[SeekAndFind]

RE: Restore the import tariffs. Lower income taxes by an equal amount. We might have to drop out of the WTO, but it’s not working for us anyway.

Require military and government purchases to be made in America, with American parts.

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I’ll agree with most of what you said with the exception of import tariffs.

The history of that has not been kind to the economy of the USA. The most recent disaster being the tariffs on steel imports under George W. Bush.

[DannyTN]

Actually the history is that we had substantial import tariffs from the start of the country until the 1960's and the country did just fine. The steel industry tariff does have some lessons for us.

1. We may be hamstrung by the WTO, and we may need to get out of the WTO. We need to examine whether the committments we made to the WTO are really in America's best interest, and exit the WTO if they are not.
2. We should expect some retaliatory tariffs and that's okay. The kid who hits the bully back, shouldn't expect the bully to go down on the first slug. The bully might, but more than likely the bully will hit again.
3. The world is not going to like us if we raise our tariffs. China won't like us if they can't keep ripping off our manufacturing and exporting their unemployment to us. We just need to expect this. It's no different than a store ending a loss leader promotion. Yeah people get mad cause the price goes up.
4. Selective tariffs have more unintended conseqences than general tariffs. This is easier seen with the sugar tariff, where sugar is tariffed but candy is not, thus driving candy manufacturers off-shore.
5. There are a lot of people bought into free-trade and many of them are journalists. There is going to have to be some educational campaigns to offset the current free-trade group think that is out there.
6. It's often hard to prove the true effect of a tariff. There were all kinds of assumptions and suppositions made about the effects of the steel tariffs, but very little real analysis.
   • Some looked only at the consumer side.
   • Some looked only at downstream industries that used steel products and most of those analyses jumped to the conclusion that the higher prices cost those industries, when that's not necessarily true.
   • The benefit to the steel industry, was obscurred by the fact that from the start the tariff was only to be temporary. So steel companies still merged or went bankrupt.
   • Some looked only at the problems caused by an entrenched union and waived the white flag assuming such problems were unsurmountable.
   • Few at any looked at the strategic and military value to America of the American steel industry.