President Trump and his cabinet secretaries announced that “we have a deal with China!” – and the stock market didn’t react.

Didn’t go up, didn’t go down. The first two days since the announcement, at least, the market remained flat.

In part, this is likely due to the fact that everyone’s waiting to see the final deal, though they’ve given us the big picture:  both sides give in a little; the U.S. will still have high additional tariffs on Chinese goods and will allow most Chinese college students, and mainland China will stop holding critical rare earth components hostage. 

The devil will be in the details, of course, but this big picture should at least have been enough for either excitement or horror from the market, and it drew neither.

What it did draw, interestingly, was a lot of editorials, implying that President Trump has backed down, or that he never really had a strategy, even though the net end result has a much higher tariff total on Chinese goods than the tariff level in place when he entered office.  So, from the President’s tariff strategy at least, it’s a win.

But there’s more to it than this.  This entire experiment has been a lesson, to both the American people and the entire world, and more and more people are beginning to absorb this crucial lesson, at long last.

First, some background:  All imported products have import duties, around five percent or so, give or take, which are the same for goods from almost all countries on earth.  On top of those basic U.S. import duties, some products from some countries have some additional tariffs, such as the 7.5% additional and 25% additional that were added to most Chinese products during President Trump’s first term.

This year, for Chinese goods alone, President Trump added first ten percent, then twenty, then even more, until the new tariffs totaled 145% on top of the normal duty and the old 7.5% and 25% additions.   So, for a short while, before the current truce, America was charging between 145% and 190% on Chinese goods, depending on the product.

Now with the new deal in place, it will about 55% plus the basic duty, possibly plus the first term tariffs (these details haven’t yet been clarified).

The people who want to attack President Trump can do so, saying that he’s been talked down to a much lower tariff, compared to the massive level briefly imposed in April.  But is that really what’s happened?  At the end of this process, the total tariffs on Chinese goods will be much higher than they were when he started his second term.  So from the perspective of setting tariffs, President Trump has definitely won.  He’s raised the tariffs considerably on Chinese goods.

But that’s not the main lesson here.

President Trump’s thesis – and not just his, but the thesis of the conservative movement, the MAGA movement, the American working class, and all American patriots – is that the United States has lost far too much manufacturing over the past half century. 

The United States of America was the king of the industrial revolution; our economic dominance was propelled by our ability to make everything, and to be more........

© American Thinker