Economics & Policy
What Causes Inflation?
What drove the 9.1% peak of 2022 and the 2026 rise, and what the Fed did.
Economics & Policy
Where Does U.S. Federal Spending Go?
Where the $7.4 trillion of fiscal 2026 goes, and why interest now costs more than defense.
Economics & Policy
Which Presidents Created the Most Jobs?
Payroll jobs added under each president since 1939, and how much of the count a president controls.
Do Tariffs Bring Back Manufacturing Jobs?
The claim is that tariffs bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States. In October 2025 the president of the United Auto Workers said targeted auto tariffs “can, in fact, bring back thousands of good union jobs.” This page tests the claim against four episodes, from the 2002 steel tariffs to those of 2025 and 2026. It counts jobs gained and lost, the cost of each job saved, and the effect on the trade deficit.
Jump to the verdict ↓
The short answer
No, not on net. Tariffs add some jobs in the industries they protect. But studies of the 2002, 2009 and 2018 tariffs found that losses elsewhere outweighed those gains. The losses came in industries that buy the protected goods, in retail, or in exports hit by retaliation. The 2025 tariffs were followed by a fall in manufacturing jobs, not a rise, though that fall cannot be credited to tariffs alone.
The Tariffs in Force in 2026
The main tariffs in force in October 2026 rest on two trade laws. Section 232 tariffs, imposed on national security grounds, have covered steel and aluminum since 2018 and copper since 2025. An April 2026 proclamation set them at 50% on the metals and 25% on many products made from them. Section 232 tariffs on autos and lumber also survived the Supreme Court ruling described below.
Section 301 tariffs on Chinese goods date from 2018. Increases decided in 2024 set them at 100% on electric vehicles and 50% on solar cells and, from 2025, semiconductors. Since 24 July 2026, new Section 301 tariffs have applied to 60 economies that supply 99.4% of U.S. imports. Their rate is 10% or 12.5%, and goods under Section 232 are exempt.
The Supreme Court struck down the largest layer in February 2026
How High Tariffs Have Been
On 20 February 2026 the Supreme Court ruled 6–3 in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump. It held that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) does not authorise the President to impose tariffs. That ruling removed the single largest source of the 2025 increases: the IEEPA baseline tariff, the country-specific top-ups on China, the EU and others, and the emergency orders covering Canada, Mexico and fentanyl. Section 232, Section 301 and normal tariff rates were untouched.
By Global Trade Alert’s estimate, the trade-weighted average U.S. tariff fell from 15.3% to 8.3%. Importers had paid about $166 billion in IEEPA tariffs. By 21 August 2026, U.S. Customs and Border Protection had certified about $107 billion of refunds, according to court filings cited by the Penn Wharton Budget Model.
Within hours the President invoked Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 and imposed a 10% surcharge effective 24 February 2026. Section 122 is time-limited: that order ran 150 days, to 24 July 2026, when the Section 301 tariffs on 60 economies took its place.
| Month | Rate |
|---|---|
| January 2025 | 2.3% |
| June 2025 | 9.5% |
| October 2025, the peak | 11.4% |
| March 2026, after the ruling | 7.1% |
| July 2026, the latest | 6.7% |
Penn Wharton’s rate counts the duties actually collected. The Budget Lab at Yale measures the rate set in law instead, before buyers shift away from tariffed goods, holding import shares at their 2024 pattern. On that measure the rate reached 18.0% in October 2025, the highest since 1934. Yale put its average rate set in law at 11.0% in August 2026, and the cost of those tariffs at about $1,100 a year per household.
How a Tariff WorksA tariff raises the price of the imported good, which helps domestic producers of that good and raises costs for the businesses and consumers who buy it. The U.S. International Trade Commission (USITC) found all three effects after the 2018 steel tariffs, as the 2018 figures below show. The debate is over net effects: whether the gains to domestic producers plus strategic benefits outweigh the losses to buyers plus deadweight costs plus retaliation. Deadweight costs are the efficiency lost when a tariff distorts what people buy and where resources go.
Gains to a Few, Costs Spread ThinlyJobs in industries that use steel or inputs made of steel outnumber jobs making steel by roughly 80 to 1, Lydia Cox and Kadee Russ estimated in 2018. A steel tariff’s gains go to a few visible workers, while its costs are spread thinly across many more, and that gap shapes tariff politics.
Four Tariff Episodes, 2002 to 2026
Steel jobs saved (projected before the tariffs)~3,500 (for a proposed 15–20% tariff)
Cost to steel users (same projection)~$2 billion/year
Jobs lost in steel-using industries26,000 to 200,000 (published estimates)
Duration21 months (lifted after a World Trade Organization ruling)
The figures most often quoted for 2002 are forecasts and contested estimates. The 3,500 jobs and $2 billion come from a January 2002 policy brief by Gary Hufbauer and Ben Goodrich. The brief was about a proposed tariff of 15% to 20%. It was written before President Bush chose rates of 8% to 30%.
The 200,000 is the Trade Partnership’s estimate of jobs lost to higher steel prices in 2002, in a study for a coalition of steel-consuming industries. Its authors said the data could not yet show how much of the price rise the tariffs caused.
Later studies measured what happened. Lake and Liu found that the tariffs did not raise local steel employment but cut local employment in steel-using industries for years after they ended. Lydia Cox found large, lasting falls in those industries’ exports and employment.
Obama Tire Tariffs (2009): 25–35%Tire jobs saved1,200 at most (Peterson Institute for International Economics)
Consumer cost (2011)~$1.1 billion
Net jobs (after retail losses)~−2,531
Steel tariff25%
Aluminum tariff10%
Covered steel imports, 2018–2021−24% (modelled by the U.S. International Trade Commission, USITC)
Steel production, 2018–2021+1.9% (USITC model)
Average U.S. steel price, 2018–2021+2.4% a year (USITC model)
Iron and steel mill jobs, March 2018 to December 2019+4,200 (Bureau of Labor Statistics, BLS)
Output lost in steel- and aluminum-using industries (2021)−$3.48 billion (USITC model)
Aaron Flaaen and Justin Pierce, economists at the Federal Reserve Board, compared manufacturing industries by how exposed they were to all the 2018 tariffs, including other countries’ retaliation. Moving an industry from the 25th to the 75th percentile of exposure was associated with 1.4% lower manufacturing employment by August 2019. Protection from imports added a little, but higher input costs and retaliation took away more, as the chart shows. These are short-run effects relative to less-exposed industries, not a count of jobs lost nationally.
How to read it: each bar is the change in manufacturing employment that Flaaen and Pierce link to one channel of the 2018 tariffs, or to all three together. Each compares an industry at the 75th percentile of exposure with one at the 25th. Source: Flaaen and Pierce, Federal Reserve Board, Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2019-086, effects through August 2019.
| Channel of the 2018 tariffs | Change in manufacturing employment |
|---|---|
| Import protection | +0.3% |
| Higher input costs | −1.1% |
| Retaliation | −0.7% |
| All three together | −1.4% |
Value of domestic production, Section 301 tariffs, 2018–2021+0.4% (USITC model)
Cost to U.S. buyers of imports, all 2018 tariffs$51 billion a year (Fajgelbaum et al.)
Net loss of real income, all 2018 tariffs$7.2 billion a year (0.04% of U.S. output; not statistically significant)
Farm exports lost to retaliation, mid-2018 to end-2019>$27 billion (U.S. Department of Agriculture)
Payments to farmers, 2018–2019$23 billion (Government Accountability Office)
China’s share of U.S. importsnearly 22% before June 2018; 9% in 2025 (Bown)
Manufacturing jobs, April to December 2025−82,000 (BLS)
Manufacturing jobs, April 2025 to September 2026−10,000 (BLS; recent months preliminary)
Institute for Supply Management manufacturing index, December 202547.9 (contracting for a 10th month in a row)
The same index, September 202654.5 (expanding for a 9th month in a row)
Manufacturing employment fell through 2025 as tariffs rose, and recovered most of that fall in 2026 as tariff rates came down. Neither move can be credited to tariffs alone, because a national total also reflects everything else happening in the economy.
The Cost of Each Job Saved
Where both figures exist, each job saved cost, or was projected to cost, many times its pay. The cost per job saved divides what a tariff costs the buyers of the protected good by the number of jobs it saves. For the 2009 tire tariffs, the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE) put the cost to consumers at about $1.1 billion in 2011, for at most 1,200 jobs. That is $926,500 per job, about 23 times a tire builder’s average pay that year.
In December 2018 PIIE projected that steel users would pay about $650,000 for each job the 2018 steel tariffs created, about 14 times average pay in steel mill production jobs. The 2002 steel tariffs were projected to cost $584,000 per job, for a proposed 15–20% tariff.
How to read it: the bars are dollars a year. Each tariff has two bars: the cost to buyers for each job saved, and the average annual pay of that kind of job. Sources: PIIE (Hufbauer and Lowry, 2012; Hufbauer and Jung, 2018); Bureau of Labor Statistics pay data, for tire builders as PIIE cites them.
| Tariff | Cost per job saved | Average annual pay of the job |
|---|---|---|
| Tires, 2009 (cost estimated for 2011) | $926,500 | $40,070 (tire builders, 2011) |
| Steel, 2018 (projected December 2018) | $650,000 | $44,870 (steel mill production jobs, May 2018) |
Productivity, Imports and the Trade Deficit
Ball State University (2000–2010)87.8% of job losses from productivity growth
Trade share13.4% from trade (growing demand added back 1.2%)
China import competition (Acemoglu, Autor, Dorn, Hanson and Price)2.0–2.4 million jobs lost across the economy, 1999–2011
Manufacturing peak19.6 million (June 1979)
Latest12.65 million (September 2026, preliminary)
Rising productivity, driven chiefly by automation and information technology, explains most of the fall in manufacturing employment from 2000 to 2010, by Ball State’s estimate. Import competition from China mattered too: it caused local job and income losses that persisted for years after the shock levelled off around 2010. And even if a tariff blocks imports and restores some production, the jobs may not come back one-for-one if the surviving plants are highly automated.
The Trade Deficit QuestionThe goods-and-services deficit rose from $498 billion in 2017 to $932 billion in 2025, the largest in the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) series back to 1960. It fell in 2019 and 2023, but there has been no sustained narrowing since the tariffs began in 2018.
How to read it: the line is the annual U.S. trade deficit in goods and services, in billions of current dollars. It runs from 2017, the year before the 2018 tariffs, to 2025, and the axis starts at zero. Source: BEA and Census, U.S. International Trade in Goods and Services, annual revision of 9 June 2026, Table 1.
| Year | Deficit | Year | Deficit |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 | 498 | 2022 | 903 |
| 2018 | 557 | 2023 | 750 |
| 2019 | 535 | 2024 | 885 |
| 2020 | 637 | 2025 | 932 |
| 2021 | 827 |
Deficits with single countries are weak scorecards. The goods deficit with China fell from $417 billion in 2018 to $202 billion in 2025, but the deficits with Vietnam, Mexico and Taiwan grew as sourcing moved to them.
The overall deficit depends on more than trade policy. The current account is the trade balance plus other items, chiefly net income on cross-border investments. A country that imports more than it exports gives foreigners claims on its assets in exchange. So by balance-of-payments accounting, the current account deficit must equal the inflow of foreign capital, which rises with foreign demand for U.S. assets. The economists Kimberly Clausing and Maurice Obstfeld call the effect of tariffs on the trade deficit ambiguous.
The Strongest Case That Tariffs Help
National securityDomestic capacity in semiconductors, rare earths, pharmaceuticals, and defense inputs has strategic value that output statistics underweight. In 2024 the Biden administration decided to raise Section 301 tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, semiconductors, solar cells and other strategic goods. It said the increases would support investments under the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. Even Kimberly Clausing and Maurice Obstfeld, economists who oppose broad tariffs, accept that defense production may justify a national interest in making things at home. But they find subsidies usually the better tool.
The China shock was realImport competition from China cost 2.0–2.4 million U.S. jobs from 1999 to 2011, by the estimate of Acemoglu, Autor, Dorn, Hanson and Price. The losses lasted for years in the communities hit.
Bargaining powerTariffs sometimes extract concessions. In May 2019 the United States lifted its steel and aluminum tariffs on Canada and Mexico. Both countries dropped their retaliatory tariffs, and each agreed with the United States to monitor steel and aluminum trade. In 2025 the Trade Representative, Jamieson Greer, said more than 75 trading partners had approached the United States after the April tariffs.
Manufacturing multipliersEnrico Moretti estimated that each additional manufacturing job in a U.S. city creates about 1.6 jobs in local goods and services in the same city. Factory closures devastate towns; tariffs that preserve strategic clusters have spillover value beyond the direct headcount.
COVID exposed fragilityA 2021 White House review found that the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted supplies of medical products, including essential medicines, and caused a global shortage of semiconductor chips. Some reshoring via tariffs buys resilience that free-trade models don’t price.
Protected industries gainedSteel capacity utilization reached 80% in 2019 and 81% in 2021, continuing a rise that began in 2016. A 2021 report by Adam Hersh and Robert Scott of the Economic Policy Institute counted the plans steel producers announced after the tariffs. They added up to more than $15.7 billion of investment in new or upgraded plants and at least 3,200 direct jobs.
Investment followedIn October 2025 Stellantis announced a $13 billion U.S. investment that it said would add 5,000 jobs over four years. The president of the United Auto Workers credited targeted auto tariffs.
Most of these points have answers:
- Clausing and Obstfeld note that a security case gives little reason for tariffs on consumer goods that are not strategic.
- On the China shock, Autor, Dorn and Hanson wrote that the 2018 trade war raised U.S. product prices but did not expand employment in the protected industries.
- The 2019 concessions came from lifting tariffs, not keeping them.
- Moretti calls his local multiplier an upper bound for the national one, and writes that large multipliers do not by themselves justify government intervention.
- Protected industries do gain some jobs, but in the three earlier episodes on this page, losses elsewhere outweighed them.
- Investment pledges such as Stellantis’s count the jobs promised, not those lost among the buyers of the protected goods.
The Strongest Case That Tariffs Hurt
Regressive taxTariffs work like a consumption tax, which falls hardest on lower-income households because they spend a larger share of their income. In August 2026 the Budget Lab at Yale estimated the burden on the lowest-income tenth of households at 1.6% of after-tax income. That is about three times the 0.5% for the highest-income tenth.
Downstream destructionFlaaen and Pierce found that losses from higher input costs and retaliation outweighed the gain from protection in more-exposed industries. The U.S. International Trade Commission (USITC) estimated $3.48 billion in downstream output losses in 2021 alone.
RetaliationMajor tariff actions have drawn retaliation. China answered the 2009 tire tariffs with antidumping duties on U.S. chicken parts. By the estimate of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, the duties cost that industry about $1 billion in sales. By a U.S. Department of Agriculture estimate, retaliation against the 2018 tariffs cut farm exports by more than $27 billion from mid-2018 to the end of 2019, mostly to China. The government paid farmers $23 billion.
Trade diversion, not reshoringChina’s share of U.S. imports fell from nearly 22% before June 2018 to 9% in 2025, but sourcing moved to Vietnam, Taiwan and Mexico. Total U.S. imports still rose 4% in real terms in 2025, Chad Bown found, which suggests little reshoring, though his paper does not measure it directly. The USITC estimated that the Section 301 tariffs raised the value of domestic production by only 0.4%.
They become permanent“Temporary” tariffs create political constituencies for permanence. The 2018 Section 301 tariffs on China are still in place and were raised in 2024 on about $18 billion of annual imports. The Section 232 steel and aluminum tariffs were doubled to 50% in June 2025.
Expert consensusIn a 2021 survey of 1,422 members of the American Economic Association, 95% agreed, fully or with provisos, that tariffs and import quotas usually reduce general economic welfare. When the Clark Center asked its panel of economists in March 2018 whether new steel and aluminum tariffs would improve Americans’ welfare, none of the 40 who answered agreed.
Supporters reply that shifting imports from China to other countries serves the strategic aim even without reshoring. Clausing and Obstfeld accept that tariffs can move trade toward more reliable partners, though some of the shift may be goods routed through third countries. The Budget Lab at Yale’s model also projects U.S. manufacturing output 1.3% higher in the long run. The same model finds that gain more than offset by losses elsewhere, such as construction, down 2.2%, and mining, down 1.0%.
The verdict: what the evidence shows
No, not on net. In each of the three earlier episodes on this page, jobs gained in the protected industry were outweighed by jobs lost elsewhere. Those jobs were lost in steel-using industries after 2002, in retail after the 2009 tire tariffs, and in industries hit by higher input costs and retaliation after 2018. The 2025 tariffs have not been followed by a manufacturing jobs gain either. Where both figures exist, each job saved cost, or was projected to cost, about 14 to 23 times its annual pay.
The case for some tariffs on national security grounds is a different claim, about strategic goods rather than manufacturing jobs overall.
Four common claims, against the evidence
Claim“Tariffs bring back manufacturing jobs.”
Not on netProtected industries gain some jobs, such as about 4,200 at iron and steel mills from March 2018 to December 2019. But input costs and retaliation outweighed protection in more-exposed industries, and manufacturing jobs fell 113,000 in 2025.
Claim“Tariffs reduce the trade deficit.”
Not supportedThe goods-and-services deficit rose from $498 billion in 2017 to $932 billion in 2025, the largest in the Bureau of Economic Analysis series back to 1960. The deficit with China fell, but trade moved to Vietnam, Mexico and Taiwan.
Claim“Tariffs are just a tax on Americans.”
Largely supportedStudies of the 2018 tariffs found them fully passed through to the prices of imported goods. The Budget Lab at Yale put the cost of the tariffs in force in August 2026 at about $1,100 a household a year. But some tariffs also raise domestic production, as the U.S. International Trade Commission found for steel.
Claim“Tariffs are necessary for national security.”
Partly supportedDefense production can justify supporting a domestic industry, though economists who accept that usually prefer subsidies. Section 232 tariffs, imposed on national security grounds, now also cover lumber and products made from steel and aluminum, such as farm equipment.
Download the conclusion
The verdict above as one image, with the 2018 tariffs’ effect on manufacturing employment in more-exposed industries, channel by channel. Import protection added 0.3%, while higher input costs took away 1.1%. Retaliation took away 0.7%. The image is 1,200 by 630 pixels, the size social networks use for link previews, and anyone may download it and post it.
What would change this conclusion
This article concludes that: (1) tariffs add some jobs and output in the industries they protect; (2) in the 2002, 2009 and 2018 episodes, losses in industries that buy the protected goods, in retail or from retaliation outweighed those gains; (3) each job saved cost, or was projected to cost, many times its pay; (4) the trade deficit was larger after the tariffs, not smaller.
These conclusions would be falsified by:
• A study of the 2025 and 2026 tariffs, like Flaaen and Pierce’s for 2018, that counts input costs and retaliation and finds more-exposed manufacturing industries gaining jobs against less-exposed ones
• Bureau of Labor Statistics data showing manufacturing employment well above its April 2025 level for three years or more. A study would also need to credit the rise to tariffs rather than to the wider economy.
• A tariff whose cost per job saved, measured after the fact, came in below the pay of the jobs it protected
Sources
Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, decided 20 February 2026. The Supreme Court held 6–3 that IEEPA does not authorise the President to impose tariffs, striking the IEEPA baseline tariff, the country-specific top-ups and the emergency orders, while leaving Section 232, Section 301 and normal tariff rates intact. Source for the ruling and the Section 122 order: Jennifer Hillman, Council on Foreign Relations, 23 February 2026. Source for the fall in the trade-weighted average US tariff from 15.3% to 8.3%: Johannes Fritz, Global Trade Alert, 20 February 2026. cfr.org, globaltradealert.org
Penn Wharton Budget Model. Effective Tariff Rates and Revenues (updated 9 September 2026), with its data workbook. Source for the monthly average effective tariff rate, computed from USITC customs data as duties collected over import value (2.3% in January 2025, 9.5% in June 2025, 11.4% in October 2025, 7.1% in March 2026, 6.7% in July 2026); the replacement of Section 122 by Section 301 tariffs of 10% or 12.5% on 24 July 2026; the June 2025 rise in the Section 232 steel and aluminum tariffs from 25% to 50%; and the $166 billion of IEEPA tariffs collected and $107 billion of refunds certified by 21 August 2026, from court filings. budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu, data workbook
The White House. Further Adjusting the Tariff Regimes for Imports of Aluminum, Steel, and Copper into the United States, proclamation of 1 June 2026. Source for the Section 232 tariffs on steel and aluminum since 2018 and copper since 2025; for Proclamation 11021 of 2 April 2026, which set them at 50% on the metals and 25% on many products made from them; and for farm equipment’s place among those products. whitehouse.gov
Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. Notice of Modification, four-year review of the Section 301 tariffs on China, September 2024. Source for the increases decided in 2024, to 100% on electric vehicles, 50% on solar cells and, from 2025, 50% on semiconductors, covering about $18 billion of annual imports, and for USTR’s statement that they support investments under the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. ustr.gov
Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. Section 301 action on 60 economies over forced labor: release of 23 July 2026 and fact sheet. Source for the tariffs of 10% or 12.5% on 60 economies supplying 99.4% of U.S. imports, with goods under Section 232 exempt. ustr.gov release, ustr.gov fact sheet
The Budget Lab at Yale. State of U.S. Tariffs, 17 October 2025; The State of U.S. Tariffs, updated 24 August 2026. Source for the rate set in law, measured before buyers shift purchases (18.0% in October 2025, the highest since 1934) and its average statutory rate of 11.0% in August 2026; the cost of about $1,100 a year per household; the burden on the lowest- and highest-income tenths of households (1.6% against 0.5% of after-tax income); and the long-run model results (manufacturing output 1.3% higher, construction 2.2% and mining 1.0% lower). October 2025 report (PDF), budgetlab.yale.edu
Note on measure. Effective tariff rates differ by method and are not interchangeable. Penn Wharton’s are customs duties collected over the value of imports. Yale’s apply the rates set in law to import shares held at their 2024 pattern, before buyers shift purchases. After the February ruling Yale put the rate consumers face at 9.1%, the highest since 1946 apart from 2025, as the Council on Foreign Relations reported.
Russ, Kadee, and Lydia Cox. Will Steel Tariffs Put U.S. Jobs at Risk? EconoFact, 26 February 2018. Source for the ratio of roughly 80 jobs in industries that use steel or inputs made of steel to each job making steel, and for published estimates of 26,000 to 200,000 jobs lost in steel-using industries after the 2002 tariffs. econofact.org
Proclamation 7529 of 5 March 2002, 116 Stat. 3184. Source for the 2002 safeguard tariffs, effective 20 March 2002, with first-year rates from 8% to 30%. govinfo.gov
Hufbauer, Gary Clyde, and Ben Goodrich. Time for a Grand Bargain in Steel? Policy Brief 02-1, January 2002. Source for the projection, made before the 2002 decision, that a proposed tariff of 15% to 20% would save about 3,500 jobs at an annual cost of $2 billion to steel users, or $584,000 per job. piie.com
Francois, Joseph, and Laura Baughman. The Unintended Consequences of U.S. Steel Import Tariffs: A Quantification of the Impact During 2002. Trade Partnership Worldwide for the CITAC Foundation, 4 February 2003. Source for the 200,000 jobs lost to higher steel prices during 2002, and for the authors’ caveat that the data could not yet show how much of the price rise the tariffs caused. tradepartnership.com
Lake, James, and Ding Liu. Local labor market effects of the 2002 Bush steel tariffs. Working paper, draft of 11 July 2022. Source for the finding that the tariffs did not raise local steel employment but depressed local employment in steel-consuming industries for years after they were removed in December 2003, following a November 2003 World Trade Organization ruling. k-state.edu
Cox, Lydia. The Long-Term Impact of Steel Tariffs on U.S. Manufacturing. Working paper, 22 January 2026. Source for the large and persistent declines in exports and employment in industries downstream of the 2002 and 2003 steel tariffs. coxlydia.com
Hufbauer, Gary Clyde, and Sean Lowry. US Tire Tariffs: Saving Few Jobs at High Cost. PIIE Policy Brief 12-9, April 2012. Source for the tire tariffs of 35%, 30% and 25% from 26 September 2009; the 1,200 jobs saved at most; the cost to consumers of about $1.1 billion in 2011 and $926,500 per job; the net loss of about 2,531 jobs once retail losses are counted; China’s duties on U.S. chicken parts, costing about $1 billion in sales; and tire builders’ average pay of $40,070 in 2011, from BLS. piie.com
U.S. International Trade Commission. Economic Impact of Section 232 and 301 Tariffs on U.S. Industries. Publication 5405, March 2023 (corrected May 2023). Source for the modelled effects for 2018 to 2021: covered steel imports down 24%, steel production up 1.9%, the average U.S. steel price up 2.4% a year, downstream output down $3.48 billion in 2021, the value of domestic production under the Section 301 tariffs up 0.4%; and for steel capacity utilization of 80% in 2019 and 81% in 2021. Linked to the copy at GovInfo. govinfo.gov
Flaaen, Aaron, and Justin Pierce. Disentangling the Effects of the 2018-2019 Tariffs on a Globally Connected U.S. Manufacturing Sector. Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2019-086, Federal Reserve Board, December 2019. Source for the 1.4% relative fall in manufacturing employment, and the +0.3%, −1.1% and −0.7% from import protection, input costs and retaliation, plotted in the first chart. federalreserve.gov
Hufbauer, Gary Clyde, and Euijin Jung. Steel Profits Gain, but Steel Users Pay, under Trump’s Protectionism. PIIE blog, 20 December 2018. Source for the projection that steel users would pay about $650,000 for each steel job the 2018 tariffs created. piie.com
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Current Employment Statistics, seasonally adjusted (manufacturing, and iron and steel mills); Occupational Employment Statistics, May 2018; and Katelynn Harris, Forty years of falling manufacturing employment, Beyond the Numbers, November 2020. Source for manufacturing employment (down 113,000 in 2025, down 82,000 from April to December 2025, 12.65 million in September 2026, preliminary), iron and steel mill jobs (up 4,200 from March 2018 to December 2019), average pay of $44,870 in steel mill production jobs, and the June 1979 peak of 19.6 million. fred.stlouisfed.org, bls.gov (pay), bls.gov (1979 peak)
Fajgelbaum, Pablo, Pinelopi Goldberg, Patrick Kennedy, and Amit Khandelwal. The Return to Protectionism. Quarterly Journal of Economics 135(1), February 2020. Source for the $51 billion a year cost to U.S. buyers of imports and the $7.2 billion (0.04% of U.S. output) net loss of real income from the 2018 tariffs, and for complete pass-through. Linked to the authors’ copy. campuspress.yale.edu
Amiti, Mary, Stephen Redding, and David Weinstein. The Impact of the 2018 Tariffs on Prices and Welfare. Journal of Economic Perspectives 33(4), Fall 2019. Source for the complete pass-through of the 2018 tariffs into domestic prices of imported goods. aeaweb.org
USDA Economic Research Service. The Economic Impacts of Retaliatory Tariffs on U.S. Agriculture (ERR-304), January 2022. Source for the more than $27 billion of farm exports lost to retaliation from mid-2018 to the end of 2019, most of it in sales to China. ers.usda.gov
U.S. Government Accountability Office. GAO-22-104259, January 2022. Source for the $23 billion paid to farmers under the 2018 and 2019 Market Facilitation Program. gao.gov
Bown, Chad. How did Trump’s 2025 trade war affect the decoupling of US-China supply chains? PIIE Working Paper 26-14, July 2026. Source for China’s share of U.S. imports (nearly 22% before June 2018, 9% in 2025), the 4% rise in total real imports, and the caveat that the paper does not measure reshoring. piie.com
Institute for Supply Management. Manufacturing PMI reports for December 2025 and September 2026. Source for the index readings of 47.9 (the 10th month of contraction in a row) and 54.5 (the 9th month of expansion in a row). December 2025, September 2026
Hicks, Michael, and Srikant Devaraj. The Myth and the Reality of Manufacturing in America. Ball State University, June 2015. Source for the shares of manufacturing job losses in 2000 to 2010 from productivity growth (87.8%) and trade (13.4%), the 1.2% added back by growing demand, and automation and information technology as the main drivers of productivity. Linked to the copy at NIST. nist.gov
Acemoglu, Daron, David Autor, David Dorn, Gordon Hanson, and Brendan Price. Import Competition and the Great US Employment Sag of the 2000s. Journal of Labor Economics 34(S1), January 2016. Source for the 2.0 to 2.4 million jobs lost to Chinese import competition from 1999 to 2011. economics.mit.edu
Autor, David, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson. On the Persistence of the China Shock. Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Fall 2021. Source for the job and income losses that persisted for years after the shock plateaued around 2010, and for the authors’ statement that the 2018 trade war raised U.S. product prices but did not expand employment in import-protected sectors. brookings.edu, conference draft (PDF)
Bureau of Economic Analysis and Census Bureau. U.S. International Trade in Goods and Services, Annual Revision, 9 June 2026. Source for the goods-and-services deficit from 2017 to 2025 in the third chart, the largest in the series back to 1960 in 2025, and the goods deficits with China, Vietnam, Mexico and Taiwan. bea.gov, time series, series by country
Clausing, Kimberly, and Maurice Obstfeld. Tariffs as Fiscal Policy. PIIE Working Paper 25-19, September 2025. Source for what deadweight costs are, what the current account includes, the balance-of-payments link between capital inflows and the current account deficit, the foreign demand for U.S. assets behind those inflows, the ambiguous effect of tariffs on the trade deficit, and the authors’ views on national security, subsidies and shifting trade to more reliable partners. piie.com
Moretti, Enrico. Local Multipliers. American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings 100(2), May 2010. Source for the 1.6 local jobs per manufacturing job, the local multiplier as an upper bound for the national one, and the author’s caution about intervention. Linked to the author’s copy. eml.berkeley.edu
The White House. Building Resilient Supply Chains, Revitalizing American Manufacturing, and Fostering Broad-Based Growth: 100-Day Reviews under Executive Order 14017, June 2021. Source for the pandemic’s disruption of medical products and essential medicines and the global shortage of semiconductor chips. bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov
Joint statements by the United States and Canada, and by the United States and Mexico, on Section 232 Duties on Steel and Aluminum, 17 May 2019. Source for the lifting of the tariffs and the retaliatory tariffs and for the agreed monitoring of steel and aluminum trade. canada.ca, ustr.gov
Jamieson Greer. Responses to questions for the record, Senate Finance Committee hearing of 8 April 2025. Source for the more than 75 trading partners that approached the United States after the April 2025 tariffs. finance.senate.gov
Geide-Stevenson, Doris, and Alvaro La Parra Perez. Consensus among economists 2020: A sharpening of the picture. Weber State University, December 2021. Source for the 2021 survey of 1,422 American Economic Association members, 95% of whom agreed, fully or with provisos, that tariffs and import quotas usually reduce general economic welfare. aeaweb.org
Clark Center Forum. Steel and Aluminum Tariffs, 12 March 2018. Source for the panel’s answers: 28 strongly disagreed and 12 disagreed that new steel and aluminum tariffs would improve Americans’ welfare; none agreed. kentclarkcenter.org
Hersh, Adam S., and Robert E. Scott. Why Global Steel Surpluses Warrant U.S. Section 232 Import Measures. Economic Policy Institute, 24 March 2021. Source for the plans steel producers announced after the 2018 tariffs: more than $15.7 billion of investment in new or upgraded facilities and at least 3,200 direct jobs. files.epi.org
United Auto Workers, 14 October 2025; Reuters, 15 October 2025. Source for the UAW president’s statement that targeted auto tariffs “can, in fact, bring back thousands of good union jobs”, and for Stellantis’s $13 billion plan and 5,000 jobs. uaw.org, claimsjournal.com (Reuters)
Ibrahim, Reem. Trump’s Iowa Steel Mill Is a Win for Steelmakers. What About Everyone Else? Reason, 1 October 2026. Source for the point that a tariff’s costs are dispersed while its winners are easy to see. reason.com
Cite this article
TruthBased.org. “Do Tariffs Bring Back Manufacturing Jobs?” Updated November 2026. https://www.truthbased.org/do-tariffs-bring-back-manufacturing-jobs