The chart below shows USA equal in rank with China and moving ahead significantly in the future. If this is true, why does the USA have a trade deficit? Is the USA just manufacturing the easy stuff that there is no international market for? If the USA is as competitive as China in manufacturing, why does trump impose, or need tariffs. Is it because US companies don't like selling stuff to foreigners? Or, they don't know how to sell stuff to foreigners? Or is it because if the USA did not sell war machines and armaments it would be even further behind in the trade balance. Trump is attacking symptoms instead of the problem. Trump has not even identified the problem. The cause could be that the US$ is over-priced and has been for a long time. If that is so, the US administration doesn't know how to fix that.
@Denizen We need tariffs for reasons of national security to protect certain industries and agriculture. We need tariffs to created a level playing field between America's safe, non polluting factories and China's factories that may be unsafe and polluting. We need tariffs to protect American labor from such foreign labor that involves virtual slave labor as in Chinese Apple factories, child labor at Vietnam Nike shoes factories and the like. And for standard of living differences of labor. Fair Trade. Not Free Trade. BTW my Uncle had a business, Freight Traffic Engineers back in the fifties What he did in pre computer days was help get the tariffs in order so companies could get their goods off the docks at LA (San Pedro, Long Beach?) Harbor and into I never understood what a tariff was back then.
The US needs tariffs to spread poverty in the USA. The 1950s "happy days" is gone. There is no going "back to the future". Without the cheap labor of undocumented immigrants, American agriculture and American construction industry would collapse, not to mention Mar a Lago.