The president vowed to bring factories home. But tariffs, immigration policies and spending cuts are turning that promise into a costly balancing act.
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President Donald Trump is pushing manufacturers to bring factories home. His policies are punishing them when they try.
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“You hit this inflection point where you’ve done the demolition, and the next step is to clean up and lay foundations and start building something, and that’s where we are right now,” said Oren Cass, founder and chief economist of American Compass, a conservative, economically populist think tank. Administration officials “deserve a lot of credit for doing a lot of the hard stuff they did out of the gate, but if it’s going to succeed, it needs to be followed by the actual, bottom-up, systematic, stable, structural new thing.”
“Whether or not they can make that transition is what everyone’s looking at,” Cass added.
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The president has pitched his trade policies at workers who feel left behind by globalization. But that doesn’t mean trade barriers will revive factories and close income gaps.
CHIPS Won’t Help China
American Compass executive director Oren Cass argues that demanding perfect legislation is a convenient excuse for voting no, and a standard by which everyone would always vote no.
Can Free Trade Work for Everyone?
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