Trump will kill CHIPS Act by gutting NIST employees
semiwiki.com
semiwiki.com
> Earlier this year, he said: "Disabling or destroying TSMC is table stakes if China is taking over Taiwan. Would we be so insane as to allow the world's key semiconductor company [to] fall untouched into the hands of an aggressive PRC? Taiwanese should realize that would be the least of their problems."
> Earlier this year, the US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo told the House Appropriations Committee that a hypothetical Chinese invasion of Taiwan and seizure of TSMC would be “absolutely devastating” for the United States.
> She said that “the United States buys 92 percent of its leading edge chips from TSMC in Taiwan,” meaning any disruption to that supply chain would have a significant impact on the US economy
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/trumps-undersecre...
Its really the mood of the given day of one man, known for his wild emotional swings which rule most if not all of his decisions. Everybody understood the game quickly, leading people on all sides are not stupid in these matters. The rest are just official PR statements 'to keep face'.
https://www.state.gov/u-s-relations-with-taiwan/
The United States’ approach to Taiwan has remained consistent across decades and administrations. The United States has a longstanding one China policy, which is guided by the Taiwan Relations Act, the three Joint Communiques, and the Six Assurances. We continue to have an abiding interest in peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait. We oppose any unilateral changes to the status quo from either side. We expect cross-Strait differences to be resolved by peaceful means, free from coercion, in a manner acceptable to the people on both sides of the Strait. Consistent with the Taiwan Relations Act, the United States makes available defense articles and services as necessary to enable Taiwan to maintain a sufficient self-defense capability – and maintains the capacity to resist any resort to force or other forms of coercion that would jeopardize the security, or the social or economic system, of the people on Taiwan.
Keep in mind, that if we go to war with China, they'll probably have to reinstate the draft.
because if you look at Big Law, investment banking, or private equity, there are a lot of highly-educated Americans who are willing to work as hard as anyone on earth.
so it's got to be something about TSMC's recruiting pipeline, or perhaps what motivations the Americans who get educated for the skills they need have, rather than specifically American laziness.
The real theme of the post-08 crash is "no one wants to pay americans anymore". And it's only been spreading from industry to industry as the billionaires figure out how to cut american labor but benefit from american consumerism.
There are no solutions; only trade-offs. And the US, like many first world countries, has picked trade-offs that raise the average COL.
We could arrest pretty much all cost of living growth if all renters (both businesses and individuals) just decided not to continuously agree to pay higher prices for the same land/apartments/buildings.
Yes wages might go up (someone who can use Sharepoint[0] is probably more efficient than someone who can use a physical filing system) but you need far fewer people to do it. So costs can still go down.
> We could arrest pretty much all cost of living growth if all renters (both businesses and individuals) just decided not to continuously agree to pay higher prices for the same land/apartments/buildings.
I agree that most of cost of living is housing-related, but rent price increases are a function of population increasing faster than housing. That's the thing to address.
[0] or something good
> I agree that most of cost of living is housing-related, but rent price increases are a function of population increasing faster than housing. That's the thing to address.
Yes we should build a whole lot more and it will slow residential price growth, but no, in general this will not actually reduce the cost of living. For example, this doesn't address the increased competition (i.e. increased prices) for commercial spaces, which gets baked into every coffee, garment, or meal you purchase.
America does have cost disease, but it’s from more than just politicians spending too much. It’s also things like NIMBYs restricting housing supply or the insane bureaucratic explosion in health care.
>So likely no great loss for hem.
This I agree with. This whole tariff deal was supposed to encourage this exact behavior. Have more foreign companies setup on american soil so they can provide american jobs. So we arguably lose out a lot more on this action.
Arizona fab has had top notch quality, out-pacing Taiwan's yields. https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/ts...
They're making 4nm chips too now, doing fine. https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/ts...
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/29/business/tsmc-phoenix-tai...
Thus depriving Taiwan of its much-needed intellectual and human capital to sustain its Silicon Shield defence strategy.
I frequently browse social media sites that are popular among the Taiwanese, and my impression is that they are generally unhappy about this state of affairs, seeing it as an act of economic coercion from the US.
Welcome to how rest of the world feels like now
If you're European or Canadian, welcome to the club.
Repatriate and give them sme tax credit.
I don’t understand why they would care to move the money out of the countries where they earned that money and are likely to be expanding more than they are in the U.S. anyways.
The Chinese can't believe their good luck. No need for them to do anything -- just let the US self-destruct.
They don't. It was always a lie. The want to make their own lives great(er) at the expense of the rest of the human species.
Way too many people were somehow conned by an expert conman who had previously conned them. Short memories and wishful thinking is a dangerous combo.
Once the propagandist has convinced their target of the other's inherent malevolence, the target will no longer seek to understand the perspective of the dreaded other. Their every statement will be viewed with suspicion.
They only say they want to make their country great, the tricky devils!
But I have a different theory. I think that in this case, the propagandists are trying to convince the other of their own inherent malevolence.
Not to say liberal media doesn’t try to do this, but let’s be honest? Trump is a world’s better marketer than the folks at MSNBC.
And I think he thinks it is useful to be so extreme that it also creates that divisiveness. Like as objectively as I try to look at Trump, I think he intentionally obfuscates his intentions to increase divisiveness.
No, stupid people are easier to herd. That's all there is to it.
Remember that Trump only turned to the Republican party after trying everything else first.
Which will be pointless and fail, especially against a country like China.
However, I'm old enough to recall when America was convinced by Rumsfeld et. al. to send US soldiers in harms way -- over 4000 of them died in Iraq -- for some obscenely lucrative oil contracts.
That qualifies as "die en masse", and it was over some really flimsy pretext, which was later proved to be completely false.
Also 4K is a drop in the bucket compared to what it would take to defend Taiwan.
a) Invade Taiwan in the next 1-2 years
b) Extort by threat of invasion
https://www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2025/01/china-suddenly-...
https://www.news.com.au/technology/innovation/military/built...
This is such a funny comment because it’s both right and oh so wrong.
Yes, the U.S. was likely never gonna send troops to fight in Taiwan (although it has sent troops to fight in Korea, so it’s not as much of a stretch as you claim).
But the bluff worked because the U.S.’s promises held value. To the point that the U.S. didn’t explicitly say they would defend Taiwan against China, but China was avoiding confrontation with Taiwan simply to prevent the U.S. from saying they would do that.
Of course, Donald Trump damaged that significantly in his first term and has torn that to shreds in his second term.
With Trump’s nakedly transparent and quod pro quo based foreign affairs, it’s hard to remember how much soft power value the U.S. had built up over decades where it could achieve what it wanted without even saying anything, which has basically been destroyed over about a decade.
Now Trump is burning alliances and soft power and threatening to burn the dollar.
It seems like imploding the postwar order and the US position therein is a right wing goal.
Like tankie communists they care more about the ideology than the real outcome. They are in love with a fantasy of how the world ought to look and if it doesn’t look that way it must burn.
This is why I have a low opinion of all ideologues, those on the left as well. They will all kill and impoverish us if the square peg does not fit in the round hole.
There are also white nationalists for whom white birth rates and ethnic cleansing are the only things that matter. Same deal there.
Is it important enough to start WWIII. That’s another question.
OP is saying that Taiwan is "some small random island" from the point of view of most Americans, its merits notwithstanding. And given everything the current Trump administration has done so far (which suggests that they view alliances, promises, and treaties in extremely transactional terms), it doesn't seem unfair or unreasonable to assume that they share this view too.
Tariffs are both subsidies and taxes at the same time; see "Tariffs Give U.S. Steelmakers a Green Light to Lift Prices":
> Executives from U.S. steel companies were enthusiastic backers of the 2018 tariffs and have urged Trump to deploy them again in his second term. They have called for the elimination of tariff exemptions and duty-free import quotas, saying those carve-outs allow unfairly low-price steel to enter the U.S. and undermine the steel market.
[…]
> Higher prices for imported steel are often followed by domestic suppliers raising their own prices, which then get passed through supply chains, manufacturing executives said. For consumers already reeling from rising retail prices and inflation, pricier steel and aluminum could further lift costs for durable goods like appliances and automobiles, as well as consumer products with aluminum packaging, such as canned beverages.
> “The issue with tariffs is everybody raises their prices, even the domestics,” said Ralph Hardt, owner of Belleville International, a Pennsylvania-based manufacturer of valves and components used in the energy and defense industries. Steel and aluminum are Belleville’s largest expenses.
* http://archive.is/https://www.wsj.com/economy/trade/trump-ta...
So tariffs are taxes in the sense that consumers are paying higher prices. But they are subsidies in that domestic companies don't have as much pressure on prices and can get more money.
So if you want to help a particular industry might as well just go with subsidies directly instead of the taxation add-on as well.
Right now our industries are competing with slave labor and lax environmental controls. If we don’t want either of those things here, we can’t allow groups who do those things to sell into our market freely.
The idea that we tax our people and hand the money to our companies so they can compete with polluting slave labor is incredibly more complicated than just putting up barriers to entering our market. Not to mention the fact that the pollution in China et al affects us here also.
In my opinion we should just not trade with countries who don’t have labor and environmental standards at parity with ours. Tariffs are the next best thing.
It would be nice if tariffs would serve that purpose in this timeline, but they won't. The actual "we" imposing tariffs is diametrically opposed to the "we" (me included) that want better labor and environmental standards (well, a planet that isn't a cinderblock by 2025). Trump, Musk, and their ideological collaborators are probably dismantling the NLRB, the EEOC, and EPA as we speak.
IIRC, the funds went to mostly red states. So MAGA people, happy your guy came through for you again ?
But yes. I remember when Americans used to care about politicians creating American jobs as a populist stance. Those days feel like decades ago now with people celebrating the literal slashing of government jobs (who surprise, is the biggest US employer).
Why would you think there needs to be one giant employer instead of a healthy market of many?
Stats:
The Bureau of Labor and Statistics puts the total number of Americans employed by government (at any level, federal, state, local, or military) at roughly 23 million, as of Feb 2025. At the same time, private businesses employ roughly 132 million Americans, vastly outstripping the employment of the government.
This is what you want. More teachers than administrators. More private employment than tax-supported services. We need government. We need good and effective bureaucrats, even. But we should always be cautious about the economic friction that increases in the government sector usually cause.
If this is an attempt to free up labor for private industry to further diminish worker power and wages, the demographics crunch comes regardless due to the compressing working age population pyramid. The federal government creates jobs for both unprofitable yet necessary work and is an employer of last resort in the ways it offers and structures work available (military spouse flexible work arrangements, locating offices and working spaces for federal work in communities where no other employer will offer jobs, etc).
> Most Americans care about creating American jobs in the private sector not about growing the government by creating more government jobs. More Americans are employed by industry and small businesses (as it should be) than by government.
The American electorate, broadly speaking, is grossly uneducated and unsophisticated in these matters unfortunately. They don’t even know who pays tariffs, why they’re inflationary, etc.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/14/politics/the-biggest-predicto...
sure, millions of businesses if you divide it that way. Meanwhile the government is still the largest single employer in the us. Wal-Mart's global market, by comparison (the largest private market in the US) is 2.1m.
>Why would you think there needs to be one giant employer instead of a healthy market of many?
Why is Google bigger than a startup? They deal with more money and people. The government isn't running like a business but is still running on a scale of managing trillions of dollars and caring for hundreds of millions of americans. Why wouldn't our government be large?
Also, private sector hasn't exactly been stable the last 15 years if you're a normal worker. That's pretty much the one advantadge of public sector until employers can't throw out employees like livestock whenever they fancy. People claim to want more teachers but treat them horribly.
Honestly, as a recovering libertarian, I'm actually pretty enthusiastic about creating government-run services. I'd like to see far more of them, and thus far more people employed by government. For instance: I'd much rather use a weather app put out by NOAA (if only such a thing existed) than any of the private alternatives (whose business model is really to secretly invade your privacy and sell your data).
> Why would you think there needs to be one giant employer instead of a healthy market of many?
"One giant employer" is a ridiculous straw-man, but I've come to realize the market isn't a panacea. And the "optimal market solution" can actually be pretty user/customer/worker hostile.
I actually work at a private business that could plausibly be a government-run service, and I think it'd actually be pretty good for everyone if it were converted into one (so long as the government is not run by anyone with a last name of Musk).
That's exactly what I ended up doing.
That's exactly what I ended up doing. But it's a little awkward because I have a bookmark to my zip code's forecast page. An app would be nicer and more accessible to more users.
But sure, The government is redistributing its wealth and helps stimulate the rest of the economy with the workers they employ. Even for private sector it keeps the wheel turning.
By taking trillions away from the private sector (in taxes, inflation), it costs the economy tens of millions of jobs.
It then spends that to create new jobs. Some of that spending has a positive ROI, such as employing 100 police, to allow 10,000 people to focus about innovating rather than their own safety. On the flip side are many of the jobs in Washington, which dont create any multiplicative benefits for society and are net negative.
Congress allocates that, so any grievances on what they agree to spend should be take to your reps. The deadline is in 3 weeks, so be swift!
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But to go back on-topic: the everyman just sees a job they get money from and can use to invest or stimulate the economy. The other economic overhead is not affecting their day to day... Usually. At least not to a point they complain.
By your logic the only jobs that can be created is by deficit spending, and since the private sector cannot create money, but the government can, the implication is that only the federal government can create jobs.
That's what the tariffs are for. Trump 1.0 gave the US washing machine tariffs and got 1800 jobs on-shored at the cost of $800k/job:
> We find that in response to the 2018 tariffs on nearly all source countries, the price of washers rose by nearly 12 percent; the price of dryers—a complementary good not subject to tariffs—increased by an equivalent amount.
Let’s just save the money upfront by scrapping CHIPS and be ready to defend Taiwan from Chinese invasion? Trump was one of the first presidents to recognize Taiwan with a direct phone call.
The CHIPS act doesn’t deter conflict, but it does reduce the damage if it happens. Losing Taiwan now cuts off the most advanced processors in the world but if they’re making them in Arizona that goes from no supply to short supply with a straightforward path to scaling capacity. That’s a big improvement and it’s a fraction of the cost of a conflict.
Under the aggressive stance of this administration, the CHIPS act doesn’t seem necessary.
China is racing to catch up. Sure, they're still behind, but as much as I dislike their autocratic government, they're actually smartly spending many many $billions to create a domestic chip design and manufacturing. And once they do that, well, it'll just be one more area in which we'll have handed leadership to the Chinese, except with much more critical ramifications.
Taiwan is the Ukraine of Asia right now. And even without that we are worse off because Trump increased tariffs to Taiwan this month. expect any electronics you buy this year to surge in pricing.
Kinda-sorta like how car factories were repurposed to produce military aircraft during World War II.
I think it'll be ironic if things come to that -- NVidia unable to get fresh silicon, and scads of them sitting around, powering LLMs... we could see amazing shenanigans where certain folks cut deals (cough graft cough) to get to keep most of their gpus, while others get liquidated, and implode.
I seem to recall a presidential candidate recently claiming that they wanted to bring manufacturing back to the states. Chip manufacturing seems like it would fall under the category of manufacturing.
At this point we're just throwing away money already spent, which doesn't seem particularly efficient, which this administration is obsessed with, given the creation of an entirely new department/not-really-a-department to increase efficiency.
We do a lot of corrupt/wrong subsidizing in this country but that doesn't mean throw the baby out with the bathwater.
If I had a magic wand we'd still have tariffs and subsidize critical infrastructure and expertise - for example I find it very surprising that we don't make sure we always have wartime level of doctors and farmers trained and ready.
- subsidize farmers so consumers have cheaper groceriess
- help fund public schools so education is less limited by socioeconomic status
- fund science to advance the future
- offer tax credits to encourage adopting environentally-friendly technology
- apply taxes to disincenivize bad habits (e.g. tobacco)
So I'm not sure where you're coming at with this angle. That's government's greatest effect on society.
> imposing tariffs to protect industries.
Trump is doing it wrong and recklessly, so no disagreement in reality
But there are smart tactics for this short term inefficiency that can cause long term competitiveness. You can apply a high tarriff if you trust that domestic competition can catch up in a few years so you don't lose your own market to overseas competition. Long term, encouraging domestic stimulation is much better and more reliable than relying on foreign products for consumption. Especially essentials.