To travel by train through America’s rustbelt is to witness the real reason for Trump’s tariff revolution. Miles upon miles of derelict factories and decaying industrial architecture stand as monuments to trade policies which have gutted America’s manufacturing heartland and undermined the families – and the towns – which depended on it. In electing the Trump-Vance ticket last year American voters have called time on decades of elite indifference to industrial production and the liberal trade policies which have accompanied it.
It turns out that the transitory profit secured by executives who out-sourced thousands of US industrial jobs to cheaper jurisdictions is no compensation for the loss of your industrial base. Trade deficits have not only caused social breakdown, they have gradually beggared the wider American economy.
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