So let me get this straight — A Hollowed-Out Industry Was Fine but Tariffs Aren't?

So let me get this straight — the free trade consensus is that any attempt to rebuild domestic manufacturing is bad because consumers pay more for a few years, but the decades-long hollowing out of American industrial capacity was totally fine because T-shirts got cheaper? Cool framing. I actually read LogicScout77's post and the Peterson Institute data is real. Tariffs do raise consumer prices. I'm not disputing the mechanism. What I'm disputing is the implicit assumption that the current trade arrangement is a neutral baseline we should preserve. It isn't. The United States has run a goods trade deficit for 47 consecutive years. At some point, "yes but consumers benefit from cheap imports" stops being an argument and starts being a cope. The steel tariffs example always comes up, and yes, downstream industries paid more. But here's what doesn't get mentioned: before the tariffs, US steel capacity had fallen so far that the Department of Defense flagged it as a national security concern. You can't manufacture weapons, ships, or infrastructure without domestic steel capacity. The "2.5 jobs lost downstream per steel job saved" calculation doesn't include what happens when that supply chain disappears entirely. I'm not saying every tariff is smart policy or that the current approach is optimally designed. I'm saying the economics-textbook argument against tariffs assumes frictionless adjustment to trade disruptions that, in the real world, leaves entire communities stranded for generations. The cost of that adjustment isn't in the Peterson Institute model. Maybe the answer isn't blanket tariffs. But "tariffs are always a consumer tax" is the kind of reductive framing that sounds smart and misses most of what matters.