Sadly, our three-legged stool won't hold us up anymore

The Trump administration’s tariffs have shaken the global economy and disrupted many Americans’ financial futures. WFAE’s Tommy Tomlinson, in his “On My Mind” commentary, says the tariffs are a misguided search for a simpler world.

When I moved to the Charlotte area in 1989, North Carolina’s three-legged stool was just about to crack.

The three-legged stool. That’s what they called tobacco, textiles and furniture — the three industries that carried North Carolina’s economy through much of the 20th century.

Even before I got here, it was all fading to dust. I got to see the last of it. I walked a tobacco field Down East with a farmer who was trying to figure out what to grow next. I went to Kannapolis as the massive Cannon mill closed for good, and I watched its smokestacks fall.

The work, by and large, went overseas. It makes sense to wish we could bring it all back. I actually understand the gut feeling behind what Donald Trump is doing with these massive tariffs on products from other countries. Now for Trump, I think, it’s simply about power and leverage. But for the rest of us, there’s also a playground sense of justice. It’s about reclaiming the work that used to belong to us.

Lord, I wish it was that simple.

The most immediate complication is Trump’s fundamental instability. Just look at last week: He jacked up tariffs on nearly all our trading partners, then reversed course and reduced tariffs on everyone but China. The financial markets jerked up and down as a result, jeopardizing trillions of dollars in investors’ cash and regular people’s retirement funds.

There’s no way to predict what Trump will do next. He’s like a weird uncle playing Got Your Nose with the entire global economy. That’s not likely to persuade anybody to invest in building new factories over here.

But beyond that, we have to be honest about other complicated realities.

We say we’ll be willing to buy American-made goods made by American workers paid a fair and living wage … but we will also be furious if we can no longer buy cheap T-shirts and toys at Walmart.

It does feel unfair to export our jobs to countries where people work for less and are exploited more … but that also helps many of those countries build sound economies and make them less of a threat to us.

It stinks that American workers have a harder time finding blue-collar jobs … but it’s also true that some of them find other jobs where they can make a good living and not break their backs.

Again. It’s complicated.

I wish it wasn’t. I wish tobacco didn’t cause cancer and cotton dust didn’t cause brown lung disease and that everybody could afford well-made American furniture. I wish our three-legged stool could’ve held up forever.

But we don’t live on the playground anymore. Navigating this complicated world requires grown-ups making grown-up decisions. And right now we are running a deficit in grown-ups.