sectors have been offshored over decades of globalization. This hurt specific geographies more than specific income classes, I think? But the negative stories we hear from a few pale in comparison to the massive enriching of the US economy that has resulted from globalization. Free trade helped to make the US great in the first place.