My point was that your usual schtick is to claim all tariffs (except Canada’s tariffs) hurt everyone.
Tariffs certainly do hurt everyone,
including Canada's tariffs.
My point was that targeted tariffs, aimed specifically at certain commodities, are useful to protect a domestic industry. For example steel production. Canada and the USA both produce steel. If China starts dumping cheap steel into your country, it risks collapsing your own steel industry if everyone instead starts buying the cheaper Chinese steel.
But it still hurts, because your consumers are denied the opportunity to purchase a less expensive product, forced instead to continue buying your own more expensive steel. Ideally, your own domestic producers should find a way to produce similarly less expensive steel. But it generally comes down to the fact that North American workers expect to earn a higher wage than Chinese workers.
Without tariffs to discourage purchasing the cheaper Chinese steel, your domestic steel production will collapse, forcing many into unemployment which has further detrimental effects on your country's economy when those unemployed stop paying taxes. So tariffs used to artificially protect an existing industry might be a better solution than allowing your economy to suffer, even if it means you're paying more for that steel than you should be.
The USA imposed 25% tariffs, contrary to the existing USMCA Free Trade Agreement, on Canadian imports based on an entirely invented "emergency", a presumed threat to the USA's National Security, of Canada supposedly flooding your country with fentanyl and illegal immigrants (emptying our prisons and insane asylums...). Canada retaliated by imposing targeted tariffs of our own. Both countries are suffering as a result.
Just because you can't explain another country's reasoning, or it doesn't personally make sense to you, doesn't mean it's senseless.
Tariffs make sense in limited cases. A blanket 10% tariff imposed by the USA on EVERY country in the world, including an island inhabited only by penguins, makes ZERO sense. Additional tariffs calculated solely on the balance of US trade deficit/surplus makes ZERO sense. Imposing such tariffs on countries with which the USA actually enjoys a trade surplus makes ZERO sense. Announcing those tariffs as "Liberation Day", driving the stock markets into the toilet, only to announce the next day the removal or delay of some of those tariffs makes ZERO sense (unless that market manipulation was intentional designed to make your billionaire friends even richer). Claiming the tariffs are only a negotiating tool, part of the "Art of the Deal", to force countries to come begging to the US, "200 deals" so far, makes ZERO sense when the White House won't name a single country that has accepted to make such a deal.
But most of all, it makes absolutely
ZERO sense at all that the White House is telling Amazon that, "
showing consumers how much tariffs raised prices on certain goods 'is a hostile and political act',.
