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.
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.