MADE IN AMERICA, BROKEN BY TRUMP

A PLATTSBURGH FACTORY'S GROWTH GRINDS TO A HALT THANKS TO THE TRADE WAR.

- ERIC BOEHM

Trump is not guiding a rebirth of American industry. He is overseeing a ritual sacrifice to the false god of central planning.

WHEN PRESIDENT DONALD Trump announced a sweeping set of tariffs on nearly all imports, he promised that April 2—what the White House dubbed “Liberation Day”—would “forever be remembered as the day American industry was reborn.”

That’s not the way Michele Derrigo-Barnes sees it. Trump's tariffs are “killing” small American manufacturers like hers, she tells Reason.

As CEO of Plattco Corporation, a small business that makes industrial valves, Derrigo-Barnes runs the sort of blue-collar industrial production shop that Trump and his allies say they want to help. Instead of being helped, she found herself dealing with fallout from the tariff announcement: canceled orders, higher prices, and enough uncertainty to put on hold a planned expansion of the company’s Plattsburgh, New York, manufacturing center on the banks of Lake Champlain.

What would she tell Trump if she got the chance? “Stop the nonsense. We've worked hard to get us to a place where we can perform well and we can take care of our customers, and this is putting that in jeopardy.”

The few dozen workers at Derrigo-Barnes’ company won't be the only ones in jeopardy if Trump’s tariffs remain in place for the long haul. Hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs will be lost and only about a fifth as many created, according to an estimate by investment bank Goldman Sachs. Tariffs create higher prices for inputs, which in turn can reduce sales for manufacturers’ outputs, leaving companies worse off. While large companies such as Apple have already successfully lobbied the White House for special treatment, smaller operations such as Plattco have little choice but to eat the costs or pass them along to consumers.