> Some people don't like protectionism because in the long term it's worse for both countries. You have a short term benefit of protecting a handful of jobs in exchange for vastly more expensive goods for everyone as well as more expensive inputs to your other products undercutting other local industries
Expensive goods only result from half-assed protectionism. When governments go the whole nine yards, such as with China's PV and EV industries, or the US with agricultural subsidies, it results in very cheap products and inputs to other products. Corn syrup is an ingredient to a lot of American food items because it's a cheap sweetener due to all the subsidies as the government decided, many decades ago, that American farmers should be shielded from competition. Some decisions make sense in the realm of national strategy and geopolitics, and not pure economics. The US would be very different if it had started to import the bulk of it's corn from Ukraine in the late 1990s
>When governments go the whole nine yards, such as with China's PV and EV industries, or the US with agricultural subsidies, it results in very cheap products and inputs to other products.
We have subsidies for solar and other stuff but the competition is absurdly stiff. What the US government actually needs to do is limit imports. If you want to subsidize that stuff, the money can come from tariffs.
>The US would be very different if it had started to import the bulk of it's corn from Ukraine in the late 1990s
Yes, it would be worse. Food is very important strategically and economically, and subject to occasional disruptions. You don't want to have people starve because of one or more regions has a low yield. There is zero benefit to letting our land go fallow to save the meager cost of government agriculture programs to help farmers survive bad years. We don't import corn because we grow all we need. It is native to North America after all.
Expensive goods only result from half-assed protectionism. When governments go the whole nine yards, such as with China's PV and EV industries, or the US with agricultural subsidies, it results in very cheap products and inputs to other products. Corn syrup is an ingredient to a lot of American food items because it's a cheap sweetener due to all the subsidies as the government decided, many decades ago, that American farmers should be shielded from competition. Some decisions make sense in the realm of national strategy and geopolitics, and not pure economics. The US would be very different if it had started to import the bulk of it's corn from Ukraine in the late 1990s