These are for sure challenging times for a lot of industries like that. I think one of the issues is that we are far too accustomed to subsidized goods which doesn’t bring the cost to actual numbers but keeps it far lower than it would. Not that subsidies are necessarily in play here but we so often don’t get an idea of what things really cost until it changes.
The insidious part about the tariffs is that the conglomerates are still going to make money hand over fist but the people are the ones that suffer. We do need to fix the trade issues though, so this was inevitable.
It's a middle-class and lower-class tax, 100%.
And I mean, the US is the biggest consumer country in the world. If they want to stop buying shit, cool, buy less shit. Otherwise, they need to be aware that setting up the infrastructure to bring jobs back to the US is a decades-long undertaking and, quite honestly, will fail.
The US cannot offer sweat-shop level production, and so long as other countries DO, those of us who make shit with actual... y'know... laws and protections and shit... we'll always lose manufacturing to them. Canada, the US, EU, etc... we have labour laws and so long as we do it's always going to make getting these company owners to manufacture here very difficult, unfortunately.