They will make Chinese goods more expensive, but it won't make exports more expensive. On the contrary, the whole idea behind the tax cuts and revised depreciation is to create the incentive to buy newer more modern equipment to get our prices down so we can compete with China. The depreciation tables get companies to buy equipment now, helping those companies down stream.
That, indeed, may have been the PR reason behind the tax cuts, but if that had been the real reason then the tax cuts would have been tied to the companies doing exactly that. They weren't.
The majority of the increased profits accruing from the tax cuts has gone into "share buybacks", "dividends", and "bonuses". The last two don't really affect the stock market as much as the first one does. The first one, by decreasing supply while demand remains constant, has the net effect of "boosting" stock prices and that, to the naive, looks like the economy is improving because "the stock market is going up". If the supply had remained constant and the demand for the shares had increased, then that would be an indication that the economy is improving. The reverse does NOT hold true.
Too many here think of China as MAGA hats and consumer items. That's not really where the US is going. We are trying to protect our leadership in capital equipment, aircraft, large industrial equipment used to make capital equipment, robotics, and AI. We are trying to get our competitive edge back where we can protect our processes by keeping them here in the USA rather than in China where they are copied, and we are going to redirect the global supply chain back the the USA. If they want to advance up the value chain, the need to do it honestly which, BTW and all B.S. aside, is a foreign concept to them.
In short, the policies of the US government must be tailored so as to maximize the profits of American corporations and to allow American corporations to create a world monopoly for American goods in order that all other countries can be treated as milk cows for American capital.
We make "national" money on the big stuff, and that is the market China is trying to push us out of.
I agree, it should be illegal for any country to compete with the United States of America. The only "fair trade" is when the US sells whatever it wants to sell at whatever price it feels like charging and buys whatever it wants to buy at whatever price it feels like paying. If any country offers its goods for sale at a price lower than the American price, then that country is not "trading fairly" and if any country offers to pay more for the goods it wants to buy than the American price, then that country is not "trading fairly" either. Those **E*V*I*L** countries must be stopped.
Right?
Somehow through the last 40 years the US population has been convinced that we can't do it and we might as well give up. That is totally wrong headed thinking. The less physical contact between US industrial processes and Chinese industrial processes, the better it is for the USA because there is a mental infrastructure as well has a physical one. That is what makes us different, and that we want to keep over here.
I don't think that "the US population" has been convinced of that, but I will agree that "the owners of US capital" have most certainly been convinced that they can make more profit by manufacturing elsewhere (and paying better than average local wages while doing so) than they can by manufacturing in obsolescent American factories using highly paid American labour, and, you know what, they are right.
If American workers were prepared to work 12 hour days, six day weeks, at $13.50 per hour, without fringe benefits, and without any union protection, then the American companies would take a different view of investing in the US manufacturing sector again. I mean that works out to around $50,544 per year and that's more than DOUBLE the poverty level, so everyone would be well taken care of.
Right?