Are you asking rhetorically, or do you really not know? Free trade agreements benefit exporters, not importers. By enacting tariffs, you help prevent foreign providers from undercutting domestic businesses, since foreigners can very often churn out products at lower costs (leading people to naturally pick the cheaper option, and why wouldn't they?).
Since tariffs are designed to protect domestic businesses from those issues, when you remove tariffs (which is EXACTLY what free trade agreements do), you may save a few bucks on an item at the store, but you give all the actual job creation and economic overhead to the foreign countries you're buying from, and neglect that economic growth from your own domestic companies. That's why our free trade agreements are "piss poor." Granted there is a balance to it (and I'm not saying we should go all Smoot-Hawley on their asses), but tariffs are a proven concept that have been around for centuries.
But I have a sneaking suspicion that a college-educated person like yourself already knows this. It's sad that I have to explain what we all read in our 6th grade Social Studies books.
Your implicit assumption is that it's best if everything that's sold in our country is also made in our country, but that's not necessarily the case. Tariffs on steel imports may help American companies producing steel, but they hurt the much larger set of companies which use that steel, and ultimately the consumers of those products.
They're called trade agreements for a reason, because money is exchanged for goods. The value of those goods does not go away as soon as the money changes hands. The goods that are purchased from other countries have inherent value and can subsequently be further refined or sold for profit, benefiting the American companies and citizens who purchased those goods.
To claim that purchasing something from another country is inherently weakening your own economy is shortsighted, and the real world is obviously more complicated than that.
You don't think that the US is a bit too import-heavy? I mean, statistically, it's well known that we import far more than we export, so that's not what I'm asking. I'm saying don't you agree that we've taken import reliance a bit too far???
Like I mentioned earlier, I'm not saying gung-ho tariffs are helpful. There's a balance to it. Also, i'm not trying to oversimplify anything here. If anything, free trade oversimplifies things, since it's just a blanket-sweep removal on restrictions / deterrents to foreign reliance.
Also, free trade is a relatively new methodology overall (at least NAFTA, for example). It can be "too much of a good thing," if you will. Heck, NAFTA didn't even exist until the Clinton administration. People speak as if it's been around for ages. It's still a work-in-progress, and asking for re-balance isn't as absurd as people make it out to be.
The sad part is, whether by tariffs, or by free trade, both approaches can be boiled down to outright assumptions (that 1) the lower costs from free trade will increase economic growth by giving people more cash, or 2) that that tariffs will restore domestic purchasing and business which also results in more cash). Either approach gets us more cash, at least on paper.
I dunno man. It'd be nice if there was an end-all, be-all answer, but like you said, there's complexities here. I'm just sick of people dismissing all contrary views as absurd (especially when they involve proven concepts have been around for literally centuries). ---