alt Hacker NewsA thought experiment. Imagine a small poor country far from the US, of 1 million people, where the average income is $3000 annually ($3 billion total household income). Imagine a factory in that country that produces shoes beloved in America.
Those shoes are so popular in America that Americans buy $1 billion of those shoes every year. In order to address the problem as stated, this hypothetical country would have to spend a third of its household income purchasing products produced in some of the highest-cost conditions in the world. To do so, they would have to shut out their local trading partners from whom they currently buy goods at prices they can afford. This would have the effect of making them even poorer.
Does this make any sense?
If you make an exception for this hypothetical country, then countries such as China would come in and build factories there and bypass their own tariffs. You're back to playing whack-a-mole.