America got richer and outgrew the phase where tons of factory jobs made sense. It seems pretty clear to me that well-paying manufacturing job in developed countries were the product of a particular moment in time where poorer countries couldn't do it yet. Now they can. It was never going to last.

> Americans have been hurt for 50 years

Can you please explain a bit more about this 'hurt'?

My understanding is that a significant majority of sources of US 'hurt' are internal and there has been ample opportunity to vote at least some of it away, but the votes keep going in the direction of making it worse.

The worst thing about it is that the situation has essentially been perpetrated on the citizens of the US by those with power and influence for the simple human weakness of greed. Unfortunately they've got the power and resources to effectively do large scale "convincing".

> Americans have been hurt for 50 years

No they haven't. They've benefitted from it.

Because now most Americans don't slave away in unsafe factories 7 days/week for dollars an hour.

> Americans have been hurt for 50 years … yes manufacturing going overseas was a huge change and many administrations didn’t do enough to help affected workers. Buuuuuut - placing tariffs on our allies that will likely lead to a recession makes no sense.

Yeah, some tariffs aren't a bad idea. But this plan? Just stupid, without any thought or strategy behind it.

The tariffs should be used more strategically to reorganize supply chains, not these blanket tariffs of low cost and high cost places. And probably ratchet them up slowly, to give time for production to move, instead of a big bang of putting them up everywhere.

So tariff China and Mexico, not Canada and Germany.

Devaluing the dollar makes paying national debt more expensive