"If America tried to block foreign-made products and make everything at home, prices would skyrocket and foreign countries would likely retaliate by blocking U.S. goods from their countries. "You can't turn back the clock," Blinder says.Trump doesn't plan to block them. He plans to tariff them. That way we don't have shortages before American industries can ramp up.
Other countries probably will retaliate. But our trade deficit is so high it won't matter. For example, in the first 6 months of 2015 we imported $227 Billion of Chinese goods, and only exported $56 billion to China. So their retaliation is just not going to matter that much.
But there's an even bigger problem for those who want to restore U.S. manufacturing employment (now 12.3 million) to its 1979 peak of 19.6 million: Technology has taken many of those jobs for good. Today's high-tech factories employ a fraction of the workers they used to. General Motors, for example, employed 600,000 in the 1970s. It has 216,000 now — and sells more cars than ever.
While that is true, there are very important reasons to recapture those industrial processes.
- We need those industrial processes in times of war. We should never become dependent on foreign countries for as much as we have. In 1812 Europe cut us off from manufacturing goods, causing Thomas Jefferson to change is views from thinking we need to be an agricultural economy and trade for manufacturing goods, to observing that a strong manufacturing base was essential to preserving a free state.
- To install robotics and become the masters of robotics, we need to have the manufacturing processes to work with. China despite it's cheap wages is moving forward with robotics.
- There are a lot of other jobs that move with the manufacturing processes( Research and Design, marketing, etc.).
- Letting China have those manufacturing processes strengthens China militarily. That's not a good idea.