The government allowed companies to lower environmental and worker safety standards by outsourcing overseas without including tariffs as a function of said standards.

See, the things we buy wouldn’t be so cheap if we didn’t let some companies in china dump toxic waste for free.

I sort of agree with you about using tariffs (at least for issues of global effect, like climate change), but do you think the US government should have a policy goal of making products more expensive for American consumers and/or reducing the amount of toxic waste dumped in China?

Not more expensive per se, but more truthfully priced.

E.g. cheap rare earth minerals from China are only cheap because we are borrowing from the future people who will pay to clean up the mess.

When we more accurately price the real cost of goods by quantifying damage to the worker’s health, global environment, etc. then outsourcing would not look nearly as attractive.