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I drink whiskey in the winter and gin in the summer. My preferred brand of whiskey comes from Kentucky, but the gin I like comes from England. I suppose I could switch to vodka — no tariffs on our Russian friends! — but there’s something about a gin and tonic with a slice of lime that defines summer for me. A vodka and tonic just doesn’t do it.

Perhaps I could buy enough gin now to carry me through to the fall, but my retirement account took a hit when the president announced his tariffs, and although the market has bounced back some with the news of a 90-day reprieve, I don’t want to make any large purchases at the moment. There is too much uncertainty.

I am aware of what the president said when he first announced the tariffs. We have to be ready for a little pain, a little sacrifice — more tonic, less gin — and he explained that the temporary pain will seem worthwhile when the manufacturing plants return to this country. And because of the tariffs, they will come back. It will make economic sense to build things here.

But I wonder who is going to work in our new factories. We seem to have a shortage of workers. The mayor lost her re-election bid largely because city services aren’t up to par, and a big reason services are so bad is the city can’t find enough workers. Like refuse collectors. And police officers. The city has raised salaries and offered signing bonuses, but the shortages continue.

Remember when COVID shut down restaurants? When the restaurants eventually re-opened, they couldn’t find enough workers. Where had they gone? What were they doing?

Consider Tiffany’s Diner in Maplewood. Before COVID, it was a late-night hang-out. Now it closes at 2 p.m. Not enough workers, the manager told me.

Garment workers in Sri Lanka make about $70 a month. The president plans to hit them with a 44 percent tariff. Bangladesh is in line for a 37 percent jolt. The factories in those countries will almost certainly shut down.

Do we have workers who want those jobs? Really? And if we pay high enough wages to attract American workers, how much is a shirt going to cost?

These questions come to me because I have some training in economics. In the summer of 2005, I attended a three-day seminar on economics at a country club in Cape Cod. The seminar was run by Washington University’s “Murray Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government and Public Policy.�

Before joining the Washington University faculty, Weidenbaum had been the chairman of the Council of Economics Advisors for President Ronald Reagan.

There were about 15 journalists. They were about what you’d expect — witty, intelligent, opinionated and easily distracted. If they were better able to concentrate, they could have become lawyers, maybe even doctors. In addition to Weidenbaum, there were professors from the University of Chicago and George Mason University.

Weidenbaum was a conservative with a libertarian streak. The other two were libertarians with conservative streaks. The journalists mostly leaned left.

The economists wanted us to understand the Big Picture. If a factory closes, our tendency is to focus on the Little Picture. We interview the poor soul who lost his job. The Big Picture is the value of, and inevitability of, globalization. Can’t we work that fundamental truth into our stories? Also, if a beach is slightly polluted, enough to get a small group of swimmers ill, does it make economic sense to shut it down? No, it does not.

Free trade and fewer regulations. Those were the themes.

Mostly, though, I remember feeling like a big shot. I remember being overwhelmed with that feeling one evening while I was sitting on the patio of the club, the ocean right in front of me, as Weidenbaum sat across the table and reminisced about his times at the White House. I fit in well here, I thought to myself as I sipped my gin and tonic.

In a subsequent column, I mentioned two of the other journalists. I was quite impressed with a young woman from the Cook Political Report. Amy Walter could be a comedian, I wrote. She entertained everybody with a great riff about the perils of depending on young voters. “If they can fit all they own in a car, forget it,� she said.

Also, there was a young staff writer from the Council on Foreign Relations, Lionel Beehner. He now teaches at West Point and is the director of research at the Modern War Institute. He brought his guitar to the seminar and serenaded us with a song he wrote in honor of our professors.

“We are free-traders. We are not Darth Vaders,� he crooned.

Music does something to me, and the visions that were planted in my brain, still remain.

When I watch “Jaws,� I root for the sleazy mayor who doesn’t want to close the beach. Let’s talk economics, people. One or two tourists as opposed to the welfare of an entire village?

And don’t get me started on globalization. I don’t remember the exact way the economists described it, but moonlight was glistening on the ocean, a gin and tonic was in front of me, and we were a tree, a huge tree, and we had underground root connections with all of the other trees, and everybody was feeding everybody else. Why would we cut those roots?

Even with all my training, I cannot say for sure how our trade war will end. Maybe corporations will continue to manufacture elsewhere. And with all our new income from tariffs, we won’t need to tax ourselves. America, the Exceptional. Subsidized by the world.

Or, more likely, manufacturing will return to America. If we can’t man or woman the factories ourselves, we’ll do what we’ve always done. We’ll let people from other countries sneak in and work.

It’s really basic economics.