>soybean farms are fat that needs to be trimmed.

How does this follow? A legitimate business that when left alone has no problem doing perfectly fine that becomes unsustainable after heavy handed attempts by politicians screw things up for them is fat that needs to be trimmed?

And that's just retaliatory tariffs. Let's look at the ones we've done to ourselves: Steel. So, now steel from China is a lot more expensive. Encourages domestic creation of steel, right? Cool. It's still more expensive. And that means a lot of businesses that actually make something with steel are starting to hurt. So, the businesses that actually build stuff instead of the businesses that dealt with a commodity are in danger of going under or laying off people. There's far more people already hurting from the steel tariffs in the US than the most possible that could benefit under the theoretical best case scenario for steel manufacturing in the US.

None of this makes any sense whatsoever.

> A legitimate business that when left alone has no problem doing perfectly fine

There's a hidden assumption here: they're doing fine when doing business with China is cheap. That comes with a cost (especially when China is not willing to play fair w.r.t. IP law and gov intervention). I'm not worried about soybeans, I'm worried about the cost in terms of American jobs of keeping soybean farmers in business.

I don't understand why you think tariffs are likely to create a net positive in American jobs. That certainly has not been the case so far, and would have been even worse without the US government now using taxes to subsidize businesses that the tariffs are screwing over.

If curbing China's loose interpretation of intellection property rights was a goal, then withdrawing from the TPP makes zero sense, because a huge portion of the deal was limiting Chinese trade influence in the rest of Asia and providing a coalition to combat Chinese IP theft.

We passed up a strategy that had a good chance of resulting in a checkmate for one where we're sacrificing knights and bishops to take pawns. Or at this point, maybe we've enabled friendly fire for chess somehow and are now taking our own pawns. Like I said before: None of this makes sense. Actual economists are baffled.

To be fair I don't think Trump is particularly adept, but I'm still not convinced tariffs are a bad idea in the long-term. China does all sorts of things to prop up Chinese companies and I see no reason why America shouldn't be looking to do the same.

Farm subsidies are considered national security expenses because growing your own food is a national security issue. In other words there are some fat you want to keep because some fat keeps you warm through winter and when you don’t have food.

Ah yes, standing up for the people of the US by deciding which of them are "fat" that needs to be "trimmed". Here's a further list of "fat" that you can "trim" (https://www.uschina.org/sites/default/files/list_of_chinese_...).

We already decided thousands of jobs are better done in China. Either way somebody loses out.

We have record unemployment and until the market fluctuations of these past few weeks, arguably the strongest economy ever and the biggest in the world. I don't know what loses you mean. That fewer people spend their career in a factory? There's disruption yes as our economy transitions to other jobs, but the net trend for everyone is upwards.

> the net trend for everyone is upwards.

Not true. Unemployment is low at the peak of the longest bull run in history, sure. The problem is wage growth is static, or even dropping: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us-...

You're picking one metric out of many, that is too simple to represent the entire system. The gestalt is positive. Stagnant wage growth is only a piece of the picture: with so many people employed it's still a net increase in the national payroll. Stagnant wages are a problem, it mean a lot of the benefits of the bull economy are probably not being distributed very equitably, but that by itself does not represent the trend.

So businesses that were doing fine until heavy handed government intervention represent "fat" to be trimmed? I don't follow that line of thinking.