Tariffs are great. They protect the struggling domestic IT industry and gives it time to ramp up its production of vintage computer parts.
replies(14):
First, overall, the US has increased manufacturing output over the last couple decades. 2019 was the highest year ever, covid interupted a bit, but levels are back there again.
However the number of people involved has dropped a lot. US manufacturing prefers automation and prefers to manufacture things which are high-volume, low labor.
A good parallel is agriculture. Foods produced in the US (and the US produces a lot of food) tend towards low-labor. Think fields of wheat or corn, not vegetables. Most fresh produce comes from cheap-labor regions like Mexico (or is grown locally with foreign labor.)
So really your point is not about American manufacturing, but rather American labor.
Secondly, this free market you refer to is the American consumer. They are very price sensitive, and deeply favor cheap over good. This contrasts to a lot of the rest of the developed world which strikes more of a balance in this regard.
Since labor is cheaper elsewhere, it follows that cheap imports are favored (by the consumer) over the locally produced items. Unfortunately the imported good is often of a higher quality now (because foreign manufacturers can afford quality and still be cheap.)
So, the politicians you speak of (regardless of party) are reluctant to medel, partly because of unintended consequences, and mostly because the only real lever they have is to increase the cost of imported goods (ie tarrif them) which in turn gets consumers upset. (Witness the fury of the voter in 2020 because of more expensive goods.)
Thus while it's helpful to blame politicians, politicians are elected by consumers. Consumers who could by local, but choose not to. Consumers who vote against politicians that cause price hikes. (Even when those same politicians incentivise local production with things like CHIPS act.)
You can blame politicians, and indeed corporations all day long, but the consumers are voting with their wallets, and "cheap" is the only metric they care about.
No, supposed quality adjustments hide lower production volumes: https://www.palladiummag.com/2025/10/03/how-gdp-hides-indust...
> Motor vehicles, bodies and trailers, and parts: actual light vehicles produced down 11%, real gross output of vehicles up 39%, real value-added up 125%. Inputs as a percent of gross output rose from 74% to 77%.
> Steel mills & manufacturing from purchased steel: in raw tonnage, steel shipped is down 18%, real gross output is up 5%, real value-added is up 125%. Inputs as a percentage of gross output rose from 73% to 74%.
> If the quality adjustment is 32%, the value-added increase becomes 652%!
> Another “quirk” of real value-added is that inflation adjustments and quality adjustments get applied retroactively, which creates wild inflections from small changes. In simplified terms, let’s say that, in 1997, car sales were $100 billion, and were still $100 billion twenty years later in 2017, with no changes due to inflation or input costs. Input costs in both years were $75 billion, meaning $25 billion in value-added in both years. The only thing that changed, let’s say, was that the “quality” of cars got 10% higher thanks to software innovations like Apple CarPlay and design improvements like crumple zones for safety—neither of which add to recurring production input costs. So, let’s say, our economists would adjust the 2017 figure to be $110 billion in “real” terms and show a small 10% increase, right?
>
> Instead, the way it works is that a recent “base year” is taken, in this case 2017, and the base year is never adjusted. So rather than adjusting from $100 billion to $110 billion, the “real” output of 1997 is retroactively adjusted to be lower, in this case $91 billion, to get the same 10% increase. But then, our value-added in 1997 has fallen to $16 billion, and the increase in “real value-added manufacturing” has jumped from 10% to around 50%! We have created a 50% increase in car manufacturing not by actually producing 50% more cars or “objectively” making cars 50% better, but just by playing around with statistics and definitions.