"But when you impose tarriffs, the price of everything goes up, and pretty soon the poor people that you were trying to protect can't afford to buy anything."
Prices do not go up infinitely.
And they don't go up on everything.
They specifically go up on the things that we import in large volume from low-skilled overseas workers: textiles, steel. We don't yet have free flow of agricultural products and truck drivers from Latin America, but get CAFTA going and you can watch the Midwestern farms go out of buysiness and all th3e trcukers switch over to being Juan Valdez too.
There is no job that Americans do that cannot be done as well by a foreigner for a lot less money. I note that company health plans in some places are now encouraging ill workers to fly to Asia for major operations. It's cheaper over there. EVERYTHING is cheaper somewhere else.
For comparison's sake, the states in the US which have won the "race to the bottom" in terms of corporate regulation and taxation are NOT the most prosperous or best educated by any stretch of the imagination. There is a level of government infrastructure and regulation which makes for more profitable and efficient markets than quasi-total deregulation does.
Interesting that the word "socialist" gets bandied about incorrectly a lot whenever one wishes to speak sanely about taking care of one's own people.
But here's another word: globalist. The net result of absolutely free trade in a world full of dictatorships - including the 1.1 billion man Chinese dictatorship - is that every one of your industries goes out of business over time. If we can do it, they can do it cheaper. And will. So, we either become like them, or we decide that unfettered globalism doesn't take us to the place we want to be.
I don't understand where you're coming from at all. Are you saying that America's lower class would be better off if we shut out china so they could quit their jobs and get back into the sock-making and phony novelty vomit factories and earn the right to pay more for those products on the consumer end?
Tarriffs, like all consumer taxes are actually a much bigger burden on those who spend a higher percentage of their disposable income.
Reagan understood this - in his inaugural address in 1981, he said it clearly - Government is the problem. It acts as a distorting influence on the economy and promotes inefficiency.
So, slash and burn. And if people are unequal, well that's quite frankly, tough. Life isn't fair. Anyone telling you otherwise is lying. The Democrats merely move the unfairness into the realm of bureaucratic decision-making.
Americans are supposed to be tough, ambitious, realists. Perhaps politicians should remind them of this heritage and get the government the bloody hell out of the way.
Ivan