The only way that a 10% tariff could bring jobs back would be if the difference between paying someone in the US to do it is less than 10% more than paying someone outside the US to do it. Otherwise it will still be profitable to do this outside the US, and this is just a tax hike on Americans, who don't generally seem to understand that tariffs are taxes.

Would IMO need significantly more tariffs to effect significant shifts (and, even more importantly, some certainty that those tariffs are going to stick for the next decades, which is hard to provide).

Chinese mean manufacturing wage is ~$25k/year (purchasing parity adjusted, $15k unadjusted, for an average 49h/week of work). If you want domestic products to be competitive, you basically need the difference paid by consumers/taxpayers in tariffs or subsidies.

I don't think current tariff level is going to move lots of manufacturing jobs into the US (and I would personally argue that most Americans don't even want those jobs as they are currently). Instead, I'd expect a slow shift towards countries with favorable local wage/tariff combination (India, Vietnam, etc.).

Higher tariffs won't do it alone. Time is needed, as well. The current tariffs are likely seen as temporary.

If you start a factory to produce on shore, you would have to recoup capital costs off the margin available due to undercutting offshore factories while tariffs are higher.

When the administration or whims change, the tariffs go away and your factory loses that margin and isn't as profitable.

> being more assembly jobs back to North America

Electronics Assembly jobs already exist in North America - but in Mexico.

They aren't going to bring assembly jobs back to the US, because electronics assembly is very low value and low margins.

Bringing it all back to North America isn't going to help much, since its almost impossible to locally source every single component that goes into a modern computing device. There there is the cost of labor.

Tariffs have various long term effects that are useful. One is shifting where that manufacturing is done and in the longer term it could bring it back, depending on the cost of doing it in a different, non China, country. But another long term effect is geopolitical - China is in a more difficult economic position than the US and tariffs will make it difficult for them to keep building their military and difficult to envision war. It will also weaken their authoritarian government, which has an interest in annexing Taiwan and also in undermining the US, Europe, and other free societies. The other benefits of tariffs matter - it isn’t just about the short term effects (of inflating costs or whatever).

> How much of a price hike can actually being more assembly jobs back to North America? Or are they already brought back?

And at what cost even if they did/do.

Washing machine tariffs resulted in a pass through cost greater than 100%. The employment effect (1800-2000 jobs) but the cost to the public of those jobs was $800,000+ each:

* https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20190611

Prosperous America, a partisan think tank, thought this was generally positive:

* https://prosperousamerica.org/economic-view-tariff-jumping-i...

Looking at it from the "national security" perspective, they aren't exactly wrong:

> Democratic countries’ economies are mainly set up as free market economies with redistribution, because this is what maximizes living standards in peacetime. In a free market economy, if a foreign country wants to sell you cheap cars, you let them do it, and you allocate your own productive resources to something more profitable instead. If China is willing to sell you brand-new electric vehicles for $10,000, why should you turn them down? Just make B2B SaaS and advertising platforms and chat apps, sell them for a high profit margin, and drive a Chinese car.

> Except then a war comes, and suddenly you find that B2B SaaS and advertising platforms and chat apps aren’t very useful for defending your freedoms. Oops! The right time to worry about manufacturing would have been years before the war, except you weren’t able to anticipate and prepare for the future. Manufacturing doesn’t just support war — in a very real way, it’s a war in and of itself.

* https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/manufacturing-is-a-war-now

There's the old saying about WW2: The Allies won [against the Nazis] from British intelligence, Russian blood, and American steel. The silliness of the current situation is that American can't go it alone anymore, but allies are now being alienated.

So bringing back manufacturing jobs wouldn't be a bad thing, but what do you have to do to accomplish it? If China is designated as a 'country of concern' ("enemy"), perhaps target them, but why 'go after' your nominal friends?

As others here have said, an increase of only 10% or 20% will do nothing, not even motivate other countries to blink. They'll just reciprocate with tariffs of their own which will add inflation across even more products. To motivate structural change, you'd need tariffs of 100% to 500% -- forcing a new business model.

The real objective of Trump's mindless minions (e.g. Musk) is to create bragging points that will motivate bloviate-receptive voters to believe something was done by the administration to 'fix' problems, thereby increasing support for the party without actually doing anything useful.

Likely, none, zero, zilch. It will just cause inflation as it spreads across goods and domestic companies raise prices simply because they can.

What drove labour intensive assembly jobs away from the USA was wages that are a fraction of what the USA has, and correspondingly lower standing of living.

If sustained long enough tariffs will fix that. Costs will rise in the USA, exports will drop because the price of everything made in the USA will go up, the dollar will then drop, living standards will drop, and eventually comparative wages will start to approach those in Asia. Once that happens, assembly jobs will naturally migrate back to the USA.

The USA has avoided that outcome for years by manufacturing very high margin products. Think Intel, SpaceX, vaccines, and the software giants like Microsoft, Google and Meta. That came at the cost of bifurcation of the economy, with tech sector jobs paying outlandish wages compared to what someone manufacturing a car could get. It seems that pissed so many people off they elected Trump.

Trump probably thinks is the fix, but changing is coming no matter who is in power. As China, India in particular, now even those "high brain power" jobs are under price stress. Chip manufacturing has almost gone, the software companies are paying 1/4 or 1/10 the price of engineering talent by hiring overseas, India has become the pharmaceutical manufacturing powerhouse of the world.

So you don't need lower tariffs to fix it. The fix is coming regardless of who you vote for. All tariffs will do is accelerate the process. But if there is one process you didn't want accelerated, it's this one.

It's not all doom and gloom. Look to Canada, Australia and Europe to see what the final outcome will be like. It's not so bad, is it? You probably don't want to end up like the Britain, as that would mean a few rich with most of the USA ending up at the living standard of Mississippi.