Trump’s tariffs won’t revive the rust belt
By 
The selling point for Trump’s tariffs that wasn’t just pure bullshit was that higher prices would be worth it if it brought more manly-man manufacturing jobs. We can debate about whether this would be a good idea but it’s a moot point because not only is this not going to happen, Trump’s economics are a net negative for manufacturing because of how much they increase the price of raw materials:
Outside of health care and social assistance, a sector in which job growth seems to be unaffected by over-all trends, the downturn in hiring extended across large parts of the economy, with fewer than half of all private-sector industries adding jobs last month. This pattern is consistent with many different types of firms putting hiring plans on hold, or cutting workers, because of the uncertainty and chaos that Trump’s tariffs have unleashed. It also jibes with the warnings that many economists critical of his policies issued earlier this year.
The weakness in manufacturing, which was supposed to benefit from the pivot to all-out protectionism, is particularly striking. In August, the total number of people employed in the sector fell by twelve thousand in a one-month span; during the past three months, it has declined by thirty-one thousand. The latest survey from the Institute for Supply Management (I.S.M.), a not-for-profit organization that surveys firms throughout the economy on a monthly basis, provides a more granular portrait of what’s happening. “Tariffs continue to wreak havoc on planning/scheduling activities,” a respondent in the electronics industry said. “Plans to bring production back into [the] U.S. are impacted by higher material costs, making it more difficult to justify the return.” Another respondent who works in trucking reported that the industry was in even worse shape than it had been during the Great Recession of 2008-09; they went on, “This is 100 percent attributable to current tariff policy and the uncertainty it has created.”
The perverse political logic of the typical Republican voter means that this won’t even damage Trump that much; in a sense he benefits from creating yet more fuel for nostalgic resentment. But the larger damage to the economy is more likely to have political consequences.