I was just reading about the impacts of the steel tariffs. US steel manufacturers raised their prices by a quarter in response (which has hit US manufacturers of steel-using products, causing job loses), and apparently they took that extra money and increased automation in their plants, because the number of US steel jobs has actually gone down compared to before the tariffs as well.
Pray tell, how are current tariffs on components (but not finished goods), which are causing US manufacturers to move their jobs overseas, bad for international business but not bad for their now unemployed workers?
Tariffs are a really dumb response to the economic issues Trump was trying to address, either missing the point entirely (jobs lost to automation), failing to address the issue entirely (IP issues with China) or actually directly making things worse. The tariffs are being implemented so poorly and so strangely that they seem to be intended to benefit international companies (e.g. the components tariffs), at the expense of workers and consumers. And this is the objection to all of Trump’s plans - they’re the completely wrong solutions, badly implemented, and everything he says about them is a lie.
