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.
You don’t say. That kind of seemed obvious from the very fucking start. Trump is absurdly incompetent or he is actively working to destroy the country. I honestly can’t tell which it is.
Trump may be incompetent but the architects of project 2025 are, unfortunately, not. Trump is merely their most useful idiot.
Oh, they’re incompetent, too. They are just very effective at installing their incompetence into the government.
I really think it’s just not a plan, but a bunch of individual wishlists. It’s not that evil is incompetent but it’s a bunch of people each pursuing their own agenda, each using the orange fool to get what they want. The part where we may get lucky is each is too egotistical to work together, and Trump is to weak a leader to make them all head in the same directions.
It’s not a bunch of incompetent fools, is a herd of evil cats
Sorry, I had to.
He’s working very hard to meet his campaign promises. They were too grandeur. The government needs a massive increase in revenue to be able to meet the promises he’s made. If you sit down and think about it, this is the easiest way for the federal government to increase revenue without directly increasing taxes. Then he does wild deportations to distract everyone from what he’s doing.
All to keep the top 1%'s share of total adjusted gross income to share of total income paid at 26.3% and 45.8%. Crazy to me that the top 1% of earners cry so hard about contributing a proportional amount in taxes.
I honestly can’t think of promises that would require more money.
And the simplest way to do it is to just spend the money. The government isn’t required to have money in order to spend it.The richest make more money when they sell more and the stock market does better. The tariffs hurt them more than a tax increase would because they can’t dodge revenue loss and market devaluation.
He’s not running a grand plan. He’s not a mastermind. He’s doing exactly what he said he would. He had to get back into power to avoid consequences. He did so by putting all the awful people with irrational agendas into positions of power so they would support him. He doesn’t give a shit about the 1% unless they’re helping him, and he doesn’t give a shit about the 99% unless they’re voting for people who can help him.
All the “distractions” are him letting the people who got him into power do what they want, because it doesn’t hurt him and he doesn’t care.
The deportations aren’t a distraction, they’re the point for the racists who directly helped him.It’s not about who in society it helps, rich or not. It’s about who in his cabinet it helps. Everyone else can go fuck themselves.
I honestly can’t think of promises that would require more money.
There are quite literally dozens. Bringing manufacturing back to the US, eliminating income tax, eliminating tax on overtime/per diem, cut “energy prices” in half in 12 months (max of 18 months), end the Russia/Ukraine war, make in vitro fert free, end birthright citizenship, cut corporate tax rate from 21% to 15%, eliminate tax on social security, car loan interest tax deductible… The list goes on. All of this will cost quite literally trillions of dollars and none of that has anything even tangentially related to his trillion dollar plan for mass deportations.
We’re looking at the largest increase in federal spending in the history of the United States here. More than any war ever. You have to pay for it somehow.
Only one of those is actually something that would cost money. The rest either don’t cost money (how does ending birthright citizenship require revenue increases?), or they’re plans to reduce revenue.
One doesn’t typically count a plan for reducing revenue as the reason for increasing revenue.Again, the government doesn’t need to match spending with revenue. When you control the money supply you can just spend what you need. There’s an impact to doing so to much, but that probably won’t come to a head for a few years.
It’s not a grand scheme. It’s surface level opportunism.
the government doesn’t need to match spending with revenue.
Governments can spend at a deficit, but there’s a limit to how much debt they can accumulate. Other countries have found that out. US was in a special position in the economy as the largest economy, a strong position in international trade and a lot of dollar investment or dollar based trading. We could get away it’s more, but at some point it still hits a limit and falls apart.
We’re already at a point where debt payments are one of the biggest pieces of the federal budget, blocking out better uses for that money. We keep stealing from the future and eventually we’ll get there to find everything gone.
And that’s before you have an incompetent leader destroying all that dollar influence, everything that made that special economic situation possible. We’re fucking around with that special economic position and will come out of this subject to the same deficit limits as any other country. Well find out our accumulated debt is beyond prudence for a “normal” economy and we’re no longer special enough to ignore that
We were in a counterintuitive position where spending more money for things like infrastructure and chips act was ok because of our special economic situation plus it’s an investment in the future that should have paid off. Whereas the orange fools approach to spending less money just risks our special economic situation that lets us get away with fucking around, plus points to a future of despair: it turns into losing more money in the future
Yup, that was the “can’t do it too much” part. :)
Any of it would be relevant if I thought trump or the Republican party cared about those consequences.
The worse part of it is
There’s an impact to doing so to much, but that probably won’t come to a head for a few years.
That’s the potential economic catastrophe. So far we haven’t had to face many consequences of excessive debt accumulation, but if those idiots succeed in destroying the special circumstances that let us get away with more fiscal recklessness than other countries, that reckoning could happen very suddenly.
It’s a similar feel to climate tipping points. It’s unique enough situation that we really don’t have a good way to predict the likelihood, the timing, the severity, but we’re not just playing with fire, we’re running around holding a tank of burning napalm over our heads claiming: no big deal, no one’s been burnt yet
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.
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”
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.
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.
that’s what happens when you have zero fucking plan at all
You mean “cOnCePts Of a PlAn” don’t count?
You mean any knowledge at all about anything or thinking ahead , which this administration hasn’t done at all, seeing as they and DOGE have just cut jobs everywhere and then these agencies have to hire people back because they’re understaffed and shit is falling apart.
You got to stop to call them incompetent. It’s on purpose. They’re traitors and are yearning for a crash.
Don’t fall for the simple explanation. Both answers are true. The objectives are all about greed and betrayal, but the means are still heavily driven by incompetence. Just because someone is a criminal does not make them a competent criminal.
Theyre not competend at leading a government.
Theyre very competend in destruction of it, and since that’s their goal, it’s dangerous to assume they’re incompetent.
Never underestimate your foes.
There are easier, safer way to crash the economy that are far less public
I get the feeling those who insist there is a plan, just don’t want to admit the emperor has no clothes
Arent they following Project 2025?
Which is hardly a plan… more like a collection of terrible ideas
Remember that the entire Tariff nonsense is the brain child of Navarro who literally invented a supposed expert to justify how they could work. This is literally a fraudulent idea to fill a shitty book that, by terrible happenstance, found an idiot stupid and powerful enough to implement it
We are lucky Trump did not find Jack and Beanstalk first or he would be opening holes anywhere to plant magic seeds
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.
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.
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.
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
What Trump and MAGA wanted can be done… but over a period of many years (like 20+ years) of careful and purposeful policy making.
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.
Trump’s pettiness, greed, unstoppable urge to gloat, and his understanding that if he lays the foundation for something useful, only his precedessors might reap the benefits
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
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
It was never possible even under normal circumstances
Just imagine the profits from artificial scarcity, end of times riots and price gouging the ever living shit out of every citizen you can.
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
You can’t make long term plans for building factories, sourcing raw materials and hiring people if the Dynamite Monkey in Chief can blow it all up on a whim.
As well, why would you when you can just hunker down for 4 years and wait for the next administration to get rid of the tariffs? They already have millions and billions invested outside of the country. Why spend that much again for a potentially short term problem?
So how come the people in MANUFACTURING couldn’t see his proposal in MANUFACTURING was a big crock of shit?
