alt Hacker News> The primary goal of the Trump administration is to destroy American manufacturing. They don't want factories, hence all the tariffs.
The goal of the Trump administration is to rebuild American manufacturing, but the impression I get is the people who they have designing the polices are kinda like stopped clocks: right about how free trade dogma was wrong, but lacking the competence to effectively move the needle in the other direction (and favoring bold, impulsive, and ultimately self-defeating action).
Also, I feel like there are weird echos of libertarianism here: they've become comfortable with some long-taboo sticks, but are still so psychotically opposed to government programs that the necessary carrots are nowhere to be found. Like tariff revenues should be getting plowed back into subsidies for new domestic manufacturing in strategic industries.
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Your position assumes facts not in evidence. If the administration wanted to rebuild American manufacturing, the last thing they'd do is pile on additional taxes on manufacturing domestically—which is exactly what their tariffs do.
An administration that wants to rebuild American manufacturing would decrease tariffs, not increase them. They'd eliminate the chicken tax, the Buy America Act, the Jones Act, and every other regulatory instrument that encourages domestic manufacturers to milk captive customers for all they can rather than make products that customers want to buy.
They'd also finish metrication ASAP, increase investment in technical education, implement universal healthcare coverage, modernize payment systems, and so on. You'll note that the Trump administration wants none of the above.
The US has a problem where government revenue has been increasing by the usual amount (i.e. as a percent of GDP it's within the same range it has been for 70+ years), and is therefore the highest it's ever been before in real dollars, but spending has increased by even more than that, and in particular spending has been increasing faster than GDP. But for the last few decades we've had people saying "deficits don't matter".
The trouble is, they kind of do, and now "interest on the debt" is eating a chunk out of the budget that rivals the entire Department of Defense. So not only is spending growing faster than GDP, a huge chunk of the money that had historically gone to cover even the traditional spending is now going to interest. And if the deficit stays how it is, that's only going to get worse.
The result is that there is no "tariff revenues" to spend on anything. Even with the additional revenue, spending still needs to go down just to tread water.
And then the question is, is the thing you're proposing worth more than the additional cuts it would take to cover it, i.e. what do you want to not have in order to have that?