A friend of mine owns a model railroad manufacturing company, and is friends with several of the former MT employees. According to him, they were called into a meeting this morning, and were told "you no longer have a job. Clean out your desks and leave". There was no severance other than their last paychecks.
I don't want to say too much so we don't get into politics, but this is why you have targeted tariffs / duties. (I'm not speaking of general tariffs like we're seeing now).
A functioning economy has to be made up of givers and takers. Takers are the one who sell stuff and take money out, or who trade labor for money. Givers are ones who buys stuff and give money or who trade money for labor. A functioning economy has to have a relative equilibrium of both.
Companies who outsource labor to foreign, cheaper markets and import the products to sell are predominantly only takers. And that upsets the equilibrium in the economy and basically shifts economic costs to the rest of the economy. Those costs don't disappear, they get shifted. When you only take and don't give you have fewer people employed. Support of those people is shifted onto the backs of the rest of the economy (taxes and a lot of other means). This is where targeted tariffs can help. The cost savings that a domestic manufacturer gains by shifting labor overseas is just shifted. In the macro sense it's not a savings. To help mitigate it, targeted tariffs approximately equal to the savings achieved by shifting labor overseas should be aimed at those products being imported.
I'm speaking about domestic companies who manufacture overseas, import it, and sell them domestically. I'm not speaking about foreign companies who are exporting and selling their own goods in their own name in another country. Those should not be tariffed as they didn't remove labor from the domestic economy and at least for 1st world countries, actual foreign imports (not domestic companies importing stuff they outsourced) is a small percentage and any imbalance can be made up by domestic companies selling US made products in foreign countries.
And before I hear cries of "a tariff is just a tax". A tariffed product price represents the real cost of that product in the domestic market. If that product was manufactured inside the domestic economy it's what the price would be for that product. It's evening the playing field and reducing the need for other forms of taxation needed to try and equalize the imbalance created by cost shifting that these companies do when they outsource. Taxes are taken to support the people who don't have work or get paid less than they would otherwise due to this. So no, you're not being taxed by targeted tariffs like I described. Blanket tariffs are a crude way of trying to solve this imbalance but the "tariff is a tax" is more true with wide based tariffs than targeted ones.
What I am saying is that I won't support, in as much as possible, domestic companies that outsource labor because they're shifting costs to me. There are some categories of products where you have no choice. Some of those products the physical manufacture is overseas but most of the intellectual manufacture (software, design. etc) is local so a good portion of the cost or a product is actually the "giving" these companies do in hiring software and hardware engineers, designers, etc., who make up the majority cost of an item. Apple for example, unfortunately, manufacturers most of its physical stuff overseas. That's slowly changing slightly. However, the vast majority of their "soft" manufacturing is in the US. So products that have a minimal footprint in the US -- basically a small US team seeing tons of foreign made product (especially stuff that used to be made in the US) is stuff I try and avoid if possible. Anyone getting rid of their company and selling it to someone who then shifts the manufacturing overseas is not going to get my money if I have options and choices.
You can't shift all your manufacturing and labor overseas. Pretty soon you don't have an economy. We can't all be Amazon drivers, McDOnalds workers, or CEOs.
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Let me give an example: Mattel sells Barbie Dolls. Those barbie Dolls are made overseas. Mattel is a US company. The Barbie Dolls should be the subject of a targeted tariff that approximates the cost to the economy of being shifted overseas vs made locally. Fictitious company Weng Hong Red Dragon Toy Company Ltd makes a competitor to Barbie called Ling Ling. They import the Ling Ling dolls into the US to sell. They should not be tariffed as they are a foreign company selling imported foreign goods (ignoring any tariff that their country puts on US manufactured goods being sold there by a US company -- we should have tit for tat tariffs to try to discourage high barriers to entry for true foreign trade). And Mattel should not be tariffed importing US made Barbies 9if such existed) into the country of the fictitious foreign doll maker I mentioned above.
I don't have numbers but I am betting that the "foreign trade" which is really just US makers shifting costs to cheaper labor m markets and importing it (back) into the US is much larger than true foreign trade of foreign companies bringing in their wares to sell here. And that's why its a problem.
I'm slowly working on these ideas to write an essay to put up somewhere but that's the gist. A functioning economy needs an equilibrium of "givers" and "takers" and domestic companies that ship labor costs overseas just transfer that cost onto the rest of the economy that they want to benefit from but do not want to contribute to.
. Saves the tariff costs up to the exemption limit (which was and still is $800 per person I believe).