The ledger does not lie

A new report, as Fox News describes it, makes a stark finding: the so-called Liberation Day tariffs suppressed hiring by as many as one million jobs and imposed roughly one thousand dollars in additional costs on the average American family in 2025. Proponents promised factories and prosperity. The ledger, thus far, shows a consumption tax borne by the people it was meant to protect.

I am no enemy of industrial policy. I argued at length — in my Report on the Subject of Manufactures — that a young nation cannot trust its productive independence to the goodwill of foreign rivals. Bounties, premiums, judicious duties on particular goods: these have their legitimate place. But there is a discipline to the argument that tariff advocates too often discard. A duty that raises revenue and shields a targeted infant industry is one instrument. A blanket tariff applied to the whole of trade, without design, without graduation, without a connected program of domestic investment, is not industrial policy. It is a tax — levied on imports, yes, but paid at the counter by American families.

The report's figure of one thousand dollars per household (Fox News) deserves to be held in the light. That is not an abstraction. It is a grocery bill, a car payment, a month's savings erased. And the million-job suppression figure — if the methodology holds — means the policy achieved the precise opposite of its stated aim. I would want to examine that methodology carefully before endorsing its arithmetic; I mark that caveat plainly. But the direction of the finding coheres with what sound reasoning would predict: raise the cost of imported inputs, and manufacturers who assemble rather than mine pay more, hire less, or move.

The deeper failure is strategic. I believed — I argued strenuously — that American manufactures could be brought to self-sufficiency through deliberate encouragement. But encouragement means building: workforce, infrastructure, access to capital, a reliable framework of law and contract. Tariffs alone, without that scaffold, do not build a factory. They raise a wall that protects whatever happens to be on the domestic side — which, in much of modern production, includes foreign-owned assembly lines and global supply chains no wall can fully domesticate.

My recommendation is direct. If the goal is genuine industrial revival — in semiconductors, in energy equipment, in advanced manufactures — then couple any protective duty with a positive program: public credit directed at infrastructure, workforce investment, and the kind of patient capital that private markets, left alone, will not supply to long-horizon projects. A tariff without that companion is not a policy; it is a posture. And postures, as the ledger now suggests, are paid for by the people who can least afford them.