But then if the other country does it back it goes in favor to the nation that is more industrial.

Correct! That’s what Cavallo et al found when the Trump administration tariffed China in 2018. US profit margins decreased on both imports AND exports, while China’s remained largely unchanged.

According to their analysis, American tariffs hurt Americans more than literally anyone else.

Fun fact, the Trump Administration cited Cavallo et al as supporting evidence for their tariff calculations.

Yeah, sorry to say you were pretty off base friend. Smoot-Hawley didn’t start the fire, but it poured fuel all over the flames and locked the firemen out of the building.

Friedman was an advisor to Reagan and Thatcher. He was a libertarian who genuinely believed that economic prosperity hinged almost entirely on just printing more money. His economic theories are all over the place, but even he acknowledges that tariffs generally don’t work:

… [Friedman] uses tariffs as an example of a policy that brings noticeable financial benefits to a visible group, but causes worse harms to a diffuse group of workers and consumers

The “protectionism” falls flat the moment you consider that the tariffs blanket all goods. If you want to dramatically expand American industry, you don’t start by raising the price of steel and raw materials.

and there a lot of economists who say it didn’t have that much of an effect at all.

Source? To my knowledge Smoot-Hawley is pretty widely regarded as the worst possible move at the worst possible time. Protectionism doesn’t work when domestic purchasing power is already collapsing. Agreed on the rest though.

Plenty of people supported Coolidge and Hoover until they felt it in their wallets. This is going to hurt, for everyone, and it will provide opportunities to change minds. Not just the minds of Trump supporters, but the minds of everyone who thinks there’s no point fighting. We have a lot of common ground opening up beneath our feet.

This is a terrible mistake for them to make. The Republican party has made this mistake before. It lead to the New Deal. History sure is rhyming, and things aren’t playing out quite the same, but we have a chance - however small it is - to take advantage of their mistake again, and turn things around.

The evidence that Trump’s Administration themselves cited in their official explanation of their tariff “calculations” (trade deficit / imports) flat out states that when the US tries to tariff other countries:

1. American importers pay for the US tariff AND
2. American exporters pay for the foreign retaliatory tariffs.

The source (Cavallo et al, 2021) clearly demonstrates that American tariffs are paid directly by Americans in both directions, meaning out of everyone on Earth, US tariffs screw the US the most. Trump’s administration legitimized the source by citing that research for its calculations on the tariff rates.

The Trade Representative’s explanation freely admits that the stupid parameters were chosen more or less arbitrarily, and they cited the paper to justify their position on tariff price throughput but conveniently didn’t list it in their “References” section.

Our analyses indicate that the price incidence of US import tariffs falls largely on the United States… Our results suggest that retailers are absorbing a significant share of the increase in the cost of affected imports by earning lower profit margins on those goods… [These analyses reveal] that the recent tariffs applied by foreign governments on US exports have affected total foreign import prices far less than was the case for the recent US tariffs

This is really not true. The wealthy aren’t playing 4D chess with the economy, they are just as short-sighted behind closed doors. The Great Depression fucked a lot of wealthy people up and turned the entire nation against them. It can happen again.

Edit - and for the record, the abundance does vanish in a depression scenario. Factories shut down, productivity collapses. The world will literally extract, refine, process, and build less of everything. You can’t build a fleet of yachts without a functioning economy.