I was broadly responding to the OP's broad comment. Like yea you don't need to buy cheap crap from Temu that you saw on TikTok. And if you have to pay $5 more for a t-shirt suck it up and stop supporting authoritarian regimes. If that results in Americans working in t-shirt factories which aren't morally better or worse than any other factory, being paid higher wages and having that money stay here in our local economies at the expense of cheap goods with economic outflows to China, I say good and maybe tariffs are a good way to make that happen.
Remember, tariffs are just an economic and policy tool we can leverage. The EU uses them against China today even. I personally found the Biden administration's approach to trade to be better, but maybe we need a mix of policies to effect change?
To that effect I don't really understand your last comment about giving up higher tiers of the economy that are "only possible in the US" - we can't make computers and iPhones here. Those are those high tiers. That is a problem. Tariffs can be a tool to effect change there. Maybe not, maybe so. The status quo isn't sustainable though.
Cheap crap on Temu and phones that mainline social media into everyone's pockets are part of the circus machinery that keeps the population distracted and docile.
Nuking them is unlikely to end well politically.
As others have said, if you want to use tariffs to wage a trade war, you prepare first, so you're not cutting off the branch you're sitting on. You don't create tariffs and then build your factories.
Because you can't. It's just not possible.
But this regime has a shoot-from-the-microphone policy style which is completely irrational and unworkable, and minor considerations like practicality don't figure.
In any case, it's clear the regime is in a race between enforcing its grip on power with martial law (whatever it's going to be called) and political collapse brought about by economic collapse.
It's too early to tell, but if martial law wins, economic collapse on an unprecedented scale will follow.
You can be toxically positive and say that a lot of dead wood needed to be cleared. But in practice that just means whole swathes of the country will turn into Detroit of the 00s, but worse - rotting ghost towns, haunted by the ghosts of those who starved to death.
I was broadly responding to the OP's broad comment. Like yea you don't need to buy cheap crap from Temu that you saw on TikTok. And if you have to pay $5 more for a t-shirt suck it up and stop supporting authoritarian regimes. If that results in Americans working in t-shirt factories which aren't morally better or worse than any other factory, being paid higher wages and having that money stay here in our local economies at the expense of cheap goods with economic outflows to China, I say good and maybe tariffs are a good way to make that happen.
Remember, tariffs are just an economic and policy tool we can leverage. The EU uses them against China today even. I personally found the Biden administration's approach to trade to be better, but maybe we need a mix of policies to effect change?
To that effect I don't really understand your last comment about giving up higher tiers of the economy that are "only possible in the US" - we can't make computers and iPhones here. Those are those high tiers. That is a problem. Tariffs can be a tool to effect change there. Maybe not, maybe so. The status quo isn't sustainable though.