The current debate over tariffs and trade is primarily a policy and economic debate, but we shouldn't overlook the human cost of the last few decades, when we have offshored so much of our industrial base. We used to be a country that made things, and being involved in production, in creating value, gives people a pride that can't be had in any other way. And when they lose that, the results are never good.
President Trump gets that. You can agree or disagree with his solutions, but you can't deny that he's trying to do right by the people of the United States, the people who put him in office. He's trying once more to make us a country that makes things because there's far more than an economic cost in losing that. There's a human cost.
Watch this:
"They shut right down... and took our jobs and put them over in Mexico... Flint used to be Motor City... Where's all the motors?"
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) April 3, 2025
For decades, these voices fell on deaf ears as Washington politicians sold them out with unfair trade that decimated our industrial base.
No longer.… pic.twitter.com/vSQPvWAIXB
That's a good question. Where are all the motors? Mexico, likely, or Canada - or China. This offshoring, this abandonment of America's industrial base, has a human cost. Two recent studies bear that out.
First, from the American Economic Review, a study (.pdf linked below) that shows the impact of a "large and persistent economic shock" on causing "deaths of despair" - in short, suicides. That study concludes:
We document a relationship between a plausibly exogenous change in US trade policy and drug overdose fatalities among working-age whites, helping to explain the alarming rise in “deaths of despair” among this group since 2000. While our findings do not provide an assessment of the overall welfare impact of this liberalization, they do offer a broader understanding of the distributional implications of trade. Moreover, by providing new evidence regarding the effects of major labor market disruptions, our results offer insights into the potential effects of future technology shocks—such as those arising from automation or artificial intelligence—that might lead to similarly sudden and geographically concentrated declines in employment.
Next, from the journal "SSM - Population Health," a look at drug abuse in dire economic conditions; this study concludes, in part:
The positive relationship between trade-related job loss and opioid-related overdose death is well illustrated by Forsyth County, North Carolina. In March 2006, less than a year after the U.S. Congress approved the Dominican Republic-Central American Free Trade Agreement, Hanes closed a knit fabric factory, laid off 610 workers, and relocated production to plants in El Salvador, Honduras, and the Dominican Republic. This was just one of many factory closures in Forsyth County, which suffered 2215 trade-related job losses from 2006 to 2008. An increase in opioid-related deaths occurred following these job losses. From 2000 through 2005, the county averaged only 12 opioid-related deaths a year. Between 2006 through 2008, the county suffered an average of 25 deaths per year, a sudden doubling of opioid-related deaths. The number of annual deaths remained at roughly the same level over the next four years, until jumping to an average of 42 deaths after the introduction of fentanyl in 2013. As local Sheriff, Dane Mastin, explained to the Winston-Salem Journal, “the trend is getting worse in part because the bad economy, job losses and other problems are driving more people to seek escape in narcotics”
This is only the tip of the iceberg. We have sent so much of our industrial base out of the country, and it is costing our people dearly.
See Also: Chinese Trip All Over Themselves With Propaganda Video Attacking Americans on Tariffs
Take a trip around the country. It started years ago; I remember about 2015, when we had occasion to drive from the Minneapolis area to Duluth, only to see the empty warehouses in that latter port town - the broken windows, the weeds growing up in the parking lots, the empty, rusting boxcars on rail sidings. The busiest businesses we saw were the taverns.
Look at Detroit: The abandoned houses, the abandoned factories, the empty buildings. The few people you see on the streets always seem to be looking down as they walk slowly.
Look at Flint, where, as the woman in the video above plaintively asks, "Where are the motors?" More to the point, "There are poor kids right here. What about them?"
Look at how many cities around the country, cities and towns that grew up around a central employer, have now lost that employer, and with it, lost hope.
There's a human cost to all this. We used to be a country that made things. We were the Arsenal of Democracy when Britain was facing the Nazi war machine alone in WW2. We were the industrial colossus that brought the world back onto its feet after that war. We were the country that established what it was to be not just a military superpower but a manufacturing superpower. Our people took pride in all that. Our people took pride in creating value, knowing that their efforts, their work, meant something.
Now, so much of that is gone - to Mexico, to Canada, to China.
We used to be a country that made things, that produced value, that had a strong, healthy middle class. President Trump is trying to bring that back. He's trying to bring back our middle class - and our pride. And if any on the left differ with this, point them to the two studies here and many more just like them and remind them to "trust the science."
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