re: If Tariffs Are Put in Place People Won't Be Able to Afford Cars

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In the mid 2010s the EPA adopted ridiculous California based fuel economy and greenhouse gas standard as a national standard by the 2016 model year[9] and collaborated with Californian regulators on stricter national emissions standards for model years 2017–2025.[10]


so. while I still don't really understand how tariffs work I do understand that manufacturers will pass the cost of 1 nanometer of CO2/50 miles, kill switches, minimum of 35 mpg, and only EVs by whenever... to us.
IE.. get rid of the EPA and car prices drop 20k overnight.

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Tradeoff being what does that do to our air quality here?

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LINK ]Why Trump Is Right About Tariffs
Taxing imported goods is unpopular with economists, but it could help the U.S. lower the trade deficit, strengthen its industrial base and safeguard national security.

Economists have reacted poorly to Donald Trump’s recent proposal for a 10% tariff on all imports. Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, called it “lunacy” and “horrifying.” According to Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, it would be “a disaster for the U.S. economy.”

But why? After all, tax revenue is necessary to provide public services, and tariffs have long proved an effective way to collect it.
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Making things also matters because the industrial economy provides an invaluable foundation for thriving local economies nationwide. While the U.S. economy now consists predominantly of services, a community cannot thrive on cutting hair, serving fast food and delivering packages alone. Undergirding the service sector there must be an industrial sector where people can create tradeable products, sent to the outside world for the many things the community needs and does not make itself. Industrial activity also tends to have a much higher “multiplier effect,” rippling outward into greater local employment and investment.

And making things matters to national security. As Adam Smith acknowledged, it is “advantageous to lay some burden upon foreign, for the encouragement of domestic industry…when a particular industry is necessary for the defence of the country.” In the 1700s, the principle seemed narrow, applying for instance to sailcloth and gunpowder.

But in a modern industrial economy, fielding a technologically sophisticated military and protecting the home front in times of crisis requires not only building and repairing billion-dollar warships but also the fabrication of advanced semiconductors, processing of rare earth elements and synthesis of pharmaceutical precursors. Each of these relies on its own complex supply chains, skilled workforce and long-term capital investments.
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America’s cumulative trade debt of $15 trillion and counting will hamstring future generations as surely as the federal government’s fiscal debt. As Warren Buffett put it in 2003, “Our country has been behaving like an extraordinarily rich family that possesses an immense farm…We have, day by day, been both selling pieces of the farm and increasing the mortgage on what we still own.” His solution was a system of “import certificates” to discourage imports and promote exports—or, in his words, “a tariff called by another name.”

The persistent and ballooning U.S. trade deficit stands as a stark empirical refutation of the economic orthodoxy on free trade. Friedrich Hayek cited “how some necessary balance…between exports and imports, or the like, will be brought about without deliberate control” as a prime example of “the self-regulating forces of the market.” Paul Krugman listed the insight that “trade deficits are self-correcting” among “the essential things to teach students.” The school of thought that dismisses the case for tariffs is also a school that dismisses the possibility of the world in which we live.
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Skeptics rightly warn that other countries may retaliate with tariffs of their own. Certainly, a world with higher tariffs and lower but more balanced trade is by no means ideal. Reversing the damage wrought by globalization will create winners and losers, just as globalization did.

But the U.S., with its enormous trade deficit and reeling industrial base, has much more to gain than to lose in the process. Not until other nations conclude that the era of exploiting American passivity has ended can prospects improve for an international system in which all sides work to expand mutually beneficial trade.
The theories that claim to refute this strategy only beg the question. They begin from the assumption that persistent trade deficits and industrial decline are costless and conclude, unsurprisingly, that a tariff does no good. This perpetuates the “presumptuous error” for which John Maynard Keynes condemned economists nearly a century ago, of regarding “the balance of trade…as a puerile obsession, [when it] for centuries has been a prime object of practical statecraft.”

U.S. policy makers—and citizens—should insist on a wider discussion about the full costs of unbalanced trade. If making things does matter, American trade policy should reflect it.

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Essential goods and materials (medicines, conductors, chips, steel, etc) should be made here. Buy all the tennis shoes, toys, wine and cheese you want elsewhere. But essential things need to be made here.

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The media is lying to us about tariffs. Trump used tariffs in his first term and inflation remained low and the cost of goods stabilized.

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Honestly.... it would probably get better. The government breaks everything they touch. I understand the intent but... just like every other agency that started out with a noble purpose... the lobbyists got involved and the noble purpose suddenly became money at the expense of the American people.

The FDA screwed up food. The CDC screwed up health and disease responses. The department of education screwed up education. and on and on.

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