Their point is; "You might by only 5,000 cars and 2 jets. Buy them from us and not the British and Germans." Multiply that by every country we trade with and not only do U.S. companies regain access those markets, they also take away sales from their overseas competition who have been using U.S. tariffs to their advantage.
This is not U.S. vs Vietnam; it's Boeing vs Airbus, Ford vs Mercedes, etc.
“You might by only 5,000 cars and 2 jets. Buy them from us and not the British and Germans.”
That’s where the idea is wrong. Why tax their economy and their people buying $50,000 cars from the U.S. (or Britain, or Germany) when they can buy $20,000 cars from India.
To buy somthing there from another country there has to be an economic benefit to it, and that is never about importing something that will cost you more when what to you is an equal can be imported from somewhere else for less.
To me Trump’s idea of trade is like the Left’s Critical Race theory on DEI - a theory that demands strict statistical proportiionality which is not the natural course of events, and forcing that strict statistical proportionality is/will be damaging in its achievment.
“This is not U.S. vs Vietnam; it’s Boeing vs Airbus, Ford vs Mercedes, etc.”
Not so. Mercedes builds cars in Germany and in the U.S. and Ford builds cars in Germany and the U.S. If the EU matches Trumps tariffs on cars, Ford will just export fewer of it’s cars from the U.S. and sell to Europe from other plants outside the U.S. And the gain to the U.S. economy in that particular scenrio? Zip.
And Trump has not made tariffs on Airbus, so its not about Airbus vs Boeing.