I’ve shared a few updates in 2025, though not nearly as often as I would have liked. I also pulled back from the all-consuming world of crypto coverage. Still, this year has been too strange to stay quiet. It has been a year marked by transition and uncertainty, with tariffs dominating nearly every market discussion.

Tariffs: Painful, but Productive

The idea behind tariffs is that short-term pain is worth long-term gain, a notion now being voiced more frequently by commentators. An op-ed in Newsweek earlier this year argued that tariffs may disrupt supply chains and raise costs, but that the payoff is in strengthening domestic production and remaking industries that were hollowed out by decades of globalization. As Mark A. DiPlacido, Policy Advisor, American Compass, noted, “Making things matters. Historically, our greatness as a nation has been synonymous with what we have invented, produced, and built.”

As the piece puts it: globalization has “weakened our industrial base, eroded communities, and ruined job prospects,” and tariffs are essential to reversing that trend. Of course, opponents point out the consumer cost, with a Newsweek chart showing that higher input costs are already pushing up consumer prices, and companies may pass that burden on.

Still, the argument resonates: tariffs are intended not just as a tool for negotiation, but to protect American-made products and rebuild manufacturing capacity (even if slowly and unevenly).

Read the full piece at Gritdaily.com https://gritdaily.com/2025-tariffs-transition-and-why-america-first-is-more-than-a-slogan/