'We Currently Have No Container Ships,' Seattle Port Says

A funny thing is the US could easily sanction any country in the 90s because it controlled so much manufacturing. Nowadays we can’t even sanction Houthis since they can get everything from China. Judging by the port situation, soon China can sanction us, easily.

The general idea is to restore that order, and decouple from China. The problem is such things will require serious leadership, not mafia style extortion.

If Trump was really going to focus on China in a constructive manner, he wouldn’t have gone off and pissed off all of our allies first. Our allies now are just as likely now to form trade agreements with China as they are with the USA, since we now appear just as bad to them as China (even worse, we don’t have much to offer compared to China). As it stands now, China couldn’t have asked for a better situation of American just deciding to go off on everyone at once.

Even Canada is now looking seriously at making a trade agreement with China than with the USA, which was unthinkable just 3 months ago.

It's too bad this administration is taking it's stand very incompetently, by ostracizing all our allies and smashing our govt capacity

"taking a stand" - is this what the narrative is going to shift to when the decades-out-of-date approach of this mentally ill false idol blows up into widespread shortages and high inflation (again) ? "Our country is in ruins, but at least we took a stand"

you're right but opponents of trump would have far more ground to stand on anything if they started by saying "well we agree with XYZ that trump wants to do, let's offer other strategies he can try if what hes doing now doesnt work".

that is not happening.

This would be easier to believe if tariffs were actually helping American manufactures. As of now, the tariffs on raw materials and high uncertainty means life is getting significantly worse for them. Those actions are drastic, yes, but they are harming the wrong side (American one).

I think there's plenty of ground for his critics to stand on.

We already had another strategy, and it was called the trans pacific partnership. Trump pulled the US out of that in his first term.

Nope. Wholehearted rejection of literally every policy, executive order, layoff, lawsuit, impoundment, appointment that this technofascist wannabe tries to pull. The constitution spells out how he can accomplish his goals, and everything he's trying to do requires an act of congress, and there's been literally nothing. If he's so popular and such a visionary dealmaker, why can't he get literally any actual laws passed through a congress completely controlled by his party?

There is no universe where any set of policies will restore manufacturing to the US that can compete with China

The truth is there is no will to sanction them, same with Russia.

Threat with sanction anyone who do economic activities with houthis and actually do it later.

I think this will be overshadowed by all the other garbage. Kinda like Germans sometimes say „well Hitler built the Autobahn“ but the industrial scale mass murder of minorities and political opponents kinda overshadows this just a little bit (it’s also false. But nobody gives a fuck about the damn highways).

Not proven - america can engage in selected manufacturing esp if profit isn't the main tool of measurement.

Also keep in mind then ... China can't be cheap labor forever either ... either it will regress or we're all be buying from Africa which is the last place there's lower cost labor at scale.

In other words it's a double edge sword for China.

I think there is, but it would screw over large capital owners and would be practically impossible in the US political system. The policies I believe could too it are also too radical to realistically be implemented in Europe.

We know that massive investment in early education with tutoring etc. could easily give the average US child the equivalent of today's top 2% level academic performance. This would be expensive, but essentially unproblematic it will never happen. Similarly, university education could be made publicly funded, and also cheaper. Here in Sweden it's cheaper per head than highschool education.

We know that physician labour in the US cost more than it should due to a shortage due to too few residencies. It could be solved tomorrow, and all US medical system problems could be solved over 15-20 years.

You could ensure that there's investment capital and no inflation, sidestepping the simultaneous inflation and need for investment caused by supply shocks due to war and technology change, by making everybody save a certain inflation-dependent fraction of their income from wages.

When a company is doing weird legal stuff to prevent their competitor from opening a warehouse in a certain, crush them-- impose criminal penalties, throw the planners and everyone who knew about the idea in jail.

15 years of this and you'd be in another world, one in which China might not be such a competitor after all. The only reason you aren't moving towards this world is because 'you' in the sense of the donors and the political leadership don't want to do it. There's even people who don't want publicly funded school lunches. With this attitude one makes oneself irrelevant.

Sure there is, it's just a real monkey's paw.

save your energy for the truly heinous things that trump is going to do (starting with the abrego garcia case, and worse).

then, when you have the time, go read article I section 8 and ask yourself how much stuff that isn't in there congress just decided to start authorizing we do. do that before trotting out constitutionalism arguments -- and then search the constitution for where it says the supreme court should be doing judicial review (I'm not saying it's a bad idea). the constitution is basically meaningless in this country and has been from since the beginning.

Sanctioning power comes from dollar primacy. When the whole world settles transactions in your currency then you have the power to switch off other countries foreign exchanges pretty easily.

The dollar has been in steady decline since the late 70's. As it's share of reserves drops, do goes the effectiveness of sanctions.

China can have cheap labor forever because they're an authoritarian government that runs "re-education camps" with enormous numbers of people in them.

I have no idea what any of your comment has to do with manufacturing infrastructure

It would have to be deeply painful and it would take decades. Voters would never tolerate it.

But that's assuming there's even a theoretical way to do it, which there isn't. We just don't have the natural resources or the political structure.

Manufacturing today is industrial automation, mechanical engineering, etc.

If you want to build it you need capital and a large mass of competent people. China has 4x your population, so if you are to do that match them in the number of people who can come up with a concept for a factory and implement it.

You have no chance without transforming your society. You can't match them and have all this inefficient industry with middle-men and insurance companies, local hospital monopolies, local food monopolies, etc. If you are to have any chance all of that has to go away. You can't have people doing things that don't matter, you have to educate everyone you have, from the earliest education to the later stages to get them to a much higher level of capability than they are at today. You can't waste people on being hungry or not having a tutor.

If you are wasting people on being hungry, not having a tutor, in inefficient middle-men industries, etc. the China will simply steamroll you by being as many as you and us Europeans together even after a population halving and by maintaining their current competence level.

Uh huh -- eventually even the Chinese won't put up with that in the long term. If however the Chinese gov run things like Russia or NK, for example, I'd reduce TTL by 50%. When fundamental problems persist overly long it goes from problem to distortion to corruption then purifies then explodes out when least expected. Here in the US we're going through a light case of that. Somehow the things Congress is supposed to handle has come out of the morass as President Trump.

Your faith that slavery and authoritarianism can be (and will be) overthrown by citizens is not based on reality.

For the vast majority of human history, most societies were slaveholding monarchies. There's very little incentive for Chinese people to organize when the slaves are "criminals" or Uyghur minorities.

Hey you wanna go there, go there. That's an assignation more severe than anything the west would or could or want to make. Nobody deserves that. N'uff said.

> Sanctioning power comes from dollar primacy

My worries is what sustains the dollar primacy. If the US can't make what's even essential for the nation, I'm curious how other nations will want our so-called services.

> My worries is what sustains the dollar primacy

Manufacturing was never part of the equation. It's somewhat ironically because of the trade deficit. Running a deficit blasts dollars out into the world. Countries put those dollars back in US banks and buy US treasuries as their reserves (hence the dollar as a reserve currency).

It's maybe the best economic deal any country has ever gotten, and the US is in the middle of blowing it all up.