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And never this sweeping: like when Japanese car manufacturers were threatening Detroit, the president negotiated with Congress and the response was targeted, not a random shotgun on other countries and industries.

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True. I have not ordered a single product from the Heard Island and McDonald Islands since the tariffs were levied on them. I am champing at the bit for these to be reduced.

Haha, but every coffee, tea, snd chocolate provider I buy from has announced their prices going up and it’s not like there’s an American industry those taxes are supporting. Hawaii doesn’t have enough land to grow even a fraction of our domestic coffee consumption.

Reagon and Congress directly negotiated with the Japanese auto manufacturers. They were threatening major tarrifs.

This lead to the 1981 automobile voluntary export restraint.

https://www.nber.org/system/files/chapters/c8719/c8719.pdf

Yes: that’s kind of a textbook example of using tariffs strategically — there’s a valid argument that automobiles are a strategic industry worth protecting (just for military capacity alone) but they didn’t threaten to heavily tax coffee and chocolate from other continents at the same time or under the pretense that it would make those crops viable in the United States at scale.

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