Monday, June 2, 2025
University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers explains why Donald Trump’s new steel tariffs will backfire—hurting U.S. manufacturing far more than helping it.
Speaking on MSNBC’s Deadline White House (June 2, 2025), Wolfers reminds viewers that when Trump imposed steel tariffs in 2018, about 1,000 jobs were saved—but an estimated 75,000 manufacturing jobs were lost due to higher steel costs rippling across the economy.
Nicolle Wallace: So what happens now?
Justin Wolfers: Well, the first thing is actually that the country that the president is clobbering the hardest is the United States. The steel industry, you should understand, is a very, very small part of our economy. It employs about 100,000 people in an economy of 160 million workers. I care about those people. My heart goes out to them. But I also want to remember the other 159,900,000.
Because steel is a small part of our economy, but it’s a big part of the inputs through the rest of manufacturing. So if you wanted to find a way to really destroy American manufacturing, what you do is figure out a way to jack up the cost of steel for American manufacturers. And that’s what the president’s just done.
In fact, he’s done this once before. In 2018, he put tariffs on steel. And studies of that episode suggest that he did actually succeed in saving around 1,000 American jobs. Which sounds terrific—until you realize that the more expensive steel that rippled out through the rest of the manufacturing industry, which is much, much larger, cost another 75,000 jobs. So the president ended up destroying 75 times more jobs than he saved last time he tried the exact same trick.
