Manipulating their currency is another reason to tariff them.
On the contrary, manipulating their currency hurts their poor in order to help
our poor and
their upper middle - upper class.
Well it doesn't benefit our poor when the poor lose even their low paying jobs to the Chinese because they pay so little and dump their toxins in the Yangtze river. Then our poor can't much afford even Chinese goods.
The loss of jobs to China is exagerated to the extent that it isn't a myth. Whenever we liberalize trade, jobs in the US
increase.
Specific jobs and industries flow around, and are invariably replaced by
better ones for the simple enough reason that mutually beneficial trade is just that - mutually beneficial. In RhetoricLand, it's always easy to get people to focus on the concrete loss here or there. In RealityLand, however, our exports
increase whenever we sign Free Trade Agreements, even as our standard of living goes up as our cost of living goes down. What you are describing here is just a complaint against the creative destruction of progress. When you introduce the automobile, the buggy industry goes out of business - and you can't save it without seizing up growth and keeping us all poorer.
Slapping Tarriffs on China would instantly raise the cost of living for our working poor. It instantly makes it harder for them to feed, clothe, and house their families. Ironically, the loss of economic efficiency will mean more layoffs, which will be concentrated on those whose labor is worth the least. Tarriffs are
dumb because they are usually built along bad math and false assumptions; but they are
wrong because they most harm those among us who are already the most vulnerable.
It also would be a very powerful stick to say "Well, if we can't build cars, then we are closing all these other manufacturing plants."