[HamiltonJay]

Sorry bunch of BS.

Tariffs are absolutely the right solution, especially when you have foreign governments subsidizing their manufacturing and dumping the products here.

Letting us consumers fund hostile regimes is idiotic.

If there was ever a lost opportunity in the post war era it was the embracement of free trade alliances rather than bilateral agreements where developing and repressive regimes could be forced to embrace egalitarianism and democratic principles in exchange for market access.

[Alberta's Child]

I am generally supportive of tariffs, but tariffs targeted at specific commodities or products are one of the dumbest ideas to come down the pike. The Trump administration tariffs on steel and aluminum — while I understood them for their political value — had an overall negative impact on the U.S. economy (more on that later).

If the U.S. determines that tariffs on imports from a specific country are necessary as a matter of policy, then it should be a flat tariff rate on everything that country exports here. None of this crap where some products have a tariff of X%, others have a tariff of Y%, etc.

One problem with tariffs in general is that as manufacturing gets more complex, costs of raw materials and assembled components of finished products matter more. One of the big Asian auto manufacturers (Mazda, I believe) canceled a plan to build a new plant here in the U.S. over the Trump tariffs on steel and aluminum. That’s because the higher price of these raw materials made it more expensive to manufacture cars here. So the U.S. was able to protect steel and aluminum producers here, but at the cost of harming the industries that rely on steel and aluminum.