Feb. 23, 2026 Editor, The News-Gazette: Looked at from the standpoint of the recent volume of public discourse, “tariff talk” has occupied a lot of space in the news media.
At bottom, however, the use of tariffs to protect any nation’s economic security boils down to a single issue: either you pay your neighbor for what you buy and consume or you pay a person in a foreign country for the things you buy and consume.
If you buy from your neighbor, he uses your money to feed his kids and put a roof over their heads. He could do the same for you. All healthy economic systems are local.
Of course, if you buy from a worker in a foreign country, you provide him a way to feed his kids and put a roof over their heads. When you do that, you export your dollars ... dollars that you could have used to help bolster the wellbeing of your own neighbor, just as he could have been doing for you.
In the last 60 (maybe 80) years, Americans have supported the global economy through trade policies designed to favor practically every other country in the world. Consequently, “free trade” has not only exported a goodly share of 38 trillion American dollars, but that disappearance of hard currency from America has gutted domestic manufacturing and services, thereby canceling the opportunity for you and your neighbor to each have a job that supports one another’s particular economic interests.
It should not be all that hard to figure out that when you use that dollar to pay for something made by a non-American worker, you have stolen the opportunity for your neighbor to use that dollar to support his own life, or for him, in turn, to support yours. DON HENKE Goshen
