Precisely. If anything, the country in deficit is closest to the leg in this analogy.

You're getting scammed. You should tariff the grocery store. Demand that the total on the bill increase by 50% and that that increase be paid back to you. That should teach 'em.

There are other cases to be made. There are things of stretegic importance you want produced domestically. Trump complains about Canada having tariffs on dairy. Obviously he mischaracterizes it, but there are indeed limitations of the amount of food Canada imports from the US.

We don't want to become dependent on the US for food. Because we don't trust the US. For obvious reasons.

And you would introduce those tariffs gradually. Just start with 0.1% and increase at a regular interval over several years so everybody has time to adjust and build out local production financed by investors that know exactly what's coming down the pipeline. No, instead you get wild swings, on and off again and a complete chaos where building and investing becomes a huge risk.

The only thing that would punish other countries there is that higher prices here means less people here buy it, which means less sold there.

But it also means less logistics workers and such as well. It's just a bad deal all around.

Or they're if cheaper because of subsidies, for example China's cars.

And I don't think it works at all for manufactured goods.

For example, in the 70's or 80's Yamaha came out with their Virago line of motorcycles. They were American style teardrop tank cruisers set to compete directly with Harley-Davidson, except with objectively better engines and lower prices. The only thing Harley had going for it was their trademark engineering mistake. of a single pin crankshaft.

Harley asked the government to step in, the government applied a tariff to motorcycles over...some engine displacement, I think it was 1200ccs or so. Yamaha responded by slightly reducing the cylinder bore to bring it down to 1150cc and made a range of lower end models all the way down to 250cc, none of which qualified for the tariff, and Yamaha is still selling cruisers in the US to this day, meanwhile Harley-Davidson is a popular designer clothing label with a small vestigial powersports division.