alt Hacker NewsIt’s reasonable to want to bring back american manufacturing. But the random, temper-tantrum, market-manipulation tariffs are not going to do that. America isn’t going to all of a sudden produce tonnes and tonnes of xmas decorations every year just because of a 50% tariff on all chinese goods that may or may not be around in 6 months. All that’s going to happen is xmas decorations are going to be more expensive.
An actual plan would be targeting specific industries where america has the ability to scale up, and having congress pass tariffs that slowly ramp up over time to allow a smooth transition.
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Maybe even use the tariff proceeds to provide incentives to those very same domestic industries? (I am not an economist.)
I don't think proposed plan with tariffs will be effective, because once scaled up and generating enough revenue, MBA will come and outsource everything, to make more money
> It’s reasonable to want to bring back american manufacturing.
Capitalism produces where it is convenient to do so.
And no politician can change it.
You can try to protect very few critical sectors, but not whole "manufacturing" which by the way keeps rising in US since ever.
What politicians want to sell is the "good old times of well paying manufacturing jobs".
Robots have long come for those.
An actual plan would look like the IIJA, IRA, CHIPS Act -- what Biden was doing, but act larger scale. The problem with globalization is not that free trade failed to create a surplus, it's that 150% of the surplus went to capital and -50% went to labor, which can and should be fixed with tax and spend. Instead, of course, we didn't tax capital and we spent the money on stupid wars. That said, good industrial policy includes tariffs too, but Democrats knew this! Biden wasn't allergic to tariffs! The 100% EV tariff (and EV subsidies and battery subsidies) happened during his administration. Aside from the fact that giving Elon everything he wanted was a massive political miscalculation, it was good industrial policy, we just needed more of it in order to affect the macro.
That's the tragedy of it -- Democrats in office understood the macro picture and worked diligently and intelligently to fix it, the spurned labor interests in the MAGA movement understood what had hurt them and correctly rejected it, but the former didn't know how to message to the latter so a demagogue swooped in and here we are.
The gonzo free-trade rhetoric of the Clinton era should never have happened, second best time to get rid of it was 10 years ago before Trump I, third best time was a few years ago before Trump II, but the fourth best time is now.