Comment by corry

There are two different questions here: (1) is Trump's strategy a good one to accomplish his goals? and (2) what are other good ideas to do so?

Just because there aren't many ideas in bucket #2 doesn't mean you should do #1.

For a trivial example, consider steel and aluminum tariffs (Larry Summers gave this example on Bloomberg yesterday):

There are 60x more jobs in industries that rely on steel/aluminum inputs than there are in the US steel/aluminium producers. 60x!

Steel/aluminum tariffs increase the cost of inputs to the companies that employ those 60x more people; their businesses suffer; those jobs are more at risk.

Meanwhile, it will take a decade for steel/aluminum production to be fully done within the US, and even then it will be a higher cost (i.e. the reason the US imports a big share of aluminium from Canada is that Canada uses cheap hydro energy to produce it - something that the US can't do).

Through that decade, every single item that uses imported steel/aluminum as an input will be more expensive for average Americans.

So you risk 60x the jobs, for a slow and ultimately non-competitive local industry rebuild, and meanwhile average Americans pay higher costs.

Now multiply that across every category of good in the economy?

#1 is bad. I don't have a great idea for #2, but #1 is bad.