Post election prediction

[FunkyDexter]

Tariffs like that will only increase the cost of things to Americans,

I agree but we could be proved wrong. Take e.g. Steel. tariffs on Chinese imports will make it less attractive to buy Steel from them, making domestic steel more attractive. That might stimulate domestic steel production.

What I think this view ignores, though, is:-
1. Domestic steel will always be more expensive than Chinese was without tariffs (if it wasn't you'd have been buying domestic already) so tariffs are inevitably going to result in a short term bump in costs. That cost will be passed to the consumer so will be inflationary.
2. The US might stop buying cheap Chinese steel but the rest of the world won't. That means our manufacturing costs for steel based products (e.g. cars) will be cheaper than yours so our products will out compete yours in international markets and probably in domestic markets too. The inevitable logic of this is that you apply further tariffs to cars which may help your domestic producers (though at the cost of a similar inflationary bump to consumers as identified in 1 above) but will do nothing at all for your exports.

In essence, tariffs aren't there to help you the consumer, they're there to help domestic producers at the consumer's expense. If you think it's going to bring back production jobs, it probably will... but in a less competitive market meaning lower wages or being driven out by automation.

The reason China is eating your industrial lunch and putting you at a trade deficit is not globalisation, it's that their manufacturing costs are lower than yours. The only ways to protect yourself from this is to to either outcompete them in costs (i.e. lower wages or fewer jobs) or offer some technology or benefit that they can't.

It's worth noting that some of us are posting from a country which has recently undertaken probably the largest experiment in isolationism and protectionism in that last 100 years (Brexit). It's been an unmitigated financial disaster and it's proponents have been reduced to complaining that it was the "wrong sort" of Brexit even though it's the one that they implemented. And that's just the red tape - the tariffs haven't been applied yet but they're coming.