According to the gospel of econ...and you're wrong. Care to discuss?
The way tariffs work is the government forces raised prices on targeted incoming goods. It is a form of wage and price control but in this case forcing higher prices.
You might say, “Well that’s not a tax on the consumer”, but effectively it is. The payment of the tariff-hiked money comes out of the consumer’s pocket and goes nowhere but into the government’s pocket.
So then you might say, “Well they don’t have to buy those goods.” But now government is forcing artificially high prices on the market place on goods the consumer ordinarily wants. So now, the consumer is forced to either pay more for what he wants or choose an often lower quality item he would ordinarily not get.
Tariffs force consumers to choose a lower quality:price item allowing lower quality:price products (usually American special-interest products bound by government policies of anti-business regulations, unions, and taxes) to succeed. The consumer loses and special interests win.
Generally, current demand is the level of the current expected standard of living. As always and in this case in particular, government interference in the marketplace (in this case tariffs) lowers the standard of living.
In the meantime, tariffs do nothing to solve the underlying root causes of inferior U.S. products because those underlying problems (anti-business regulations, unions, and taxes) are caused by the same government that is now putting another layer of interference into the marketplace.
And what makes it worse is many think these government measures are solving our long-term root causes. But again as usual, the government will put off what is REALLY needed to fix the root causes which would be GET GOVERNMENT OUT OF THE MARKETPLACE AND QUIT INTERFERING WITH FREE ENTERPRISE.