Trump's tariffs are designed to manipulate companies into avoiding them by doing what Trump wants them to do, which is to move manufacturing to the United States. When the manipulation works, the result is pretty much a pure benefit for our economy. Jobs increase, tax revenues increase, and social welfare spending decreases. The resulting tighter job markets don't just raise wages, they also caused prices to go up, but that negative is offset by Trump's uncorking of energy supplies, which is making energy much less expensive than it would be if we were still under the Biden-Obama policies, which were designed to cork energy as much as possible. To the extent that companies do not respond to the tariffs as Trump wants, and instead keep their manufacturing overseas, the tariffs become a revenue raising device, effectively a tax, reducing the amount of money our federal government would otherwise have to raise either through other forms of taxation or through borrowing, as necessary to cover current expenditures. All taxes have distortionary incentive effects. When those distortions move things in a direction that is desirable, that is the best kind of tax to use. There are limited opportunities for such taxes, but when these opportunities exist they should be exploited, and that's what Trump's tariffs are doing. The other thing Trump is doing with tariffs is imposing a tit-for-tat punishment on other countries that impose non-reciprocal tariffs on us. This too is helpful to our economy, and where it fails to bring about the desired reduction in foreign tariffs, the result is again additional tax revenues that reduce the amount our federal government needs to raise from other sources. None of this requires any new economic model. When I was a graduate student in economics in the 1980s, taking a basic graduate-level international economics course, we analyzed tariffs in just this way: They are useful for protecting strategically important industries, and for enforcing free and fair trade. What money can be raised in the pursuit of such beneficial purposes obviously should be. What is shocking is how out of whack we had let our trade relations get, and hence how much scope there was for tariffs to be imposed in this win-win fashion. It was easy to see that things were way out of whack. We had shipped most of our manufacturing to China! The real surprise for me isn't that there was a lot of correcting to be done, but that Trump was actually able to orchestrate the corrections in a way that has not resulted in any dislocations that are big enough to at least temporarily knock our economy back. The implication is that the gains have been so large as to outweigh even large temporary dislocations at every point in time as the corrections have proceeded. I think we have to credit Trump's deal-making acumen for that. The guy really is a miracle, that in his late 70s he can stay up half the night every night figuring all this stuff out. Not just a "stable genius," as he asserts, but an apparently indefatigable stable genius. People who complain that he bothers with such 2AM trolling as composing hilariously contemptuous captions for the hall of presidential portraits are completely missing the point. This is ON TOP of his orchestrating a host of economic and diplomatic miracles. He deserves all the fun he can have in the process.