Trump has it right on the economy. Tariff-hating "conservatives" are clueless

The conservative right is not confused about how the economy has changed. They know America is no longer an industrial powerhouse. They simply do not care. They keep demanding a balanced budget as if Congress could ever pass cuts on the scale they imagine. It cannot. The voters will not accept it. The math will not allow it. Their message has become moral theater, not a workable plan.

Their worldview has become elitist without admitting it. They judge the economy by what pleases Wall Street, not by what builds Main Street. They defend free trade in a world where corporations use global labor markets with no overtime rules, no livable wages, weak child labor laws, and poor safety standards. That is not free enterprise. It is a way to escape American standards. It treats American workers as a cost problem instead of the foundation of the nation.

They repeat the claim that tariffs are a tax on consumers, even though the Federal Reserve’s own research shows that is not how markets behave. When tariffs appear, consumers resist higher prices, so retailers hold the line. Importers absorb cost to protect volume. Foreign exporters cut their own prices to keep access to the American market. The burden is spread across everyone, which is why tariffs barely move inflation.

The deeper issue is this. Inflation today is not driven by tariffs. It is driven by slow growth and weak productivity. And slow growth is the direct result of deindustrialization. When America built things, real growth reached four or five percent. The 1950s, 1960s, early 1980s, and late 1990s all saw strong growth because production lived here. Factories create productivity. Supply chains create innovation. Industrial jobs create rising wages. That is how debt-to-GDP stayed stable for decades without brutal cuts. Growth did the work.

A service-heavy economy cannot do that. Finance, healthcare, consulting, and compliance are large but low-multiplying. They raise revenue but not national output in a meaningful way. A hospital or law firm can grow for decades without raising national productivity. A steel mill or chip plant lifts an entire region. That difference explains why the old conservative model no longer works. The engine that once supported limited government and low debt is gone.

The real goal today is simple: stabilize debt-to-GDP and then slowly reduce it.
You cannot reach that goal through cuts alone in a slow-growth service economy. You reach it by raising the growth rate itself.

This is where Trump’s plan meets the reality the right refuses to face. Tariffs are not inflationary in practice. Their purpose is to force supply chains back to American soil, which pushes companies to invest here instead of hiding behind cheap offshore labor. Tariffs only work if paired with domestic investment, and Trump’s approach recognizes that. He understands that tariffs without investment can slow growth, but tariffs with investment rebuild the productive core that creates growth.

The Federal Reserve is fighting the wrong battle. High interest rates might cool an overheating economy, but America is not overheating. It is underbuilt. High rates choke the investment needed to rebuild factories, ports, refineries, mines, and semiconductor plants. A country trying to restore its industrial base needs lower rates and heavy capital spending. That is how you restore productivity. That is how you lift real growth from two percent to four or more. And that is how debt-to-GDP stabilizes without political chaos.

This is not ideology. It is arithmetic. A service economy cannot deliver the growth needed to manage a modern nation’s obligations. An industrial and mixed economy can. Trump’s plan aims to restore that structure. It brings supply chains home. It puts American labor back at the center of national prosperity. It ends the moral failure of letting boardrooms decide the fate of the country based on quarterly profits. It puts industrial policy back under national control.

Debt stabilization does not come from austerity speeches. It comes from strength. It comes from rising output, rising wages, rising productivity, and rising national capacity. Trump’s plan is the only one that seated in reality. It is the only plan rooted in how nations actually grow, how deficits are actually overcome.