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This might be more credible if Trump were not also planning to reinstate his wildly lop-sided tax cuts. Inequality is mostly downstream of fiscal policy, not trade policy - the period of major growth in inequality came in the 80s, then it stagnated in the 90s and 2000s which doesn't really match up with free trade/decline of manufacturing timelines, what it very obviously matches up with is 12 years of Republican control of the Presidency up to 1993. Inequality at the moment is roughly where it was in the early-mid 1990s.
This makes no sense as rationale for the tariffs when one looks at where and how they have been applied. I think chips have even been exempted from Taiwan's tariff rates!
As @The_Nybbler said, this makes no sense at all. How could insulating domestic manufacturers from foreign competition make them more efficient and dynamic? The very reverse process is part of what destroyed British industry. Higher tariffs barriers in the post-war period meant that, because they were not exposed to global competitive forces, British companies never kept up with the technologies and efficiencies developing all over the world, and so when firms like British Leyland arrived in the 70s and 80s they were still producing cars at the speed and quality of decades prior and were inevitably destroyed. For a developing country this logic is more reasonable because pure Geschenkron-style copying is enough for domestic industry to grow fast from a very low base, but in the position of a first-world nation this stops working because you're at the forefront of technologies and efficiencies. Hence why Chinese tariffs have come down every year for decades, because they're slowly wearing out the possibilities of copying manufacturing techniques from the rest of the world and the competitive advantage offered by low wages.
At the end of the day you have to believe Trump when he speaks. He is simply an idiot who thinks that the US should not run a trade deficit with literally any country in the world and doesn't understand anything about anything. This is not a piece of masterful grand strategy to reduce inequality and strengthen the resilience of American supply chains, Trump is just thick.
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