By the time nations create tariffs and trade barriers, they are usually already in trouble, and it might take many years to show positive results to limiting trade...That reasoning may be all that some folks need for spending money, but when successful people spend time and money they actually check the hard numbers from historical records. That's why I included links to tariffs and jobs in my last post. In case those linked tables were too hard to follow here're the data plotted--
--and what we got is actual recorded hikes in import taxes have been followed by record spikes in unemployment, while import tax cuts were followed by more jobs. Of course, while you're free to vote for import tax hikes as you want, most of the rest of us see ourselves better off with tax cuts and vote accordingly.
I don’t really see that in the graph, if you know the underlying history. For instance, though tariffs were high but declining in 1910, unemployment was mediocre. Then there was a burst of unemployment after WWI, and tariffs increased while unemployment then declined.
Then the massive jump in unemployment of the Great Depression, followed by the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, that seemed to cause unemployment to drop. But credit to the big drop in unemployment there comes from the New Deal, in which tariffs mattered little to government make work projects. And unemployment really slammed down with WWII.
Beyond that there doesn’t seem to be much correlation, other than a slow decline in tariffs and a slow increase in unemployment.