[Persephone Kore]

By all means, you need to contact the 1400 people who were crying over losing their jobs at Carrier and explain to them that they are actually better off. Same with Ford, same with Nabisco, same with the millions of Americans whose jobs and factories have been moved outside the United States.

Yes, those particular people would be better off if their jobs were protected. But the tradeoff is bad for the country: the job losses outside those protected industries would be much greater than the saved jobs in those industries.

Prices for cars, air conditioners, etc., would go up for all consumers, since we would have removed the foreign competition. As a result, even people who kept their jobs would find that their dollars wouldn't go as far and their standard of living would drop.

Those higher prices paid by consumers for the protected goods would be money not available for other consumer items, which is why there would be job losses and economic contraction in the general economy.

Another way to look at this is that the cost to the economy for each job saved would be many times the wages for that job — probably hundreds of thousands of dollars per job. The benefits are concentrated but the costs are distributed across the country; so the costs aren't as obvious, but they're nevertheless very real.

By the way, all of this just looks at the direct effect of the introduction of a tariff. If other countries retaliate by imposing their own tariffs on goods they import from the US, that makes things even worse for us.

[odawg]

“Those higher prices paid by consumers for the protected goods would be money not available for other consumer items, which is why there would be job losses and economic contraction in the general economy.”

That is already taking place and has been taking place due to the modern versions of “free trade”.

Why is it that the United States economy became the most powerful on earth and it was done without the present trade agreements? It was done by building factories and growing the manufacturing base, not shipping them overseas and claiming that was a good thing?

You free traders are idiots. I have been reading the writers of free traders for years. It like they belong to some kind of mindless religious cult.

I read one guy who goes around the globe preaching free trade. He claims that the United States should get rid of every tariff on imported goods, every tariff, even though the rest of the nations do not.