alt Hacker News> Consider actual tariffs? A trade deficit isn't a tariff or trade barrier it's just the natural flow of commerce from them selling more stuff than they buy
That’s just defining what a trade deficit is, it doesn’t explain why trade deficits arise. For example, other countries have cheaper labor and laxer environmental regulations. Simply looking at the country’s tariff rates on U.S. goods doesn’t account for the whole picture.
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Yeah sure, Europe is absolutely known for their lax environmental regulations…
> cheaper labor and laxer environmental regulations
So we've exported our worst paying, most environmentally damaging industries? I mean the rivers catching fire was probably exciting but I'm not exactly pining to bring that back...
Tariffs can only set those industries up for internal markets, other countries will just continue to buy from the cheaper source so the protected industry has to continue to be protected.
Additionally who's going to work these labor intensive industries? We're already at 4.1% unemployment, there's not vast masses of people waiting for low paying work as seamstresses and one of the other major prongs of the Trump ideology is reducing immigration drastically so we're going to squeezed on that end too.
Finally we've done mass tariffs before and it always ends badly. Remember Smoot-Hawley? it deepened the Great Depression because people thought they could turn to protectionism to prop up and bring industry to the US. It just doesn't work when broadly applied.
Other countries also have different population numbers. To take a random example, why would e.g. Uruguay (population 3.5M) buy as much from the US (population 100x) as the US is able to buy from them?
Besides, if the trade volume is what determines the tariff, why would any country want to have a trade surplus with the US? The best solution for other countries is to artificially limit their exports, or find more reliable trading partners.