The problem with a tariff on Chinese imports is: who do you think pays the tariff? The Chinese manufacturer? The importer? American distributers? No, it's the American consumers who will have to pay for it. How does that help American manufacturers to compete? They still have much higher costs than their Chinese competitors, so they'll be outmatched on R&D, marketing, variety, etc.

Besides, the American consumers probably can't afford the higher prices anyway, so rather than helping American manufacturers, tariffs will just collapse the market when consumers stop buying the products, or they go to underground sources.

To level the playing field, we can't do it on the market-price side. We have to do it on the manufacturing-cost side. The US has all of these regulations that protect the environment and protect workers, but the costs have been borne by each manufacturer separately. I think that's led to a great deal of redundancy and inefficiency, which has raised the cost of these protections beyond what most manufacturers could bear. We need to move to a system where these costs are shared by all Americans, and by all who buy American products, in a more efficient manner. That should reduce labor costs, hopefully enough so that the benefits of local manufacturing outweight the still-higher labor cost to provide an American-level standard of living.