Tariffs Aren’t Bad For The Economy, Just For Elite Pencil-Pushers

The howls from Wall Street echo like the cries of a spoiled aristocracy waking up to find their servants gone. A modest dip in the stock market, and suddenly the talking heads on CNBC and Bloomberg start shrieking about doom, devastation, and economic collapse. These are the same people who insisted that market plunges during the Biden administration were just statistical noise.

Now, with President Trump reasserting trade policies that prioritize American labor over foreign profit margins, the very people who cheered offshoring act as though he’s detonated the foundation of the economy itself.

Let’s call this what it is: populism manifest. President Trump is delivering on a promise: a long-overdue correction to an economic system that has gleefully sold out the American working class. For decades, jobs were outsourced, factories were shuttered, and the keys to our industrial future were handed to our geopolitical rivals.

All the while, they told us not to worry. “The market is strong.” “GDP is growing.” And the heartland burned.

Years ago, noted leftist Noam Chomsky warned that the financialization of the economy, where profits are generated not by production but by MBAs moving numbers in endless circles, would lead to a dangerous concentration of wealth and power. We now live in the very nightmare his cohorts spent six decades bemoaning, only to fall silent when someone finally challenges its architects.

Where is the “Occupy Wall Street” ensemble in the face of the first real confrontation with the financial elite in living memory? Silent. Turns out they never wanted solutions, just slogans and soggy cardboard signs. Maybe preserving their illusion of ideological purity matters more than actually lifting the working class they so loudly claim to defend.

We financialized everything, and in the process, we turned the American economy into a spreadsheet with no soul. The American economy has become a husk, propped up by torching our children’s inheritance and trading the dignity of work for short-term shareholder gains. We stopped making things. We started shuffling numbers. We turned labor into leverage and productivity into PowerPoint. We didn’t build wealth; we rearranged it. And we called it progress because the line graph kept creeping up, no matter what lay beneath it.

The same class of billionaires and think-tank technocrats who gutted real production now clutch their pearls because Trump is finally putting tariffs on the goods that destroyed our labor force in the first place. Spare me the crocodile tears.

Out in real America, the cost was never abstract. It was jobs. It was health care. It was dignity. It was deaths from opiates in hollowed-out towns where the mill used to stand. It was suicides. It was watching your community rot while being told by some Ivy League suit that globalization was “inevitable.” They said we couldn’t compete. Trump said we could — and that we should.

Now he’s back, doing exactly what he said he would: rebalancing the equation and prioritizing the worker over the spreadsheet. The people who never gave a damn about Youngstown or Gary or Scranton are panicking because this isn’t supposed to happen.

The money was never supposed to stop flowing. The outsourcing was never supposed to face tangible political opposition. It was only ever meant to be a passing and abstract idea to be alluded to in campaign talking points by Republicans and Democrats alike and then forgotten post-election.

When Joe Biden said, “We’re building an economy that rewards work, not wealth,” he must’ve meant stock buybacks, asset inflation, and foreign-owned supply chains. Because under his watch, the only thing being rewarded was proximity to capital, and the working class was left holding the bag. The Scranton-speak was window dressing; the real beneficiaries were hedge funds and multinationals.

President Trump, on the other hand, isn’t just talking about rewarding work — he’s doing it. He’s putting tariffs on the imports that gutted our towns. He’s rebuilding the industrial base with American hands and American steel. And, most importantly, he’s forcing Wall Street to remember that this country belongs to its people, not its shareholders. 

The death wails from the heart of this country were inaudible to the elites when they first sounded and then deliberately ignored. When our communities were gutted, when we lost everything, no one cared. That was just considered efficient economics. But now, a momentary dip in the markets, and suddenly it’s a crisis. Suddenly it matters. Suddenly they’re on television, clutching charts and sounding alarms. Spare me.

The American economy is worth saving. So are the people who built it. And for the first time in a generation, someone is finally fighting to do just that.

Kevin Capolino is a political strategist and former Capitol Hill staffer. He writes from Arlington, Virginia.