i'd like to see some actual data that causally ties any actual movement of manufacturing jobs to a set of tariffs that nobody expects to last very long. basic economics is that you're supposed to wait these kinds of things out, which is the actual flaw in trump's negotiating strategy: for all his bluster, he has no actual leverage, in even the medium term, when every other candidate is promising to reverse his strategy, and everybody knows it's a matter of time.

it's also too early to expect to see these kinds of results, even if they turn out to be real.

so, the idea that the decrease in manufacturing is being driven by tariffs is probably a political story more than an economic one. these tariffs are not really doing anything besides driving inflation, and giving people heart attacks.

a more likely explanation for the decrease in manufacturing is the end of quantitative easing, which the trump presidency brought in relatively early, but is probably more a consequence of the party's policies than of trump's. this isn't a trump thing but a republican thing; it's a reaganomics things. this leaves us with a frustrating possibility: that we might have an almost exact replay of the 2008 crisis in front of us, and it might get masked by the president's flair for controversial, if largely irrelevant, manufacturing policies.

that may mean, in the end, that we end up implementing more neo-liberalism as a "solution" to fix an illusory problem, rather than recognizing that the heart of the problem is neo-liberalism, itself.

in the current global order, the united states must print a lot of money, and, if it doesn't, you're going to see things like decreasing industrial output, as demand for goods falls in proportion to the amount of money being destroyed.

so, this recession is long overdue. and the only thing stopping it from happening has been "consumer confidence", which in context just means mass delusion.

https://www.salon.com/2019/06/05/manufacturing-falls-to-lowest-level-of-trump-presidency-tariffs-take-the-blame/

(edit: i thought this article was more recent than june, but it doesn't change my basic points.)