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.
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.
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…
The math is such that I expect to see companies that make things in the us leave. Makes more sense to build in the UK and add the 10% tarriff for your thing made of chinese parts than absorb the XX% chinese tarriffs and have to raise the price even more in the us. If the product is sold abroad at all its a slam dunk to move out.
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?
Just imagine the profits from artificial scarcity, end of times riots and price gouging the ever living shit out of every citizen you can.
that’s what happens when you have zero fucking plan at all
You got to stop to call them incompetent. It’s on purpose. They’re traitors and are yearning for a crash.
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
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 mean “cOnCePts Of a PlAn” don’t count?
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.
It was never possible even under normal circumstances
back to the mines!
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.
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
“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.
What Trump and MAGA wanted can be done… but over a period of many years (like 20+ years) of careful and purposeful policy making.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 :)
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
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.
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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.
