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One topic that I was thinking about lately is regarding tariffs and some sort of hidden cognitive dissonance behind the whole policy. It seems to be a clash of different type of worldviews, one being the so called industrial policy, which is a policy where a nation creates favorable environment to grow domestic behemoths and grow their domestic economy. There are multiple examples of countries employing this type of policy such as South Korea, China or even Japan back in the day.
On the other side of the spectrum you have standard economic theory in favor of free trade. It has formidable range of theories for why this is ultimately the best policy, the most important one being the concept of comparative advantage.
Now to get back to the cognitive dissonance stuff, there is one huge question. If you are in the latter camp where you oppose tariffs and trade regulations - why are these people not against retaliatory tariffs? From this standpoint it seems as if you are shooting yourselves in the foot. If USA imposes tariffs on some goods like steel, then you can actually take advantage of that in free trade framework: buy state subsidized steel from USA to build your own infrastructure and factories for cheap, and then use this advantage to sell things you produce back. And even if USA decides for some broad tariff regime, it still enables you to use this advantage to sell goods to other countries. Under this framework the only country punished should be USA and the rest of the free trade world should be winners.
The other side of the cognitive dissonance is that in fact at least during last few decades a lot of economists are actually pro industrial policy. You can easily find articles like these where protective measures are praised. The same goes for EU, which explicitly aims to subsidize certain industries.
I think that the most interesting example here is China, which especially subsidies the basic production capacities: energy, steel, concrete, basic chemicals etc. These basic commodities tend to "supercharge" the rest of the economy, mostly as they are hard to transport and thus create at least local monopolies. It also benefits and/or suffers from so called double marginalization problem, as costs of goods at the bottom of supply chain propagate positively/negatively throughout the rest of the economy. Moreover creating complete supply chain in certain place increases intangible "know how". You can then have experts on the whole supply chain working collaboratively with each other to produce superior goods cheaper. Think of Detroit being the old car hub or Silicon Valley as a hub for software or Hollywood for entertainment industry.
To be frank I am leaning more into industrial policy side now, especially since COVID-19. Noah Smith has an article defending such a policy for national security reasons. But in the end with how complicated the supply chains are, this becomes almost an impossible conundrum. Just take chip production issue: you have to have mining facilities for pure silicon and other valuable minerals. Then you have to have companies designing new chips in research labs. Then you have companies capable of producing highly sophisticated lithographs capable of producing high-end chips, such as ASML in Netherlands. Then you have to have companies capable of producing said chips such as TSMC in Taiwan. The whole system is very fragile and even one of the chains in the links proves security risk. The same goes for pharmaceutics or other technologies.
I think this post conflates different policies and their impacts. Tariffs, for example, do not lower the price of domestically produced goods for international consumers. That is, if the United States imposes a tariff on steel that does not make US-produced steel cheaper for international steel buyers. It makes internationally-produced steel more expensive for US steel consumers. Government subsidy of US steel production may lower prices for international consumers but that's not what a tariff is. Both articles you link to (Noah Smith and Asia Times) are specifically about industry subsidization, not tariffs. The two policies operate differently and there is no reason to conflate them like this.
It conflates them for good reason, because what was being suggested is tariffs instead of taxes. Removing corporate taxes would lower the price of domestically produced goods. In a context where they benefit from government provided services (roads, law enforcement, the stability of being protected by the army, courts that parse and enforce contracts), being exempt of taxes for it does amount to a subsidy. Of course, it's not the tariffs part that reduces the cost, but it offers an alternative to taxes for funding the government.
Personally I'm doubtful that the Trump administration will manage to get enough cuts, enough tariffs, enough deregulation-fuelled growth to actually balance the budget, but getting at least part of the way is an improvement.
Nothing in the OP mentions taxes at all, including getting rid of them for tariffs. In any case it is very unclear to me why tariffs are a better source of revenue than corporate income taxes are. The net change in corporate expenditures also seems quite ambiguous. If you are a company that does not do much importing then yes, sure, removing corporate taxes for tariffs may be a subsidy. But if you are a company that does a lot of importing tariffs may be even worse than a corporate income tax, in terms of your costs.
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