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Comment by pinkmuffinere | Hacker News Reader

I can’t speak with authority, but I imagine the steelman involves something like

- US needs manufacturing capability to maintain defense capability and boost long term growth.

- tariffs result in pushing some manufacturing (and associated skill set) back to the U.S.

This would be a good argument for targeted tariffs. Less clear that it's a justification for tariffs on stuff the US just doesn't have.

US manufacturing output is at an all-time high. It doesn't feel that way because there aren't as many jobs involved. I understand you're not actually arguing this, just speculating, but, "we need to boost manufacturing capability" isn't a convincing argument.

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

Hmm that is interesting. I understand this plot is showing the gross output of US manufacturing, but it strikes me that it might be the relative growth that matters, not the absolute growth — I wonder if there’s a similar plot normalized by the total world output?

If this were indeed the case, I’m not sure tariffs are the right direction to do it.

Principally, that a company would need more guarantees on their capital investment that extend beyond a single president’s term. Since tariffs can be revoked at any moment, companies will want more assurances that the long path of capital investment will be worthwhile, or else they might find themselves disadvantaged before even getting off the ground.

They would find themselves lobbying the government to hold back the free market for them within a few years time.

I did see a talk where someone was making the case that if the U.S. depends heavily on China for steel, and Taiwan for chips, then if China invades Taiwan the U.S. would very quickly be unable to wage a war with both supplies cut off. So the goal is to build some capacity for such products domestically.

They also tied that to Trump's desire to get out of Europe and deescalate the Middle East, being that if the U.S. was already stretched across Ukraine and say Iran, it would be way to stretched to also wage anything in the far east.

I'm no expert by a long way, but I can see some logic in the argument.

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