The things that dominate middle class budgets: food, housing, medicine, education, are surprisingly local, and have become increasingly unaffordable in recent decades even as economic numbers have gone up.

The question that really matters to most people is, "What will these tariffs do to the prices of these things that actually matter?" And that it actually rather hard to predict.

The economists who claim that tariffs will harm normal Americans were also the economists who claimed that sanctions would destroy the Russian economy. They had the opposite effect, for reasons that still remain somewhat unclear. It may be that global trade makes certain classes of society very very wealthy, while not necessarily being such a positive for the middle class.

It is also notable that Chinese competitiveness has only increased as they have engaged in decades of state economic planning and market barriers. The economists who have told us since Reagan that this is inefficient and stupid might be ... wrong.