[coderenegade]

The definition of good pay is relative. Increase wages enough, and people will leave other industries, and new workers will join the workforce straight out of high school rather than going to university. Those jobs will be filled.

[foota]

Op is implying that there's excess labor lying around that with moderate prices (say, what you make in fields like construction, electrical work, etc.,) would be picked up. This isn't the case, or they'd already be taking the jobs in those fields that are relatively in demand.

I agree that if you paid people as much as software engineers to work in a factory you would certainly see disruptions in the labor market. I don't know what the market clearing price would be for factory labor sufficient to meet the US demand, but I don't think it'll be pretty.

[retrorangular]

To what benefit though? People in the US currently provide advanced services such as software sold to people everyplace, and people in developing nations are manufacturing cheap goods, sold to people everyplace.

After tariffs, people in the US are (maybe) manufacturing cheap goods, sold mostly only here, and developing nations continue to manufacture cheap goods for the rest of the world, and fewer people are providing advanced services such as software.

Overall, the world just becomes poorer and has fewer useful services provided. Yes, the US becomes less dependent on the rest of the world, but the rest of the world also becomes less dependent on the US. Material wellbeing of everyone is worse off.

But that's assuming all went to plan. In practice, it's hard to see how they would even achieve bringing manufacturing here through tariffs. Crashing the stock market is a sure-fire way to ensure the next administration (3.5 years away) will revoke them. You could install a dictatorship, but that makes it even less likely for companies to invest in the US. In practice, this will likely just make Americans poorer, but not bring any meaningful amount of manufacturing jobs back. Pretty much the epitome of "cutting off your nose to spite your face."