Tariffs won’t bring a boom in American manufacturing

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. It isn’t easy to pin down the purpose of the Trump administration’s sweeping tariff agenda. Sometimes the president uses tariff threats to intimidate and gain leverage with trading partners.

Other times it seems his main motivation is to bring in new tax revenue to pay for tax cuts and other priorities. But the goal most commonly cited by Trump administration officials is bringing manufacturing jobs back to America—reindustrializing the nation. As Vice President JD Vance put it during a speech in Michigan earlier this month, “If you want to be rewarded, build in America.

If you want to be penalized, build outside of America. It’s as simple as that." That the tariffs have been widely unpopular hasn’t dissuaded the administration from this pursuit. Stock investors are clearly spooked: The markets plummet every time Mr.

Trump proposes a new or higher tariff and rise when he delays or cancels them. Consumer economic sentiment recently hit a 29-month low, and consumers’ expectations about future conditions fell 15% this month, the largest decline since the pandemic. A February survey of small-business owners showed the largest decline in plans to expand since April 2020.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has said that the tariffs will be “worth it" even if they trigger a recession, because on the other side of any potential pain, great gains await us. Doubtful. Our analysis suggests that large-scale reindustrialization is highly unlikely to occur.

Even countries with large trade surpluses have experienced declining shares of factory jobs. There is good reason to expect we’d be no different. The reindustrialists in the Trump administration appear to believe, against all evidence, in the