I am not an economist, but I’d think a couple of reasonable metrics would be:

• Taxes raised through tariffs are enough to significantly replace a significant portion of personal income tax burden across all taxpayers, while not raising the price on goods so much as to negate that benefit.

The math we’ve seen so far does not come anywhere close to supporting this. According to the St. Louis Fed, personal income taxes collected in 2024 was about $9.6 trillion. The increased tariffs have pulled in $6.3 billion in the past month, according to the Treasury Department, as reported in Newsweek. Extrapolated for the year, that comes out to about $0.08 trillion, or 0.8% of what is collected in income tax. The numbers don’t add up even if the tariffs collected increase once the actual rates are stable, nor does this administration seem interested in giving a tax cut to anyone other than the wealthiest taxpayers, nor would I implicitly trust the numbers from this administration’s Treasury Department.

Furthermore, that doesn’t address how much of the tariffs are past to the consumer - which will be damn near all. Also, around 30%* of tax returns were for $0 in taxes due to low income and various exemptions, so the inflation in goods will be a net negative - as you can’t cut a $0 tax - for what is mostly the poorest third of the population. Inflation induced by tariffs are about as regressive a tax as there is. (*The figure I have for this is 31.42% in 2022 according to the National Taxpayers Union Foundation. I’m assuming the figures aren’t wildly different for 2024.)

• Increased manufacturing in the US, especially in strategically valuable goods, such as semiconductors.

This is a less quantifiable benefit, but can be good for supply chain stability and national security, in theory. It will take years to come to fruition, as factories take a long time to set up, and businesses will need a clearer picture about where the economy is headed before taking on such large investments. On-again, off-again policies delivered in tweets don’t provide that - quite the opposite. Moreover, said goods will mostly be more expensive due to higher labor costs, providing little to no relief on the inflation front. It also should be pointed out that successes on this front will reduce tariffs coming in, acting against my previous metric.

What effect this has on the trade deficit I don’t see as important. You run a trade deficit relative to your local grocery store since they don’t buy things from you, and what would you do to remedy this? Start a farm? Having invested the time and money in a farm, would you come out ahead? Not likely. The trade deficit is a political football that fiscal conservatives love to complain about, but do not follow up on when they’re in power.

All that said, I emphatically do not agree with the current administration on these policies, or really any policies, just to admit my biases.