And the fact is, we don't want to compete with countries like China on lack of environmental or worker safety regulations. Free trade is a race to the bottom for wages, to the bottom for environmental regulations, to the bottom for social support programs.
We don't want to go there, and the way to stop China from dragging us there, is to charge them a good tariff for admission to our consumer market.
No, that’s not true at all. It’s the regulations, taxation, borrowing and (welfare and other pork) spending that create the “wage differential” by pushing down the value of the US dollar; the money printing is a symptom of all that as well as a contributing cause the higher the debt rises. Without getting rid of those (which are all leftist causes anyhow), all that raising tariffs will do is create a trade war in which the USA is already critically hobbled; nobody will reinvest in the USA, and nobody can make anyone do it.