[bootsmann]

> It does get hard to math out when you have to weigh the money the average consumer would save over the 10 million auto jobs in the US.

Not that hard to math out, the deadweight loss of tariffs is always non-zero. IIRC there was a pretty good paper that mathed out the impact of Obamas tire tariffs and concluded that it cost the economy significantly more jobs than it saved.

[ApolloFortyNine]

That's pretty much impossible. If it costs a company 1% less to make a widget that takes 1000 hours of labor to make it overseas instead, the company is incentivized to move overseas.

The thousand of hours labor, the material to source the widget, the real estate for the factory, the transportation now all occurs overseas.

At the very least, you can't spew something like that then not even bother to link a source.

[bootsmann]

https://www.piie.com/publications/policy-briefs/2016/us-tire...

Ratio of 3 jobs lost per tire job saved.

> The thousand of hours labor, the material to source the widget, the real estate for the factory, the transportation now all occurs overseas.

This frees up massive amounts of capital that is more effectively spent playing to Americas strengths, this isn’t a zero sum game.

[matwood]

The problem is that it's all connected. Sure, the widget company may have local jobs saved, but what about the downstream companies that buy the widget to make something else? They can't hire as much because they are paying the higher price. Look at the steel tariffs. Sure they saved some steel jobs, but were a much larger net loss for jobs impacted by the higher prices.