Free trade did not, by itself, cause jobs to go overseas. There is a whole set of technologies that allowed for rapid and cheap transportation of goods between countries. Technologies like GPS, the internet, and massive container ships.
This allowed businesses to move manufacturing to places where labor cost was cheaper. Even with tariffs, it will still be cheaper to build things in countries like Vietnam, Cambodia, China, India, and Mexico. It would take tariffs equal to the difference in economic power of the countries to which we have exported jobs to bring jobs back to this country.
The average wage for a manufacturing job in Vietnam is $2,500 a year. You do the math. How big will the tariffs have to be to make it profitable again to bring those jobs back to the US? Trump is closing the barn door about 30 years too late.
