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.
True. It is very hard for American companies to compete against a country willing to work 9 year olds in sweat shops for next to nothing. Best to keep letting the billionaires exploit this so they can keep stamping on Americans trying to start their own businesses and keep the poor poor and the rich rich