Lot of folks defending the tariffs are asking "Why would you assume they don't have a plan?" Folks, let me tell you about the time one of the architects of Obamacare dressed me down for asking how they were going to stand up a fairly complex website in three years. I worked in IT before I went to business school, and I had some idea of how tangled US government technology procurement processes were, so I was curious and a little skeptical about the requirement to have a fully functioning website that could enroll anyone in the country in just a couple years. She, of course, was a health policy specialist, not a software developer. But she got really, really mad. The upshot of her comments was that a) I was an obstructionist ideologue who would grasp at any straw to criticize Obamacare. b) This bill was the culmination of a decades-long project. It had been worked on by some of the best experts in the business, and had the full backing of the administration. Did I, critical gadfly, really think these big brains didn't have a plan for something as simple as a website? Chastened, I subsided. I guess they have a plan, I thought. As anyone old enough to recall 2013 will remember, the administration did not, in fact, have a plan for the website, which crashed repeatedly, failed to enroll anyone, and had to be fixed by an emergency infusion of helpers from Silicon Valley. To the massive embarassment of everyone on the left who had trusted the administration to have a plan. The lesson is: don't assume the politicians you like have a plan. Or the ones you don't like. Often, when someone points out an obvious hole in the policy idea, the answer is not "they are playing N-dimensional chess and have already anticipated and planned around this". Often the answer is just "they didn't think of that because they were focused on something else."
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