re: Tariffs. What libertarian Economists don't grasp and more.

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Like he said, they do not work the way y'all think they work.

If we got back all the jobs we "lost" overseas and then doubled it, we'd be talking about maybe 20 million Americans. Out of 340 million. Roughly 6%.

And that's if we double it just for good measure.

If you search for the average factory worker salary in the US, you'll get around $17 an hour. if you search for average manufacturing job salary in the US, you'll get almost $24.50 an hour.

Not sure why the difference (maybe the latter takes management jobs into account and the former doesn't?), but let's use the higher number.

That's a little under $51,000 a year for 20 million people.

That doesn't mean that 20 million people who were unemployed suddenly make $51,000 a year, it probably mostly means that someone who was making $15-$20 an hour is now making $24.50 an hour and the unemployed people are filling in the $15-$20 an hour jobs.

$51,000 a year is going to pay roughly $6,000 in taxes. That IS significantly higher by percentage than when the person was making $18 an hour who will pay maybe $1,500 in federal taxes. The difference being $4,500 times 20 million, which is $90 billion in additional tax revenues.

However, if the average manufacturing worker here makes $24.50, that's four times as much as the average Chinese manufacturing worker makes. Obviously prices have to go up to deal with that.

Let's say prices go up in those industries by 20%. It's probably going to be more than that, but we'll be conservative.

Now, in 2023, we still had almost 13 million manufacturing jobs going in the US and those jobs produced $2.3 Trillion in revenue.

Using that math, an additional 20 million jobs would add another $4.3 Trillion, without accounting for the 20% price increase.

Do the math and those goods costs Americans (all of us, not just 6% of us) over a trillion dollars more than they would have, for a 90 billion dollar offset in federal income taxes.

That's off by almost an order of magnitude.

Now I'm sure that someone could dispute some aspect of what I have said or chime in with, "Wait, you didn't factor in XYZ," but the napkin math is too far off for anything I can reasonably think of to matter.

Bottom line, unless or until someone shows otherwise, when we "get those manufacturing jobs back," America loses. Financially, at least, which is what your claim was based on.

Tariffs will NOT cause anyone's income taxes to go down. They WILL cause prices to go up.

And another reason I know this is that Trump instituted tariffs back in 2018 and we know the effects of them. I don't need a crystal ball. All I have to do is look up the net effect of the 2018 tariffs. We lost. Net jobs, net cost, American producers lost market share, etc. That's a fact.

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