Time to tariff up: Stop funding our own collapse

For the past fifty years, Americans have been sold a fantasy: that global “free trade” would benefit everyone, everywhere.  That letting factories go abroad and turning our economy into a service-sector playground would somehow enrich us all.  That we could import our way to prosperity.

Well, we tried it.  What did we get?  We got ghost towns where manufacturing once thrived.  We got millions of Americans who don’t make anything but debt payments.  We got flooded with cheap junk made in sweatshops, while being lectured that we’re spoiled if we don’t appreciate the low prices.

But cheap stuff isn’t free.  It’s bought with the lives of underpaid workers overseas and the livelihoods of American workers here.  We’ve outsourced everything: our jobs, our dignity, even our sovereignty, all in the name of an economic theory no other country believes in.  And make no mistake: They never played fair.  China manipulates its currency, uses slave labor, and subsidizes everything.  The E.U. buries foreign goods in regulation.  Mexico slaps a hidden VAT on American products before they hit the shelf.  Meanwhile, we’re the only country foolish enough to unilaterally drop our economic defenses while calling it “leadership.”

If you ask the smug elite who benefit from this system, they’ll tell you tariffs are “regressive,” “backward,” or “isolationist.”  Nonsense.  Tariffs are a rational response to economic sabotage.  They are a firewall against exploitation.  They are the only tool left that says to foreign nations, “You don’t get to destroy our industries and walk away with our market.”

We’ve run a trade deficit every single year since 1975.  That’s not sustainable.  It’s not harmless.  It’s a bleed-out.  When you buy more than you sell for five decades, you don’t just lose wealth — you lose leverage, you lose competence, you lose your soul as a producing nation.

And we’re supposed to believe this is a “tax on consumers”?  No — you are already paying the real tax: in lost wages, in closed factories, in higher crime, in social dysfunction, in fentanyl pouring through supply lines we no longer control.  Prices didn’t skyrocket because of tariffs.  They skyrocketed because we don’t make anything ourselves and rely on fragile global chains to deliver everything from medicine to microchips.

Tariffs don’t raise prices; they restore reality.  They say, “Pay what it actually costs to make this product without slave labor or pollution so bad that it would be illegal here.”  And if that means a shirt costs five dollars more?  Then so be it.  At least your neighbor might have a job again.

A country that doesn’t manufacture is not a real country.  It’s a dependent outpost with a flag.  And the longer we delay fixing it, the harder the fix becomes.  Tariffs are not about retreating.  They’re about rebuilding.  They are the cornerstone of a sane economic policy that values work over imports, workers over shareholders, and sovereignty over convenience.

It’s time we stopped asking whether tariffs are “popular” with economists who’ve never set foot in a factory.  We should ask: Do we want to be a strong, independent nation, or a customer base managed by global corporations?  Bring the work home.  Protect our industries.  Rebuild what we lost.  And stop apologizing for putting Americans first.

 https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/04/time_to_tariff_up_stop_funding_our_own_collapse.html