It's honestly not a bad idea.
The point isn't to raise the prices on their crappy software locked gear. It's to keep them making it in the US. It's saying "If you destroy these US jobs, you're going to go out of business because NOBODY is going to buy your stuff, they'll pick another manufacturer."
John Deere is big, but they ain't a monopoly. And if they're looking at a giant tariff targeted directly and only at them, they'll cave.
And it's something that should have been done back in the '80s, to all kinds of companies. "If you move manufacturing out of the US, you're going to be hit with GIANT tariffs. Do the same thing for outsourcing services, hit companies that decide a call center in India is a good idea with big tax penalties, big enough to cover all the money they saved, and all the money that their US employees would have paid in taxes, and then double it.
I'd love to see the tech industry hit with it. You can't just slap the high tariffs on them all at once, of course. But if you start gradually, maybe just a few percent increase every year that they're still outsourcing manufacturing to China, maybe Apple will see that the only way forward is to reopen that factory in Freemont.
Maybe tariffs aren't the right tax to use, perhaps a 200% corporate income tax would be more effective. They can even choose to get out of that, if they spend all of what would have been profits for a few years building a US supply chain they won't have to pay it.
