We might be going off-topic a heck of a lot during the next four years:
While the costs of free trade tend to be concentrated, benefits like lower prices for imported goods are spread very broadly, making them less obvious. In an interview on Fox News on Sunday, Newt Gingrich, former speaker of the House and a Republican Trump ally, questioned whether that trade-off made sense.
In some cases, he said, Americans should be “prepared to pay a little bit more for imported products” to keep jobs at home.
If trade advocates can’t make a better case, or at least come up with better ways to help the inevitable economic losers of globalization cope, then free trade itself may be imperiled, whatever the overall benefits.
via www.nytimes.com
Using the very simplest (a static demand and supply model), and most compelling, economic analysis of international trade shows that the economic costs of tariffs (lost consumer surplus due to higher prices and lower consumption) exceed the benefits (producer surplus gains which are positively correlated with jobs).
