The Trump administration’s tariff scheme appears less and less likely to bring manufacturing jobs back to U.S. shores.
Businesses across the country are crunching the numbers and realizing that, despite Donald Trump’s insistence, they can’t balance out his tariff hikes across the supply chain.
“Some manufacturers who had plans to open factories in the country say the new duties are only adding to the significant obstacles they already faced,” Bloomberg reported Friday.
That’s because the supply chain to produce those goods in the United States simply isn’t there, requiring companies to import raw materials and factory equipment—which Trump’s tariffs have made unaffordable—from abroad.
That’s the point. Destroy America but keep idiots voting for it.
Well they want to almost destroy America, that way the rich can buy up everything for cheap and become even more pwoerful. They’re literally trying to recreate the situation that caused the rise of oligarchs in Russia.
And the idiots vote for it because they’ve been brainwashed by propaganda to think they’ll be part of the elite once it’s over.
BRB, setting up my backyard forge after years of not smooshing any metal. Looks like it’s up to people like me to make all this complicated tool&die
Tariffs aren’t designed to bring manufacturing back. It’s designed to crush the US economy for Daddy Putin. It’s designed to starve out the plebs. It’s designed to bankrupt companies to be bought by the billionaire class for pennies on the dollar.
Leave Russia out of it. It’s your own rigged election system and lack of real competition that led to this
I’m not American nor living in the USA.
You left out the most important reason: getting people to come kiss Trump’s ass to ask for exemptions. Nothing is more important than getting Trump the sycophancy he has to settle for in lieu of respect.
People keep ignoring this…
I don’t personally think it’s true. I think Trump’s first term he spent all day and night on putins dick and this term he is trying to achieve a similar staying power. He wants to be more powerful than Putin.
So first Trump prevents any ex-allies to the US from trading with them
Then Trump prevents factories from being opened in the US to produce goods locally
What kind of 6D backgammon is this?
The kind where shelves go empty soon. I remember walking round the grocery store during covid and everything being empty, felt like a dream. Now it’s a nightmare.
Right, this is why an intelligent leader might use tariffs to bring back manufacturing, in a very targeted way and matched with incentives to help build what is missing.
This is someone who heard that you could use a hammer in conjunction with nails to build a house so starts swinging mjolnir in every direction
But you mean your company isn’t willing to make a years long investment in on-shore manufacturing capacity when the scales that make it advantageous to the company can change in any direction, at any point, for any made-up reason, by any amount? Don’t they love investing in America?
/s+++
It’s not even that entirely
You can’t build X here unless every component is also produced… here. The component factories can’t be built here here until there’s factories building the subcomponents for them, AND a buyer for them here.
A button up shirt needs cotton -> chemical treatment -> dyes -> fabric, base chemicals > plastic pellets -> buttons, AND the machines to do all of those processes. It’s like 7 or 8 different factories just to produce a shirt with buttons on it. Imagine how many factories it is for anything more complex.
Then in comes your point of needing commitment when it’s not even certain for more than a week, nobody is going to build out entire supply chains in that scenario.
That is a very good point that I hadn’t considered, thanks for your response.
To your point, that just makes it even more of a ridiculous proposition.
Gamers Nexus just talked to some PC manufacturers about this.
“We assemble PCs, made in America from these parts”
(motherboard, CPU, graphics card, PSU, …)
So what if, for example, the motherboard manufacturer moved to the US?
Well that’s an assembly of a hundred or so other Chinese components. And the equipment needed to manufacture it would need to be imported.
Ok, but what if all those hundreds of factories were built in the US?
Well, they all use imported aluminium and steel and plastic, etc., and require their own imported machines to produce…
“Is any part of your PC entirely made in the US?”
“The shipping labels? And maybe some packaging”
Another example would be Trump saying that US farmers now have unprecedented access to the UK market for sales but the US uses growth hormone which is banned in the UK and Europe. It’s very unlikely they’re going to designate a non growth hormone section of their farm just to ship beef overseas.
Which would only be financially sound if for some reason there is significant demand for American beef in the UK which… Why would there be?
The beef issue is actually older and a bit more complicated than the hormone question. When the hormone ban went into effect, the only product banned that wasn’t before was edible organ meats.
North America is an agricultural powerhouse and the US in particular. A lot of countries have deep and legitimate concerns about US agricultural exports purely based on the low cost and high volumes, which can threaten domestic food production: An unacceptable condition based purely on national security concerns. It’s part of why the US exacerbates the situation by subsidizing agriculture. We may produce a stupid quantity of food, but it must always be, on the whole, economically viable to produce food domestically.
While the concerns of the EU citizens are real, the readiness with which they were acted upon is in part due to the convenience of protecting the agricultural sector of more powerful European countries.
While correcting artificially low prices is actually a valid use of tariffs, using them for protectionist purposes like offsetting actual competitive advantages creates a lot of trade agreement drama.
Can’t retaliate against food safety restrictions. Hence the wto court cases that have been flying around for decades.The reason there would be a demand for US beef is the same reason as Japan has such a high demand for US beef: it’s cheap and available. Even the high quality import is often price competitive with average or low quality domestic.
Also, there’s already a fair number of US producers of beef that didn’t get hormone treatment. Nothing mandates they get it, and we even already have inspection programs to facilitate it: https://www.ams.usda.gov/services/imports-exports/nhtc
If course, that’s all the center of the current wave of wto disputes, since the EU restricts beef imports to a quota, and no one can agree on certification requirements.
soybean, pork was heavily exported to asia, now with the tariffs, asia will find other countries to do it for them. brazil is willing to destroy the amazon for cattle farming. and Alfalfa which is mostly for the ME market. in the usa, outside of limited consumption of health food store, and research universities involving botany.
This is what I’ve been saying, building factories is already an expensive and time consuming process, then you slap high prices on everything you need to make a factory work it’s going to be out of reach for basically anyone and the few who can afford it likely wouldn’t anyway because like this describes it’s not fiscally responsible but also the US is in decline why would you be putting an enormous investment into a wildly unstable system? If you want manufacturing in the US building factories needs to be reasonable price wise and you need consumers with the funds to do the consuming, neither of which can be delivered now
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ironically, much of the domestic industrial policy Biden signed into law was intended to do exactly this but Trump reversed course because corrupt reasons
“Corrupt reasons” is actually giving him too much credit. He’s tearing up everything Biden did because Biden did it. He did the same thing with as much of Obama’s legislative agenda as he could.
It’s pure pettiness. He can’t allow his predecessors to have a legacy. His ego cannot afford it.
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A combination of incentives and targeted tariffs only where necessary. For example, you might have incentives to build out EV chargers, incentives to buy EVs, “carrot and stick” to encourage legacy manufacturers to start building EVs, incentives for new EV companies, incentives for battery recycling companies …. Then come out in a dominant position for a new technology product, destined to build jobs and wealth for decades! Or you could, you know, throw that all away and then throw money at the dead tech of half a century ago
Also need regulatory approval, plus funding talent and all the employees for said factories, and then manage the logistics from the factories to distribution warehouses then to the stores.
“Consumers with the funds to do the consuming” well wouldn’t that be grand. Unfortunately that would involve paying people and executives are allergic to basic decency even when the core of it is ultimately selfishness.
the supply chain to produce those goods in the United States simply isn’t there
This is what everyone has been saying ad-nauseum since this whole shit show started.
…in the 80s.
That’s what people keep forgetting: this is not new. It took us decades to offshore our supply chains, decades to move out low profit manufacturing. Now it’s gone. Long gone with few remnants, and we need to start over. It will take time and investment, incentive and support, and can only be done with an actual strategy and sticking with it. For decades…
Maybe a factory can be built in a couple years, but a supply chain is many factories building different things, supported by resource acquisition that’s different from what we currently do. A supply chain is decades
Which came first? The chicken or the egg? Is the orange fuck-nugget doing tariffs to cause an economic collapse or to provide cover for a collapse that was happening anyway? Trump ate McDonald’s while the empire burned.
If the collapse was going to happen anyway then it would’ve been best for Trump to sit out the election and let it happen under Biden’s watch.
Trump might be in a jail cell right now if he wasn’t in the Oval Office.
back to the mines!
you were warned months before, and even before the election. dont act surprised, you thought his only legislation was tax cuts, but it wasnt , he was pushing things further along the line for PUTIN.
Only the 1% are getting tax cuts. This was all known before the election but people are dumb.
So how come the people in MANUFACTURING couldn’t see his proposal in MANUFACTURING was a big crock of shit?
Because the people writing him checks aren’t the people doing all the actual work.
The world has no appetite for his big beautiful luxury goods store.
USA used to be the managers and leaders of these factories, now he wants them to be the grunt workers and for some reason people are all for it.
Before Reaganomics and globalism the middle class was strong and built on the shoulders of blue collars, why do you think they forced globalism down our throat? So they could make stuff cheaply and could eradicate the middle class. I hate Trump and what he stands for, but globalism was something the left was fighting against back in the day because the left realized the consequences of losing manufacturing jobs in first world countries.
All socialist ideologies are globalist.
“Workers of the world unite” ring any bells? “All war is class war?” Globalist rhetoric. The idea that artificial divisions like nations are weapons against the people.
You are, ironically, using the word the way Reagan and his kind used it, as an ill-defined nationalist slur to protect local profit margins.
There’s a difference between fighting together against capitalism and being pro economic globalization. Economic globalization has actually hurt the workers of the world and you know full well that’s what I’m talking about, you just want to argue for the sake of arguing.
https://repository.law.miami.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1082&context=umiclr
Because only white Europeans deserve to have the benefits of an industrial or post industrial economy, obviously.
Go tell a kid making Nike shoes that he’s benefiting
Ok Mr I Think the Government Doing Stuff is Socialism So It Never Occurs to Me That Socialist Globalism Eradicates Sweatshops by Default.
Weird you made that your legal name btw but you do you
Took you two days to come up with this non answer? Damn
What made those jobs available was economic opportunity, investment, building a greater whole over time. You don’t win a game of checkers by knocking over the board or a race to the bottom to become the next third world poverty labor. You win with a focussed strategy to push one checker to the other side and “king” it.
Biden was taking the right approach with the chips act , infrastructure spending, and renewable energy investments. Maybe it wasn’t flashy or loud or immediate, but would have actually built a dominant position in new technologies, including us supply chain and lots of us jobs. The biggest flaw was we needed to stick to the plan for a decade or two, but that’s what you gotta do.
And what made those jobs unavailable was saying that we could now simply import all that they made from Asia instead.
You’re missing the point. That didn’t happen overnight. We gradually built supply chains in Asia to our own detriment over decades.
Sure there needs to be some sort of market or policy change if we want it to be economically plausible to bring more of it back, but then it will take decades to build out.
And there won’t be millions of unionized blue collar jobs as it will be all automated. Automation has done more to erode those jobs than outsourcing, and that genie is not going back in the bottle.
From an historical perspective it very much did happen overnight, in the 70s they were there, in the 90s they were gone
they also saw reagan was a easy to manipulate stooge, especially after his alzheimers starting to affect him, they took even greater advantage of him.
What made those jobs great for the middle class wasn’t the fact that they were blue collar manufacturing jobs, it was the fact that they were unionized.
Unions and high top tax brackets built the American middle middle class between the fourties and the eighties. Yes, offshoring allows companies to seek lower wages elsewhere, but the solution to that is not sweatshops at home. You need to start by building up strong labour rights and investing in education and infrastructure, which drive investment in job growth. Stop trying to regain all the jobs you lost and work and improving the jobs you have.
Yes, leftists have been warning about globalisation for decades, and they’re right, but lets not pretend that what Trump is doing is even in the same continent as a solution.
It’s still good jobs for people who won’t go to university, you can’t tell these folks “just learn programming” when what they’re good at is manual work.
I worked at four US manufacturing gigs before landing at an Employee Owned Company that actually paid living wage ($19/hr to start with benefits).
Prior to that, these four manufacturing companies I was hired at paid minimum wage, you were lucky to get a ten cent raise after a year. The work was grueling, health insurance was basically nothing, no paid time off, just shit conditions with mandatory overtime and zero workers’ rights.
Not to mention something like injection molding or QA off a line and into a box, is the most boring work there is. I hate injection molding. Even the aerospace department at my decent paid EO company was repetitive boring work, but at least they cared about ergonomics an employee well-being. This is not true in the majority of manufacturing.
There are some decent manufacturing jobs in the US, but the ratio of decent paid “good” ones, to shit companies who just beat every ounce of labor out of you before you destroy your body to pay you pennies is not great. Worker Unions and Employee Owned companies are where it’s at, but there is less of them than shit manufacturing companies beholden to their white collar, red tie shareholders.
Edit, for expamle, I actually got laid off by a company making car parts two weeks before Christmas. I was just temping there, had been four months. They told me they really liked my work, I was one of the better employees (wasnt hard at this place, the night shift all drank on the job and half the day folks didn’t give af). I wasnt going to stay with the company anyway, I just needed work for that winter. So they complimented my work ethic and skill, and then told me, a 26 year old single mom to one, that they had to lay me off because they couldnt afford to hire me until the new year, sorry its just before Christmas. This company was running more than half the year in the red.
Annoying as hell. I went back to the temp agency and they found me a job for a different company just for two weeks, cutting back scrap for this other company. I said sure. This new company was the employee owned one. I got lucky, one of the guys in the department was on thin ice already, so when it came out he was sharing a disgusting misogynist nickname for both me and the only other female (engineer) in the department, he got fired as his last strike. Guess who swooped in to take his job? Guess who got to smuggly tell the staffing agency there was no fucking way I was going back to the car parts place when they asked about me in January :)
Guess what happened with all good manufacturing jobs?
Globalization sent them elsewhere, labor conditions didn’t need to be competitive anymore, unions were destroyed through propaganda.
Without globalization those jobs would have stayed in the first world.
Assuming rebuilding manufacturing is the intended goal, how feasible is it to start at the local level, as if in a preindustrial society? That means towns would be going back to having their own smiths, bakers, butchers, like in preindustrial times? Guess that’s a consequence of deindustrializing—go back to making handmade stuff since the local businesses that once mass-produced closed long ago.
Feasible? Only in smallish communities surrounded by arable land. The urban and suburban life needs large scale industry to function at all.
The way I see,
Trump’sthe Trump Administration’s motives are:(1) Plunder the government of anything of value.
(2) Cause a recession so rich can buy everything up on the market.
(3) Sabotage America geopolitically on behalf of foreign adversaries, most notably Russia.
(4) Cement power in their control and go after any rivals.
Edit: For clarification, I don’t think it really matters what part of this is Trump himself versus the people he surrounds himself with and permits as the executive to do what they’re doing in their own personal agendas that align with one or more of these 4 points.
Nah.
These are definitely someone’s motives but not Trump’s.
He’s old and tired and petty. All he cares about is his ego, which he supports with power, revenge, and attention.
Trump doesn’t have any kind of plan other than waking up every day and stroking his ego.
Yeah that is fair and I should’ve elaborated this as the Trump Administration. As in, Trump doesn’t care because he both successfully ran from prison, and is now able to golf pretty much all he wants. If anything he probably resents America for refusing to vote for him in 2020. So now all the pilot fish surrounding Trump who helped get him elected for their own end are reaping their end of the bargain.
So naturally you’ve got the Russian assets (Gabbard, Flynn, Trump himself), the zealots like Mike Johnson and Stephen Miller, the corporate oligarchical opportunists like Musk. The power-hungry (like Trump’s sons, JDV, etc.), and so on. It’s a big fuck-you to America and it ultimately matters little to me whether it’s Trump or the broader Republican party. As far as I’m concerned they all made this; they all enabled it. They are criminal cartel.
Why Greenland?
It destroyed the Baltic alliances that are a PITA for Russia
Why kill academics?
Our economic dominance is a PITA for Russians
Why destroy the dollar?
Ibid
Why kill NATO?
Ibid
Seems like a lot of work for a lazy old man who’s not in fear from Russian mobsters
Exactly, it’s like thinking he had a plan the whole time to bankrupt his casinos or any of his other many failed ventures. He is just bad at leadership because his narcissism constantly self-sabotages, like with his casinos he constantly made terrible and expensive changes and his ego wouldn’t allow any one working for him to challenge him, so he’d blame everyone, stiff contractors, fire competent staff who could actually turn the situation around and the next thing you know the casino is failing despite it being basically a sure bet for profit in that time and place.
It’s the same here, the country will collapse because he isn’t just a bad leader, he is a collection of toxic qualities that almost guarantee bad organizational outcomes even given very positive starting conditions.
doesnt help that half the voting population seems to be just as narcist and ready to go down with the ship if certain groups get fucked harder
You’re giving him too much credit. His motives are:
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get richer
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have people kiss his ass so he can feel like a big boy
That’s it.
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