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kshri24yesterday at 9:28 PM1 replyview on HN

> whereas a domestic product costs

There is hardly anything that is made domestically in the US. So the premise falls apart almost immediately. This premise works great for India where domestic production exceeds exports by massive margins and the economy depends mostly on domestic economy. It does not work for US where there is hardly any domestic production and is totally import driven economy.


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AnthonyMouseyesterday at 9:33 PM

The US has the second largest manufacturing base in the world after China. It's larger than India and is even slightly larger than the EU. It used to be the largest. Moreover, if the premise is that you're trying to bring back manufacturing capacity, it doesn't matter if something is currently made in the US, what matters is what it would cost if it was, because a tariff in excess of the difference would then make that cost effective.

Obviously in the latter case you would then have to wait until that manufacturing capacity comes back online, but "customers switch to a domestic product" isn't the only thing that can cause foreign manufacturers to have to lower prices. They could also switch to substitute products or reduce consumption and then foreign manufacturers would still have to lower prices to limit the extent to which that happens.

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