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Trump's Tariffs Are Starting To Kill Jobs
Goldman Sachs estimates that the tariffs will create about 100,000 manufacturing jobs while destroying 500,000 others. In Pennsylvania, it's already starting.

Eric Boehm | 4.18.2025 12:05 PM
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abstract trade war trump | Lex Villena; Midjourney
(Lex Villena; Midjourney)

The Trump administration believes that high tariffs will boost the
prospects of American manufacturing, but one iconic truck company is now preparing to lay off hundreds of workersbecause of the tariffs.

For more than a century, the Mack Trucks plant on the outskirts of
Allentown, Pennsylvania, has been churning out heavy equipment to haul
stuff from place to place. It is one of the largest employers in the
region, providing hundreds of the good-paying, blue-collar jobs that
President Donald Trump and his allies want to promote in America.

Some of those jobs are about to disappear. Mack Trucks will lay off between
250 and 350 workers over the next few weeks, the Pennsylvania Capital-Star reports. A company spokesperson told the Capital-Star that the layoffs are
due to "market uncertainty about freight rates and demand" and "the impact
of tariffs. "

Of course, one of the impacts of tariffs is increased economic uncertainty
and decreased demand for products like the ones Mack Trucks makes. That's a tidy illustration of how higher tariffs are hurting American businesses in
more ways than one: higher prices for imported goods and component parts on
the front end, coupled with lower sales expectations on the back end. In an environment like that, layoffs seem almost inevitable.

As that dynamic plays out across the whole economy, the tariffs will create more losers than winners. A Goldman Sachs report published this week
estimates that Trump's tariffs will create about 100,000 new manufacturing
jobs (a result of supply chains shifting to the U. S. , as the president
wants) but will destroy 500,000 other jobs in the process.

That would reflect what happened during Trump's first term, when his
tariffs cost about 245,000 American jobs, by one estimate.

More layoffs are almost certainly coming.

"A lot of companies are definitely going to go under, that's for sure, "
Molson Hart, CEO of Viahart, an educational toy company, told The
Atlantic's Derek Thompson this week.

"Firms expect conditions to worsen in the months ahead, " the New York
Federal Reserve noted in its April survey of manufacturers, which showed "a level of pessimism that has only occurred a handful of times in the history
of the survey. "

Ryan Petersen, CEO of Flexport, a global logistics firm, warned in a series
of posts on X that ocean freight bookings from China are down 50 percent
since Trump's tariffs hit. That could potentially wipe out as much as $1 trillion in economic activity if the tariffs remain in place for a full
year, he estimated.

"Thousands, and then millions, of American small businesses, including many iconic brands, will go bankrupt this year if the tariff policies on China
don't change, " Petersen wrote.

The stock market might have been the first to respond to the consequences
of Trump's tariffs, but the damage was always going to be more widespread. American workers are about to end up on the front lines of the president's trade war.

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