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.
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.
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.
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
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.