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.
I contend that actively trying to destroy the country without a good reason or an exit plan counts as incompetent.
Especially when he’s tearing down the very systems that allowed his loser ass to fail upwards to begin with.
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.
The Heritage Foundation is not new; their last big project was Ronald Reagan, and they were very successful in destroying the economy in the long run. That also started us down this path that got us to Trump to begin with.
Trump would never have happened if there wasn’t mass amounts of economic hardship.
I think “evil” is a better word to describe them.
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
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.
If you sit down and think about it, this is the easiest way for the federal government to increase revenue without directly increasing taxes.
Except that when tariffs are this high, they discourage imports and purchasing. It’s self-defeating.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
Leave Russia out of it. It’s your own rigged election system and lack of real competition that led to this
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”
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.
