The tariff plan sounds like a classic case if dosomethingism. Not quite as dumb as progressive dosomethingism, but with some of the same flavor. "We can't afford to manufacture stuff here so let's make materials more expensive" sounds a lot like "There's a lot of inequality so let's take the best people out of the poor communities."
Because there are too many hurdles to implementing sane industrial policy in the US, and there is too much political volatility for a coherent long-term strategy, I am very pessimistic that it will work. I don't disagree with the idea that we need to learn to build here - just with the idea that we will succeed at it because of tariffs. Nor do I doubt that tariffs are a lot less bad than other forms of protectionism. We have a lot of dumb regulations that require us to Buy American, or spend grants only on domestic raw materials or transportation. (Not just talking about the Jones Act like everyone else on the internet, but also really petty things like a scientist going to a conference can't pay for travel on a foreign airline using an NSF grant. Or offering rebates on cars conditional on having the correct percentage of raw materials sourced in America, instead of just having people be indirectly taxed in proportion to how much they import.)
What I really fear is that instead of using tariffs to replace bad regulations, we will just be stuck with both, and it will be too expensive to build any new infrastructure for a really long time. Or the tariffs will be gone in four years, Republicans return to being viewed as the party of losers, and Democrats lose all incentive to pivot to the center.
It would also help if Trump worked with Congress to sell a well-researched trade reform package instead of just announcing what looks like it was a formula out of a high school social studies project.
1. Large industrial subsidies for domestic manufacturing paid for by
2. Increased taxes on high incomes and capital gains
This accomplishes everything the Trump intelligentsia claims to want to do with tariffs in a way that doesn't spike inflation or spark global panic. You like the 50s? Set your tax rates like it.
If your concerns are the losers of trade, then redistribute some of the gains their way. Tariffs are net-bad, and that's a worse sin than not helping the losers of a net-good policy.
Both of these comments completely miss the spiritual component of the immiseration of the wage class. If they're so much better off than they were in the '50s, why are they so miserable, why are they killing themselves with drugs and alcohol? Why are their churches empty, why do all their best and brightest children move away as soon as they can? Welfare checks are not fungible for family wages at a factory.
Suicide rates were about 10 in the 1950s, peaked at 13 in the 70s, fell back to 10 by 2000, and now are at 14 per 100k.
The whole time, manufacturing as a percentage of employment has been falling (though steady as a percentage of GDP). Why do you think the shift from manufacturing jobs explains the suicide rate trends?
Factory jobs are not fulfilling, however much people who haven't done them imagine them to be.
It’s not the factory job that is fulfilling, it’s bringing up your family in the small town where your grandparents built a home with their bare hands, every landmark has a family story, you see your grade school teacher at the grocery store, and your kids go to school with the dentist’s kids. Your uncle has a small business in town tangentially related to the factory, and you both get respect from mutual acquaintances because you’re family. It’s family reunions twice a year because you’re only a few miles apart, and it’s watching nieces and nephews playing under a tree you and your siblings played under twenty years ago, and watching them hit their first t-ball in the field you hit your first home run in. Wage class people aren’t looking for fulfillment from their jobs, they’re looking for it in all the other facets of their lives, and moving to the city for a cubicle job destroys that, not just for them, but their entire family.
The other way rural areas typically survived other than manufacturing, was agriculture, which again, they cannot compete with third-world labor and globalized markets.
Yes and no. Factory closes and a thousand jobs go. What do they do? They can move away, hollowing out the community. Maybe the factory is replaced by a call centre or distribution warehouse - providing similarly pointless jobs at low wages. Where the idyll lasts, it is very pleasant, but mostly created by front row people with well paid jobs.
Maybe the working class is spiritually immiserated indeed - but I've never reason to think that is due to low-status mediocrely-paid service jobs instead of low-status mediocrely-paid manufacturing jobs.
The former means cheaper TVs and smartphones, and we are apparently killing ourselves only about as often as we were in 1970. At that time, manufacturing was a quarter of employment. Is the theory that the cheaper goods made up for less-meaningful-than-factory-work up to 2000, but not after that? The decline from ~15% to ~10% is what drove the working class over the edge? Seems iffy.
Church attendance at least lines up with the post-2000 spike, but it doesn't explain why equally church-going America killed itself more in 1970 than 2000, and it doesn't have any clear link to manufacturing's share of employment.
I've read widely in the Suicidology literature (since my son killed himself.) This is not a great paper. The authors claim that an increase in depression diagnosis may account for most of the rise in youth suicide. At best, that is a statistical artifact. Depression is widely overdiagnosed, and the causal link to suicide is unclear; the vast majority of people diagnosed with depression do not commit suicide, and most people who commit suicide never seek mental health treatment (so their mental status is unknown.) The comment about bullying gays driving youth suicide is sheer speculation; CDC does not track the sexual preference of suicides.
In any case, youth suicide is a drop in the bucket. Older white men are most likely to kill themselves, so demographic aging may be a better explanation.
Interesting paper, thank you. I see the chart in Figure 1, but the author does not show a source for the chart. You need an account to see the source for the chart in Statista. This paper from the CDC shows a suicide rate of around 10 in the 1950s. However, I understand that there are issues comparing the pre-2000 stats to the post-2000 stats. I think we can all agree that the rate has increased steadily since 2000.
Redistribution destroys social cohesion, too. Those taxed see recipients as freeloaders. Recipients see those taxed as patsies and chumps, and _become_ freeloaders.
There are jobs available all over the country - people should move to them. Asking everyone to subsidize your unproductive employment so that you don't have to move is, welfare, isn't it?
You’re one of the “front row kids.” There’s no way we can ever agree on this, because we have different value systems. You are happy to scatter families to the four winds on a civilizational scale so you can have the newest smartphone and sneakers, and I think that is inherently evil.
It's about life-saving medicines, civilization altering technology, and the advancement and maintenance of the military that defends our land and interests.
I think it's wrong to ask the smart kids to subsidize the dumb ones, not with food or medicine but with a fetishized factory-town lifestyle their fathers deplored.
Entry level service jobs pay $20-30 an hour on the coasts. Agglomeration effects FTW even on the left side of the bell curve. The only issue ("only" lol) is high cost of housing. The solution is part of the flywheel that will create even more good jobs - massive build out of housing capacity for working people near the roaring economic engines of our country. NIMBYs delenda est.
There are many alternatives that have been actively discussed and to some degree implemented! For the specific industries that we have a national security argument for keeping (to some degree) in-country, do industrial policy, like we have done with semiconductors, or some targeted tariffs or quota regimes like we do with food.
Broad and heavy import taxes, without distinction between friend and foe, are stupid. We don't need to be stupid.
Agreed. The author’s premise feels like clickbait. There are plenty of proposals from all sides of the aisle. A simple google or any amount of economic reading shows this.
Increased taxes on the wealthy, incentives for manufacturing industries, training and other support to grow our advanced manufacturing (compete where we have an advantage), targeted tariffs on certain types of goods, UBI, just to start.
This is very late and the discussion is kinda dead, but I just wanted to give my own answer:
a. I think the pathologies and problems you're talking about are real.
b. I think it is not so obvious that things have gotten worse overall. The pathologies and losses are visible and concentrated, and the people who are the same or better off than their rustbelt-dwelling parents moved all over the country in different industries and are not so visible or concentrated.
c. In particular, the wage class isn't some fixed group of people. A lot of hourly-wage union factory workers from the rust belt have kids who went to college, moved to Atlanta or Phoenix , and are working as salaried professionals now.
d. I think a lot of the pathologies are not primarily about trade, but rather about other policies. Housing policy in the US has made housing very expensive most places, but that has very little to do with trade. All the mechanisms of community got weaker over the last 50 years, but I think that's mostly about television and increased mobility and falling religiosity and women joining the workforce, and trade has very little to do with it. Mainstream values in working-class white families have gotten much worse, and that's not trade.
e. Even within the narrow problem of there being fewer manufacturing jobs, a lot of what has happened is primarily down to technological change and unions losing power relative to industry over time.
For those reasons, I think tariffs or other changes to trade policy can't fix most of what's gone wrong. Instead, I expect that to mostly make things worse by making stuff expensive and messing up some businesses here that rely on foreign suppliers, while not really fixing what's broken.
From around 1870 to 1920, US had the highest tariff rates in the world. It has also overtook Britain in GDP per capita during that period. Coincidence?
If not tariffs, maybe local domestic leadership? The existence of a problem doesn't necessitate action that makes the problem much worse. Most types of top-down economic price manipulation (tariffs included) will inflate prices, destroy surplus, and ultimately destroy manufacturing jobs rather than creating them. If not sawing my leg off, then what do I do about the actual threat of the gunshot wound to my leg? Sure, fixing a wound isn't easy, but that is even more reason not to propose a hasty solution. Americans aren't children that need to be saved by daddy president so badly that they need him to make things worse. Yes, people are unhappy, but they are also adults who can self organize.
We need more church leaders, more educational leaders, more local political leaders, more sports, more coaches, more scouts troops, more civic societies. This isn't administrative policy, it's administrative culture.
Welfare is generous in the US. The US keeps people alive. Jobs come from people who aren't depressed, who come up with interesting things to do. Jobs come from leaders.
As for policy, we can focus on dramatically reducing costs and increasing abundance and use of basic goods & infrastructure like transportation, housing, healthcare, commercial space, and education.
Subsidies for strategic sectors - the CHIPS act failed bc dems imposed stupid dei hiring requirements on recipients (it sounds like a rush limbaugh boomer brain rot claim, but no it happened https://thehill.com/opinion/4517470-dei-killed-the-chips-act/amp/ ). Very easy for Trump to refashion a version without all the ideology that would work for semiconductors and other sectors. Offset some of the cost with targeted tariffs on semiconductors.
First, stop with the pedantic spelling corrections Thomas. It doesn't make you look smart, just condescending. Note also I'm not the original person you responded to.
So what percentage of inputs for US manufacturing are imported? Do you think those materials just magically appear in the united States? What do you think happens to facorey jobs when input costs skyrocket? Does literally no one remember what happened when luber costs trippled in a month in 2020?
Also, if manufacturing jobs are so desired why are there so many unfilled jobs (before any of this happened there were more than 2 million unfilled manufacturing jobs). Wouldn't you think that if these jobs were so great and in such demand they would be filled?
What's the theory here? Make everything so expensive to import that we have to make it here? We're y'all just infuriated about inflation? I guess now that it's Trump's idea it's cool right?
1) explain why a trade deficit is bad. You're entire point hinges on the idea that a trade deficit is a net negative, it's not. I know it's a trite talking points, but you do run a massive trade deficit with your local grocery store and it's not ripping you off and both of you are better off for it's existence. Just think about this for a moment. There's 2 things foreiners can do with dollars, they can spend them inside the US which means they come back to us, or they continue to spend them outside the US which means the dollar continues to be the world's reserve currency and, as an added benefit, reduces the supply of dollars in the US and increases the value of the dollars you have.
Trade deficit aren't bad.
2) explain how you can justify calculating a trade deficit while excluding services, which the US leads the world in exporting.
3) explain why there are so many unfilled manufacturing jobs in America right now.
A big part of the Klein-Thompson "abundance" agenda is deregulation that makes it possible to build. If things like housing, railroads, solar farms, and the like were being built en masse, that would mean a lot of jobs for non-college educated men.
I think that's a much better plan than trying to make Nikes in the US with American wages and labor safety laws.
“I would like to see just one single smart person currently excoriating tariff policy to acknowledge the material concerns tariffs purport to address — massive trade imbalances and the inability of the US manufacturing sector to compete with third-world near-slave labor. Assuming you admit these concerns, what do you propose to do about them?”
You won’t (or shouldn’t) find a “smart person” supporting our tariffs.(read David Friedman on Tariffs)
Calling trade imbalances “massive” misses the mark and implies a problem, which belies an actual explanation that doesn’t sound like mercantilism. (Read Adam Smith; or David Ricardo—who explained comparative advantage).
Likewise, calling foreign workers “near-slave labor” is not even a weak argument, but a non-argument. It sounds convincing when we hear such things, but upon a closer examination we discover that yes, through no fault of anyone people don’t get to choose their parents or where they live.
If we really care about third world workers, the best policy for them and us would be a free-market: no protective tariffs or immigration laws preventing workers from trading their labor for wages in first world countries like the United States.
Ultimately, there's two approaches to improving any trade balance: decrease imports from other countries or increase exports from your country. Trump's choices led him toward the former.
One approach to the latter was diplomacy. One advantage of America's sprawling military presence is that many countries depend on us for security guarantees; that gives us leverage in negotiations. Pressuring other countries to appreciate their currencies against the dollar or to adopt policies that are more favorable to the US (improving IP rights in India, removing data protections in the US) would have been another approach (indeed, this is similar to Nixon's actions). This would have been an especially potent approach in the wake of the Ukraine war because fears of Russian aggression are at an all-time high.
I'm not sure which approach is better (Trump's approach does have the advantage of being faster-acting, being more tangible, and signaling strength). But there certainly was at least one possible alternative.
The tariff plan sounds like a classic case if dosomethingism. Not quite as dumb as progressive dosomethingism, but with some of the same flavor. "We can't afford to manufacture stuff here so let's make materials more expensive" sounds a lot like "There's a lot of inequality so let's take the best people out of the poor communities."
Because there are too many hurdles to implementing sane industrial policy in the US, and there is too much political volatility for a coherent long-term strategy, I am very pessimistic that it will work. I don't disagree with the idea that we need to learn to build here - just with the idea that we will succeed at it because of tariffs. Nor do I doubt that tariffs are a lot less bad than other forms of protectionism. We have a lot of dumb regulations that require us to Buy American, or spend grants only on domestic raw materials or transportation. (Not just talking about the Jones Act like everyone else on the internet, but also really petty things like a scientist going to a conference can't pay for travel on a foreign airline using an NSF grant. Or offering rebates on cars conditional on having the correct percentage of raw materials sourced in America, instead of just having people be indirectly taxed in proportion to how much they import.)
What I really fear is that instead of using tariffs to replace bad regulations, we will just be stuck with both, and it will be too expensive to build any new infrastructure for a really long time. Or the tariffs will be gone in four years, Republicans return to being viewed as the party of losers, and Democrats lose all incentive to pivot to the center.
It would also help if Trump worked with Congress to sell a well-researched trade reform package instead of just announcing what looks like it was a formula out of a high school social studies project.
1. Large industrial subsidies for domestic manufacturing paid for by
2. Increased taxes on high incomes and capital gains
This accomplishes everything the Trump intelligentsia claims to want to do with tariffs in a way that doesn't spike inflation or spark global panic. You like the 50s? Set your tax rates like it.
Two things that need to be understood in this discussion:
1. The US manufactures more than ever before, actual manufacturing output has grown year after year for decades. (Look this up please!)
2. Employment in manufacturing has shrunk. We don’t employ as much people in manufacturing even as we manufacture more.
So the idea that if we just increase manufacturing we will fix these ills in American society needs to be examined.
We’re already doing that, we’d have to address both automation and globalization at the same time.
If your concerns are the losers of trade, then redistribute some of the gains their way. Tariffs are net-bad, and that's a worse sin than not helping the losers of a net-good policy.
As for the wage class, it is far better off than 1955, even though it is valid for it to be angry that they don't reap as much as others from trade.
Both of these comments completely miss the spiritual component of the immiseration of the wage class. If they're so much better off than they were in the '50s, why are they so miserable, why are they killing themselves with drugs and alcohol? Why are their churches empty, why do all their best and brightest children move away as soon as they can? Welfare checks are not fungible for family wages at a factory.
Suicide rates were about 10 in the 1950s, peaked at 13 in the 70s, fell back to 10 by 2000, and now are at 14 per 100k.
The whole time, manufacturing as a percentage of employment has been falling (though steady as a percentage of GDP). Why do you think the shift from manufacturing jobs explains the suicide rate trends?
Factory jobs are not fulfilling, however much people who haven't done them imagine them to be.
And their prevelance does not match the trends.
It’s not the factory job that is fulfilling, it’s bringing up your family in the small town where your grandparents built a home with their bare hands, every landmark has a family story, you see your grade school teacher at the grocery store, and your kids go to school with the dentist’s kids. Your uncle has a small business in town tangentially related to the factory, and you both get respect from mutual acquaintances because you’re family. It’s family reunions twice a year because you’re only a few miles apart, and it’s watching nieces and nephews playing under a tree you and your siblings played under twenty years ago, and watching them hit their first t-ball in the field you hit your first home run in. Wage class people aren’t looking for fulfillment from their jobs, they’re looking for it in all the other facets of their lives, and moving to the city for a cubicle job destroys that, not just for them, but their entire family.
You don't mention the downsides, curiously.
The manufacturing job is neither necessary nor sufficient to this idyllic small-town living you portray.
The other way rural areas typically survived other than manufacturing, was agriculture, which again, they cannot compete with third-world labor and globalized markets.
Yes and no. Factory closes and a thousand jobs go. What do they do? They can move away, hollowing out the community. Maybe the factory is replaced by a call centre or distribution warehouse - providing similarly pointless jobs at low wages. Where the idyll lasts, it is very pleasant, but mostly created by front row people with well paid jobs.
Maybe the working class is spiritually immiserated indeed - but I've never reason to think that is due to low-status mediocrely-paid service jobs instead of low-status mediocrely-paid manufacturing jobs.
The former means cheaper TVs and smartphones, and we are apparently killing ourselves only about as often as we were in 1970. At that time, manufacturing was a quarter of employment. Is the theory that the cheaper goods made up for less-meaningful-than-factory-work up to 2000, but not after that? The decline from ~15% to ~10% is what drove the working class over the edge? Seems iffy.
Church attendance at least lines up with the post-2000 spike, but it doesn't explain why equally church-going America killed itself more in 1970 than 2000, and it doesn't have any clear link to manufacturing's share of employment.
Suicide rates were much higher than 10 in the 1950s.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/187478/death-rate-from-suicide-in-the-us-by-gender-since-1950/
I was looking at the mid ‘50s values in figure 1 of https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w31242/w31242.pdf, which are indeed 10ish. Not sure what happened in 1950 itself.
I've read widely in the Suicidology literature (since my son killed himself.) This is not a great paper. The authors claim that an increase in depression diagnosis may account for most of the rise in youth suicide. At best, that is a statistical artifact. Depression is widely overdiagnosed, and the causal link to suicide is unclear; the vast majority of people diagnosed with depression do not commit suicide, and most people who commit suicide never seek mental health treatment (so their mental status is unknown.) The comment about bullying gays driving youth suicide is sheer speculation; CDC does not track the sexual preference of suicides.
In any case, youth suicide is a drop in the bucket. Older white men are most likely to kill themselves, so demographic aging may be a better explanation.
Interesting paper, thank you. I see the chart in Figure 1, but the author does not show a source for the chart. You need an account to see the source for the chart in Statista. This paper from the CDC shows a suicide rate of around 10 in the 1950s. However, I understand that there are issues comparing the pre-2000 stats to the post-2000 stats. I think we can all agree that the rate has increased steadily since 2000.
https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/12870
Redistribution destroys social cohesion, too. Those taxed see recipients as freeloaders. Recipients see those taxed as patsies and chumps, and _become_ freeloaders.
Your comment could be rephrased as “just merge the wage class into the welfare class.”
Certainly not - I'm suggesting you e.g. cut the taxes of those whose wages are undercut by cheaper foreign labor.
If that's welfare, then any sort of preferential tax rate for anything is welfare.
Lower tax rates don’t help if you don’t have any income.
No income is what unemployment is for.
There are jobs available all over the country - people should move to them. Asking everyone to subsidize your unproductive employment so that you don't have to move is, welfare, isn't it?
You’re one of the “front row kids.” There’s no way we can ever agree on this, because we have different value systems. You are happy to scatter families to the four winds on a civilizational scale so you can have the newest smartphone and sneakers, and I think that is inherently evil.
It's about life-saving medicines, civilization altering technology, and the advancement and maintenance of the military that defends our land and interests.
I think it's wrong to ask the smart kids to subsidize the dumb ones, not with food or medicine but with a fetishized factory-town lifestyle their fathers deplored.
Entry level service jobs pay $20-30 an hour on the coasts. Agglomeration effects FTW even on the left side of the bell curve. The only issue ("only" lol) is high cost of housing. The solution is part of the flywheel that will create even more good jobs - massive build out of housing capacity for working people near the roaring economic engines of our country. NIMBYs delenda est.
There are many alternatives that have been actively discussed and to some degree implemented! For the specific industries that we have a national security argument for keeping (to some degree) in-country, do industrial policy, like we have done with semiconductors, or some targeted tariffs or quota regimes like we do with food.
Broad and heavy import taxes, without distinction between friend and foe, are stupid. We don't need to be stupid.
Agreed. The author’s premise feels like clickbait. There are plenty of proposals from all sides of the aisle. A simple google or any amount of economic reading shows this.
Increased taxes on the wealthy, incentives for manufacturing industries, training and other support to grow our advanced manufacturing (compete where we have an advantage), targeted tariffs on certain types of goods, UBI, just to start.
This is very late and the discussion is kinda dead, but I just wanted to give my own answer:
a. I think the pathologies and problems you're talking about are real.
b. I think it is not so obvious that things have gotten worse overall. The pathologies and losses are visible and concentrated, and the people who are the same or better off than their rustbelt-dwelling parents moved all over the country in different industries and are not so visible or concentrated.
c. In particular, the wage class isn't some fixed group of people. A lot of hourly-wage union factory workers from the rust belt have kids who went to college, moved to Atlanta or Phoenix , and are working as salaried professionals now.
d. I think a lot of the pathologies are not primarily about trade, but rather about other policies. Housing policy in the US has made housing very expensive most places, but that has very little to do with trade. All the mechanisms of community got weaker over the last 50 years, but I think that's mostly about television and increased mobility and falling religiosity and women joining the workforce, and trade has very little to do with it. Mainstream values in working-class white families have gotten much worse, and that's not trade.
e. Even within the narrow problem of there being fewer manufacturing jobs, a lot of what has happened is primarily down to technological change and unions losing power relative to industry over time.
For those reasons, I think tariffs or other changes to trade policy can't fix most of what's gone wrong. Instead, I expect that to mostly make things worse by making stuff expensive and messing up some businesses here that rely on foreign suppliers, while not really fixing what's broken.
From around 1870 to 1920, US had the highest tariff rates in the world. It has also overtook Britain in GDP per capita during that period. Coincidence?
If not tariffs, maybe local domestic leadership? The existence of a problem doesn't necessitate action that makes the problem much worse. Most types of top-down economic price manipulation (tariffs included) will inflate prices, destroy surplus, and ultimately destroy manufacturing jobs rather than creating them. If not sawing my leg off, then what do I do about the actual threat of the gunshot wound to my leg? Sure, fixing a wound isn't easy, but that is even more reason not to propose a hasty solution. Americans aren't children that need to be saved by daddy president so badly that they need him to make things worse. Yes, people are unhappy, but they are also adults who can self organize.
We need more church leaders, more educational leaders, more local political leaders, more sports, more coaches, more scouts troops, more civic societies. This isn't administrative policy, it's administrative culture.
Welfare is generous in the US. The US keeps people alive. Jobs come from people who aren't depressed, who come up with interesting things to do. Jobs come from leaders.
As for policy, we can focus on dramatically reducing costs and increasing abundance and use of basic goods & infrastructure like transportation, housing, healthcare, commercial space, and education.
Subsidies for strategic sectors - the CHIPS act failed bc dems imposed stupid dei hiring requirements on recipients (it sounds like a rush limbaugh boomer brain rot claim, but no it happened https://thehill.com/opinion/4517470-dei-killed-the-chips-act/amp/ ). Very easy for Trump to refashion a version without all the ideology that would work for semiconductors and other sectors. Offset some of the cost with targeted tariffs on semiconductors.
Yes. Restoring America’s industrial strength is the goal, tariffs (or an alternative) are the means.
What bet?
(1) the correct spelling is “tariffs”
(2) note the words “or an alternative” in my comment
(3) read Mr. Kitten’s article. This is not a game. If you oppose tariffs, propose an alternative policy that will restore our industrial strength.
(4) if you can’t do that, sit down.
First, stop with the pedantic spelling corrections Thomas. It doesn't make you look smart, just condescending. Note also I'm not the original person you responded to.
So what percentage of inputs for US manufacturing are imported? Do you think those materials just magically appear in the united States? What do you think happens to facorey jobs when input costs skyrocket? Does literally no one remember what happened when luber costs trippled in a month in 2020?
Also, if manufacturing jobs are so desired why are there so many unfilled jobs (before any of this happened there were more than 2 million unfilled manufacturing jobs). Wouldn't you think that if these jobs were so great and in such demand they would be filled?
What's the theory here? Make everything so expensive to import that we have to make it here? We're y'all just infuriated about inflation? I guess now that it's Trump's idea it's cool right?
1) explain why a trade deficit is bad. You're entire point hinges on the idea that a trade deficit is a net negative, it's not. I know it's a trite talking points, but you do run a massive trade deficit with your local grocery store and it's not ripping you off and both of you are better off for it's existence. Just think about this for a moment. There's 2 things foreiners can do with dollars, they can spend them inside the US which means they come back to us, or they continue to spend them outside the US which means the dollar continues to be the world's reserve currency and, as an added benefit, reduces the supply of dollars in the US and increases the value of the dollars you have.
Trade deficit aren't bad.
2) explain how you can justify calculating a trade deficit while excluding services, which the US leads the world in exporting.
3) explain why there are so many unfilled manufacturing jobs in America right now.
A big part of the Klein-Thompson "abundance" agenda is deregulation that makes it possible to build. If things like housing, railroads, solar farms, and the like were being built en masse, that would mean a lot of jobs for non-college educated men.
I think that's a much better plan than trying to make Nikes in the US with American wages and labor safety laws.
“I would like to see just one single smart person currently excoriating tariff policy to acknowledge the material concerns tariffs purport to address — massive trade imbalances and the inability of the US manufacturing sector to compete with third-world near-slave labor. Assuming you admit these concerns, what do you propose to do about them?”
You won’t (or shouldn’t) find a “smart person” supporting our tariffs.(read David Friedman on Tariffs)
Calling trade imbalances “massive” misses the mark and implies a problem, which belies an actual explanation that doesn’t sound like mercantilism. (Read Adam Smith; or David Ricardo—who explained comparative advantage).
Likewise, calling foreign workers “near-slave labor” is not even a weak argument, but a non-argument. It sounds convincing when we hear such things, but upon a closer examination we discover that yes, through no fault of anyone people don’t get to choose their parents or where they live.
If we really care about third world workers, the best policy for them and us would be a free-market: no protective tariffs or immigration laws preventing workers from trading their labor for wages in first world countries like the United States.
Ultimately, there's two approaches to improving any trade balance: decrease imports from other countries or increase exports from your country. Trump's choices led him toward the former.
One approach to the latter was diplomacy. One advantage of America's sprawling military presence is that many countries depend on us for security guarantees; that gives us leverage in negotiations. Pressuring other countries to appreciate their currencies against the dollar or to adopt policies that are more favorable to the US (improving IP rights in India, removing data protections in the US) would have been another approach (indeed, this is similar to Nixon's actions). This would have been an especially potent approach in the wake of the Ukraine war because fears of Russian aggression are at an all-time high.
I'm not sure which approach is better (Trump's approach does have the advantage of being faster-acting, being more tangible, and signaling strength). But there certainly was at least one possible alternative.
Subsidies and safety nets
Next