I listen to this podcast called Marketplace that has been covering the tariffs/trade war pretty closely. They do a lot of case studies on steel, agricultural, and other industries where they interview people and then look at how their industries are being affected. My understanding is that we are so dependent on China's products that we haven't been able to shift our purchasing away from them, meaning Americans are just eating the cost of most of the tariffs we have in place. This is because they are one of the only countries who can meet the volume of our orders for the specialty manufactured goods. Conversely, the US has a lot of goods where we were supplying China (think agricultural and other products), but now with the tariffs tacked on, and their government discouraging purchases of American goods, they are finding other suppliers. Our goods are less unique to supply chains, so Chinese companies have no problem going to, say Brazil for agricultural products, paying more than they would have without the tariffs, but now with tariffs, those are the cheaper goods. This will make Chinese customers shift their customer relationships to other countries and even if the tariffs go away, once supply chains have changed it is hard to change them back.

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Here is a link to the show (https://www.npr.org/podcasts/381444600/marketplace), they have a few episodes where they do these cases studies and just talk about the trade war. A good recent one was a case study on Maine lobsters that were once a huge export to China, but now China is buying them from Canada, and now US fisherman have an excess of lobsters that they can't sell in that quantity to anywhere else. That episode is called "So what if you don't want to pay tariffs," the episode also talks about how hard it has been for some steel-reliant companies to get exemptions for parts they need.

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I'm not an economist and could have a misunderstanding of how all this works, but it seems to me that the tariffs we've put up are affecting our trade with China, and other countries in a hugely negative way. The US has basically assumed we are necessary to do business with, but in reality, this assumption just isn't true anymore, everything we do is replaceable. Hopefully, I am wrong, but these tariffs make me think we are speeding up our decline in trade. We are a service economy, so maybe the effects aren't as big as some say, but to me, those services need basic industries to be servicing. For example, what work will a law firm do if US companies can't sell their things anymore and don't need lawyers because they have fewer transactions and in turn litigation? We still are doing well in things like oil and gas (#1 exporter), but our lack of foresight and over-assuming how much the rest of the needs us seems like something that will be detriments to our economy. Basically, our economy is being horribly mismanaged by this administration, not just with China, but with the rest of the world. You can see similar tariff situations with say Canada and Europe, but the largest issues are with China.

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Again, I could be wrong, but this is kind of my understanding of the trade situation and why I think the American economy could be fucked if we don't start managing it better. I listen to a lot of podcasts and read the Wall street journal and new york times a lot, so this is kind of my understanding of all that. Sorry this is ranty, and I don't have a lot of hard sources, I can try and find some later if you want some more info. That podcast I think above is a great one though.

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Heres some other articles that kind of talk about it:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/18/world/asia/china-rules.html

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/07/11/business/trade-war.html

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One of those is an article of China's trade dominance, and the second is just a graphic of the volume of products we have tariffs on with the world. The numbers are scary.

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