Unlike some economists, I believe that tariffs can be a useful tool in protecting strategic industries to keep alive certain capacities that are essential to the freestanding nature of any self-sustaining society.
I could even live with something like a universal tariff, such as Trump’s 10%, though I would make it lower so it could be absorbed by producers, not consumers, for the purposes of funding the US Navy, which makes secure global trade possible.
For me, then, the failure of the child president lies not in his embrace of tariffs themselves, but rather in how he implemented them; this implementation was so misguided that the methodology used to calculate relative country rates amounted to little more than misapplying trade deficits to tariff rates.
