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It won't generate literally zero revenue in an accounting sense, though it might damage overall tax revenue, on account of depressing economic activity while not raising much money. Tariffs are highly distortionary.
I'm really not that worried about it. The demise of US manufacturing has been tremendously exaggerated, and the panic about it has less to do with pure manufacturing capability than with
a) anxiety over the rise of China and the loss of US manufacturing supremacy. Autarkic economic policy will make this worse, not better. The proper remedy for this would be heavy investments in industrial automation (the US is embarrassingly under-roboticized considering it's the world's most advanced economy) and closer trade ties with allied countries (e.g. Mexico). The problem here is that there's very little appetite for this sort of thing - US labor politics is adamantly anti-automation, domestic producers are more interested in squeezing rents out of a captive market, and industrial policy is largely treated as a jobs program. Even so, there is a limit to what the US can do about this. China has 4x as many people, a state with far fewer fetters on its power, and a policy commitment to industrial overcapacity.
b) the social consequences of industrial consolidation, which also have less to do with China alone (seeing as they predate Chinese industrialization) and more to do with broader shifts in global economic circumstances (e.g. Japan eating into the US' international market share in the 80s) and technological improvements that made manufacturing less labor intensive and encouraged physical consolidation. This was very bad for a lot of rural industry and the communities that depended on them, but creating zombie industries to prop them up is absolutely the wrong move.
The US has the second largest industrial base in the world, by quite a margin. We don't produce a lot of cheap consumer goods, but I don't see a reason to care that we're buying t-shirts from Vietnam instead of Mississippi.
I did. I was not impressed, especially since they're not exactly delivering on defeating the Houthis (and probably will fail for the same reason the Biden admin failed, which is that it's really hard to bomb a determined adversary into submission).
More importantly, the crude transactionalism doesn't speak highly of the current admin's thought processes. Which shouldn't surprise us, since this is a bunch of amateurs trying to do foreign policy.
I guess you're going to have to clarify what you mean by "secret sauce", because I think this is grading Trump on an outrageous curve. Most of this stuff either doesn't matter or would've happened under any semi-competent president, and without the myriad own-goals that Trump inflicts upon the country foreign policy-wise in the meantime. Trump has a pattern of doing very impulsive things, occasionally punctuated by something reasonable (usually because someone else talked him into it or because the machinery of the USG more or less made the decision for him). I don't see much reason to extend him charity on this, especially when it's been a personal fixation of his for a long time. Trump just thinks tariffs are neat, and he doesn't know enough about trade or economics to understand why this is a bad idea.
Sure.
Yes, I agree with this. I'm not sure this is enough for reshoring, though, based on conversations I've had with others.
Right, I care a lot less about cheap consumer goods than I do limited autarky by which I mean "do we have our energy, food and basic staples, and military supply chain secured against hostile actors." Obviously this doesn't preclude trade – I think there are a number of foreign suppliers (like a number of our European allies, or Mexico) that it would be safe to rely on.
We don't have this, and we should.
You can be impressed or not, but my point was that the administration was using a "whole cloth" approach to thinking about what they were doing militarily or economically. (Or at least Vance is. Perhaps his thinking does not carry over.)
Personally I think this approach is a baby step towards a grand strategy that the United States needs to actually have and follow daggumit so I hope that the administration continues to refine it.
Fundamentally, just nonpublic knowledge.
Less grading on a curve, and more withholding judgment.
One of the things that I have found is that my charity or lack thereof can't change policy. However, I sometimes can learn things when I try to figure out why things I don't understand are happening, instead of chalking it up to incompetence. I hope I've made it very clear that I don't rule incompetence out, but assuming that isn't really very interesting or educational.
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