Import taxes are paid for by the consumers in your country, whose cost of living will go up and make them less competitive against consumers in other countries

Import taxes are paid for by the consumers in your country, whose cost of living will go up and make them less competitive against consumers in other countries who don't have that burden. This is a surefire way to shift economic power away from your country and towards countries that are willing to import goods from places that have lower manufacturing costs. And it doesn't hurt the manufacturers at all, because they'll just sell to friendly markets someplace else. Taxing imports doesn't "level the playing field" for your industries vs foreign industries. It just winds up hurting your citizens and economy. You can level the playing field by reducing your industry's labor costs by removing expensive regulations, but that means giving up environmental protections, worker protections, livable wages, etc. So that's not acceptable. I believe the only way to keep your industries competitive, while also providing the protections that your society deems valuable, is for the government to subsidize those protections instead of making the industries figure out how to pay for them. Ultimately your citizens and industries still wind up paying for it through taxes, but the cost burden is spread out and ideally the protections can be provided more efficiently by having a single organization managing them instead of every little company doing it independently.