Comment by acdha

I think that’s part of what I find so frustrating about this. There’s an alternate history where we’d have a national effort to invest in domestic industry, especially outside of a few areas which are doing well, but that just wouldn’t look anything like this.

A good example I saw was living in New Haven years back, where they were struggling to build businesses around the Yale community. There’s a ton of unused industrial area, especially as you go east, but they didn’t have the right combination of funding environment, local workforce, and infrastructure so in practice everyone went to NYC or Boston, or SF, and the state of Connecticut kept losing out.

Fixing that would be huge, but tariffs won’t do it unless you also invest in those other things and also something like antitrust protection so the key decisions aren’t made by a handful of gigantic companies.