I prefer to measure the health of the economy in terms of the experience of the average person in a country. Every other measure is just a proxy for how well you think that is going.

If we look at the countries that are considered to be export economies we don't see great outcomes for the average person. China is the largest volume export economy. They work 9-9-6 hours (9am-9pm, 6 days a week), and yet their workers struggle to feed themselves and pay rent despite being one of the lowest cost of living countries in the world.

This is in spite of very high rates of production per worker. But they don't have physical prosperity. All the physical product they generate ends up enjoyed by someone else, usually on the other side of the planet.

It's not like being an export economy has given them a surplus of jobs. This is often the promise of increasing exports. There is a shortage of jobs in China so everyone is on edge of being dismissed at any moment. And their low pay compared to cost of living means people are on a brutal treadmill.

An increase in exports will give you an increase in jobs temporarily, but once people move to the export sector and the domestic sector is shrunk you have the same number of jobs. Really the number of jobs in the long term is pretty much close to full employment no matter what you do. If prices can adjust and it makes more sense for someone to work than sit on their butt and they need income then you will have full employment. Sudden disruptions to your economy will temporally change that, but full employment is something the market takes care of anyway and we don't need politicians to go find jobs for us. Especially when we aren't in the middle of a depression.

Point is that long term an export economy doesn't have more jobs available than a domestic economy. They have the same level of employment. China is an example that they don't have a permanent excess of jobs just because they are an export economy, and like all economies they always run a slight surplus of workers to jobs.

But because all their retained resources per person are tighter, when they are out of work its much harder because they haven't had discretionary income to convert into savings prior to that job loss. And because of that brutal reality workers have even less leverage to negotiate higher average pay.

A different way to look at it is that money has no value. Goods do. The only way money has value is because it can buy goods. So the prosperity of your middle class is the goods available to it.

If every country in the world puts tariffs on you and you can't sell anything on the global market then all work, engineering, business plans, raw materials, and the like have no outlet but to make more and better goods for the domestic economy. When the volume of goods available to you and your peers substantially exceeds your needs you and your peers now have discretionary spending. That is that all income competes to purchase all available goods in a giant auction. That's what the consumer market is. That is a person gets a share of the total we can call a basket. Regardless of what income is in the US if the goods are static and greatly exceed needs, and if everyone has reasonably close to the same income, you are able to meet your needs while taking less than your whole basket allotted to you. This is what it means to have discretionary income, regardless of what income is in monetary terms. High goods level = discretionary income.

This is what china doesn't have. No excess goods. No discretionary income. No savings. No security. No leverage. Diminishing pay. The cycle continues.

So then the presence of discretionary income is a product of the goods level of a country and not the income level or availability of temporally surplus jobs.

China is poor not because they lack production or have restricted access to exports. They are poor because they have a poor goods level within the country because everything is exported.

What we should be doing is imposing reverse tariffs. Tax anyone abroad who buys our goods. Make it cheaper for an American to buy American than it is for a French to buy American. Make sure all American innovation goes towards improving American lives. I don't want a damn thing produced for any other country. Is not the American consumer good enough for your ambitions to serve?

What exports do in fact do is make very few people rich. International types who have an advantage in crossing borders. Then you have a rich elite who immediately buy their good foreign. The money either never cycles domestically or it competes with the purchases of the hoi-pulloi. The only exception to an export economy making the average person wealthy is Norway and only because the revenue from exports are directly distributed to everyone.

Other than that exports actually make your average person poor.