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They "work" on steel in the sense that they make American steel competitive at the cost of making stuff made out of American steel not competitive. It also happens to be the case that making stuff out of steel employs a lot more people than making steel. Solve for the equilibrium.
Every economist likes to think you can have the dirty raw material processing happening elsewhere and keep the fun, clean, super-profitable stuff for yourself. The problem as I see it is:
This is why successive countries were able to move from 'raw processing and cheap junk' to 'serious manufacturing contender' to 'holy shit, everything's made in X now'. It's also why places like the UK or the Rust Belt no longer do even advanced manufacturing for the most part.
We're outside the realm of "economists think" and in the realm of "past experience shows".
Even if true, this isn't an argument to speed up the process of eliminating manufacturing jobs by introducing steel tariffs. The American steel industry had plenty of time to stay competitive with cheaper countries and it has completely failed. Now you want to reward them so they can keep being fat and inefficient and at the same time make it so that nobody in the country can actually make competitively priced goods out of steel?
I doubt this is true in any meaningful sense, but in any case, we already have the next, more desirable steps. Why kneecap them by putting tariffs on steel?
When those countries were doing raw processing, were they as uncompetitive as American steel? Or were they cheaper than the competition and therefore entered into a virtuous cycle? Meanwhile, putting tariffs on steel in an advanced economy is ensuring that you'll produce steel but hardly anything out of it, because it's just not cost effective. This a kind of cargo cult approach - China made a bunch of steel and they were blessed with cargo. We must go back to making our own steel at any price, and we too will be blessed with cargo.
The starting points here are different. If you're starting from scratch as a developing economy, it makes sense to start with raw processing because that's the simplest thing you can get in on and it lets you build business connections, etc.
As a developed economy that already has a long tradition of manufacturing further along the value chain, it doesn't make sense to tariff steel in the hopes of reinvigorating the manufacturing that's further along the chain. You are already making the stuff that competitors wanted to make all along, just make it cheaper and better. Steel tariffs pull in the opposite direction.
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