Six months into tariffs, businesses have no idea how to price anything

The ironic thing is that tariffs are the right tool to reindustrialize America (over the period of ~a decade) but theyre being wielded with the skill and grace of a crack addled ferret by somebody who thinks it's a magic wand.

i don't see any indication that either republicans or democrats intend to reindustrialize america

Agreed. This is hermeneutics for Trump's self enriching or just plain dumb actions.

Reindustrializing America requires people that are actually willing to work in a factory.

Won’t people be willing when the cost of living goes up so much and all the tech jobs are gone to foreign labor that they have to work factory jobs?

I never thought America was this fragile, or should i say the governmental mindset was, to just change things are essentially the backbone of what made America "America" in the first place. Changing policies that otherwise should not be changed is dangerous. When in doubt and there needs to be change then make the changes around the preexisting guidelines/settings, not change those first. Whether we like it or not enemies and competitive economies are reliant on our policies and , therefor vice versa. Changing big things first will make you the outcast, especially to our rich economy--relatively moderate population. Vs other economies of much larger population. There is fragile silver lining there to pay attention too IMO.

Most people don't work in tech. IIRC the most common jobs are retail, food service, healthcare, and education.

There won't be any factories since all the capital will be overseas.

Here's private construction of manufacturing facilities in the US.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PRMFGCON

Biden was inaugurated in January 2021 and Trump won the election in November 2024.

So you think going backwards and becoming a developing nation is a good thing?

that is actually true it seems https://www.molsonhart.com/blog/america-underestimates-the-d... most american workers in today s date simply dont have a good diet and work ethics like their ancestors used to have

What do you think happens when all the “developing” nations develop and refuse to get paid peanuts to make your phones?

Biden's major bills were very much indications of that ... even more so for the version before Manchin took a hatchet to it.

There was the pre-existing constitutional authority that congress had to regulate trade, and that was only supposed to be usurped by the president in limited circumstances...

Tariffs are protectionist, does not boost competitiveness. Tends to be the wrong tool, there are better.

Tax breaks, grants, physical infrastructure, creation of entire markets - those are better tools.

The issue with tariffs is non-competetive companies aren't required to become more competitive.

I mean consider it, a tariff is a tax on those buying a specific competitors goods. Even if tariffs were done surgically, still it seams like a tax benefit is a better tool

Pay them a decent wage and they will.

The Vulcans come visit Earth and the Federation gets formed. How the heck should I know?

But why compete on factories if that isn’t competitive with foreign factories?

I doubt explaining economic basics to an administration that seems incapable of understanding what a value-added tax is will be very fruitful

Because the immediate profits of capitalists shouldn't be the sole dictator of our economic activities and policies.

Im with you on that. But strategically retargeting the economy towards manual labor when you're big on services and digital innovation? That makes no sense. Being entirely self-sufficient is just not a good strategy in a highly competitive world connected by trade relations. Instead, tending to alliances and partnerships, assuring mutual interests and interlinked dependencies would be a lot smarter.

It all comes down to a lot of people in other parts of the world being willing to work for far less, for far longer hours, under far worse conditions, than Americans. Anything you can make in the USA will thus be more expensive, and until you’ve re-acquired all the domain knowledge lost to other nations, these quality will also be worse. As most people don’t want to buy something worse for more, you’ll need to force them to by making it unreasonable to import foreign goods (which is already happening), but that also means you limit the market to domestic. I fail to see how that is a viable strategy, unless you aim to wage war on the rest of the world and can’t trust anyone.

that requires giving advantage to such people - and stripping advantages from the rest

Even that's not enough, because the tariffs are hitting raw goods as well as finished products!

And we're decimating retail through tariffs, we're cutting as many people as we can out of food service, and we're ending much federal funding around education. Doesn't seem great.

That's how you become a poor country. Every country that closed itself off to the rest of the world becomes poor.

How many of them have MAGA-style slogans though? /s

There is evidence they are trying it just isnt particularly effective.

Part of the problem is that it runs up against the corporate lobbies who would rather take a higher short term profit margin, let American industry hollow out and buy gold + a luxury bunker in New Zealand to prep for the worst case scenario.

The fragility comes from a system vulnerability that nobody expected both the president and the congress to become nihilistic.

In my experience, most US tech workers see the non-tech US like most of the US sees the rest of the world: they intellectually understand that they’re a small piece of the pie, but living within an attention and influence bubble subconsciously makes people feel like the center of the universe. This can make average people feel superior and above average people feel exceptional.

Like in Garrison Keillor’s Lake Woebegone, where all of the children are above average.

>The issue with tariffs is non-competetive companies aren't required to become more competitive.

Yes they are. They are required to compete on a level playing field domestically and they still have to compete with marked up foreign goods.

Unfortunately it’s more complicated than that. Take car manufacturing in the US. The country doesn’t make enough steel, copper, etc to supply the industry, so domestic production depends on tariffed imports of these and various specialist components. Plus many parts cross the borders to and from Canada and Mexico for various stages of the manufacturing and testing process, incurring a tariff every time.

This means domestic cars and many other goods will get a tariff markup on a large proportion of their parts anyway. In many cases it will be cheaper or roughly equivalent to pay a single tariff on a finished product from abroad.

In theory it should be possible to bring in staged tarrifs, and use tax breaks and subsidies on on-shore necessary domestic production over time to transition the industry, but that’s not happening and there’s no sign it will happen. The administration doesn’t seem to be aware this is even an option.

You don't have to close yourself off to the world to foster local industry.

Would average American citizen like to pay x3 for made in America goods instead of Chinese?

Why they don't do it now? One could easily replace 90% of consumed good with US made.

This is what happens in imperfect systems. The leadership neglected the huge PR disaster illegal immigration was having.

Tariffs are reactionary to China’s explicit mercantilism. There is a reason we have a word for what is going on, it’s common human behavior.

>Unfortunately it’s more complicated than that. Take car manufacturing in the US. The country doesn’t make enough steel, copper, etc to supply the industry, so domestic production depends on tariffed imports

No, it's not. The US making not enough steel is not an immutable law of the universe. It is a result of the same kind of industrial decline which tariffs would reverse by making it more economic to produce steel locally.

It only wouldn't work on products which the US has no fundamental ability to make like bananas (which yes, Trump did...).

>This means domestic cars and many other goods will get a tariff markup

Yeah, that's kind of how tariffs work - there's always a markup.

>In many cases it will be cheaper or roughly equivalent to pay a single tariff on a finished product from abroad.

That depends entirely on how you structure your tariffs. If it is the case you've structured them incredibly poorly.

>In theory it should be possible to bring in staged tarrifs, and use tax breaks and subsidies on on-shore necessary domestic production over time to transition the industry, but that’s not happening

I believe I covered that when I said that the tariffs were "being wielded with the skill and grace of a crack addled ferret".