So you don’t mind paying one way(subsidize), just the other way(tariff) is bad?
So you don’t mind paying one way(subsidize), just the other way(tariff) is bad?
My argument for subsidies is that if you want to ensure that we have production capacity for a militarily strategic good, then just subsidize it.
That would require an analysis of how much base production we would actually need to subsidize, realizing that we can usually quickly scale up production so long as the expertise is in-country, and then targeting the subsidy to one or two producers. If there’s already more than that, why subsidize at all?
Now look at tariffs. A fair percentage of the comments in here about maintaining production of steel for strategic reasons are worried about China. We buy hardly any steel from China and not that much from Russia. So what’s the point of the tariff? It’s certainly not to protect strategic production.