> Otherwise, you put your local producers at a disadvantage, making the tariffs worse.

Disadvantaging local producers is how tariffs work! Local producers would then turn to local suppliers who don't have any additional taxes applied. Tariffs are a very blunt instrument, and clumsily attempting to assuage 2nd order pain points will only give rise to 3rd (and higher) order effects.

The lesson here is: don't fuck around with multivariate dynamic systems that have achieved stability: there won't be any one knob you can twist to get a result you want on a single parameter. It'll be worse if you pick one knob and turn it all the way to 11.

Yes, but it's not how the US government wants them to work. So they legislate more to close the bugs and make it work the way they want.

It's a known flawless way to evolve code... Never revise, never delete, add enough so the tests pass.

But I don't think your lesson is reasonable. Fucking with multivariate dynamic systems is what governments do. And it's well settled that in the absence of the government doing that, everything goes to hell quite quickly.

Tangential, but it seems this will also accelerate the move to even more flimsy plastics in everything from appliances to construction materials to cars.