@Wman : The Smoot Hawley Tariff is only one of the reasons we had a major depression back then. The major causes were the Stock collapse, and bank failures and the drought which killed buying power when people lost all their money and couldn't make more from farming. Once that happened, people stopped buying. The Tariffs were a knee jerk reaction that didn't help, but the depression was already underway when those passed. My father lived through the depression and told me many stories about it. Like a good number of his school-mates came to school in burlap sacks for clothing because they couldn't afford to buy any clothes. Once buying power drys up, the economy does too.
Also, those car manufacturers have plants here for the sole reason of avoiding the import tariff on foreign made cars, otherwise they'd be making them in Germany or Japan and shipping them here. Huh, tariffs can bring work here.
Yes, automation has reduced work force, but there's still a large amount of hand made things, or they wouldn't have moved the production over to where the prolific workforce is cheaper. The original move to China for many companies was not because of supply chain, as Apple purports, but because of cheaper work force. The supply chain aspect came later as they sought to seek ways to keep manufacturing there as their own economy inflates.
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