"Produce nothing and import everything" is a straw man. The goal was to produce different things, hopefully more valuable ones. That hope has been shown to be a bit specious. But regardless, being able to obtain real goods by giving other countries arbitrarily-devaluable IOUs is still a no-brainer win, period.
If your goal is to make the country manufacturing independent, then plunging us into a depression while cutting off existing supply lines is abjectly stupid! When it comes to building domestic industry from the ground up, tariffs are the equivalent of "sending thoughts and prayers". And they're even more specious knowing how volatile this administration is, and that the economic pain will mandate some course correction long before the foundations of any new factories are even poured. Never mind the cost of filling those new factories with equipment has now skyrocketed! (Or are we supposed to think that the tariff announcement has magically made the invisible hands of the market start rubbing three flattish surfaces together?)
The actual way to have carried out the purported policy goal was to spend some of the massive surplus the US gets by USD being the world reserve currency ("the deficit") on deliberate targeted import substitution - direct subsidies for US based manufacturing activities. It's top-down centralized action but that's essentially unavoidable due to that massive centralized wealth collection from having the world reserve currency. That would (/would have) also prevent that collected wealth from simply being given to the financial industry in support of their overgrown products.
Breaking up massively consolidated megacorpos into manageable entities that have to actually compete with each other would have gone a long way as well.
The only first-principles ways I can earnestly explain Trump's actions is that either he's either confusing symptoms for causes, is mentally compromised (dementia and/or social media addiction), or is working for Russia/China. Likely some mix of all three.
Hopefully the Democrats can get over their general ineptitude, spin this as a 30% National Sales Tax paying for Handouts to Most Favored Billionaires, get some Republicans to defect from the maggot party line, and fucking impeach+convict already. That's really the only course of action that can leave our country with a hope of remaining intact.
If your goal is to make the country manufacturing independent, then plunging us into a depression while cutting off existing supply lines is abjectly stupid! When it comes to building domestic industry from the ground up, tariffs are the equivalent of "sending thoughts and prayers". And they're even more specious knowing how volatile this administration is, and that the economic pain will mandate some course correction long before the foundations of any new factories are even poured. Never mind the cost of filling those new factories with equipment has now skyrocketed! (Or are we supposed to think that the tariff announcement has magically made the invisible hands of the market start rubbing three flattish surfaces together?)
The actual way to have carried out the purported policy goal was to spend some of the massive surplus the US gets by USD being the world reserve currency ("the deficit") on deliberate targeted import substitution - direct subsidies for US based manufacturing activities. It's top-down centralized action but that's essentially unavoidable due to that massive centralized wealth collection from having the world reserve currency. That would (/would have) also prevent that collected wealth from simply being given to the financial industry in support of their overgrown products.
Breaking up massively consolidated megacorpos into manageable entities that have to actually compete with each other would have gone a long way as well.
The only first-principles ways I can earnestly explain Trump's actions is that either he's either confusing symptoms for causes, is mentally compromised (dementia and/or social media addiction), or is working for Russia/China. Likely some mix of all three.
Hopefully the Democrats can get over their general ineptitude, spin this as a 30% National Sales Tax paying for Handouts to Most Favored Billionaires, get some Republicans to defect from the maggot party line, and fucking impeach+convict already. That's really the only course of action that can leave our country with a hope of remaining intact.