I’m not seeing anyone discuss this here, so I figured I’d raise an important point: this style of tariffs is crushing for US manufacturing. While a universal tariff with no exceptions incentivizes domestic manufacturing, a selective tariff with specific industry exceptions is absolute poison. You might think, as the authors of this exemption did, “well then we will exempt computer parts.” Then people will simply impo…
If you want to protect strategic production, you apply selective tariffs to support that local production while ensuring it can ramp up and import what it needs until it becomes self-sufficient.
Most countries, the US included, have used selective tariffs for this purpose. Applying a blanket tax on every type of import just increases inflation, as you can't possibly manufacture everything locally. For many products—especially cheap ones that were outsourced to China—there's no way to produce them cheaply enough for your internal market to absorb all production.
And you can't export them either, because their higher production cost makes them uncompetitive compared to cheaper alternatives from low-cost countries.
The secondary effects of import taxes are wide-ranging: they help when applied selectively and carefully; they don’t when applied capriciously and without thought.
The mere fact that high taxes were slapped on phone imports so "phones could be made in the US," only to backtrack mere days later, demonstrates that this is either the work of an insanely bright economist nobody understands, the scheme of a grifter aiming to benefit personally, or the capriciousness of a borderline dementia patient who cannot act rationally.