What does the US import that, if cut off, would decrease our quality of life?

[pampango]

116. Corporations have proven to make profits with high tariffs and low. That is not the issue.

Corporations need to be controlled with regulations and high taxes as FDR did and as Sweden and other progressive countries still do; not by manipulating tariffs.

Don't call it a "tariff". Call it a "labor rate equalization adjustment".

That's essentially what republicans called their 1924 tariff:

The hearings held by Congress led to the creation of several new tools of protection. The first was the scientific tariff. The purpose of the scientific tariff was to equalize production costs among countries so that no country could undercut the prices charged by American companies. The difference of production costs was calculated by the Tariff Commission.

A second novelty was the American Selling Price. This allowed the president to calculate the duty based on the price of the American price of a good, not the imported good.

The tariff was supported by the Republican party and conservatives and was generally opposed by the Democratic Party and liberal progressives. ... Five years after the passage of the tariff, American trading partners had raised their own tariffs by a significant degree.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fordney–McCumber_Tariff

The "labor rate equalization adjustment" sounded scientific but did not work. Income inequality reached historic highs by 1929.

If FDR thought "labor rate equalization adjustment" was a viable policy for the post-war world he would have gone with it. He did not.

In 1945, the US only imported raw materials. I wonder what his position would be today when the corporations can off-shore operations and it is the worker that suffers from free trade.

FDR did not say that he favored that "be freer after this war than ever before in the history of the world" only until the industries in Europe and Japan have recovered enough to pose a threat to us. In fact he proposed taking the governing of international trade out of the hands of national governments and do it by international cooperation (his International Trade Organization) instead.

Perhaps he was not as smart as modern American progressives, though progressives in actual progressive countries seem to think he was plenty smart.

... the workers were not affected ... (by tariffs).

Workers have always been affected by tariffs.

The Hidden Progressive History of Income Tax

The income tax was the most popular economic justice movement of the late 19th and early 20th century.

Everyday Americans hated the tax system of the Gilded Age. The federal government gathered taxes in two ways. First, it placed high tariff rates on imports. These import taxes protected American industries from competition. This allowed companies to charge high prices on products that the working class needed to survive while also protecting the monopolies that controlled their everyday lives.

These forms of indirect taxes meant that almost the entirety of federal tax revenue came from the poor while the rich paid virtually nothing. This spawned enormous outrage.

http://www.alternet.org/labor/hidden-progressive-history-income-tax?akid=9361.277129.2KDGDd&rd=1&src=newsletter706781&t=14

What was the first thing republicans did when Harding became president in 1921? They raised tariffs and cut income taxes! That would teach those progressives a lesson about substituting an income tax for high tariffs.