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I think that you are ignoring Newton's 3rd law, which pretty much can be applied to economics in this case. What made the US really great was the fact that it was the center of the liberal world order and the coalition of friends that it built around itself, including the EU countries. Let's see how well the US does when it loses most of its friends. Focusing on the EU, the US wants to balance the goods trade deficit with the EU, but it has a services surplus with the EU. Goods deficit vs services surplus roughly balanced each other before the tariffs. Guess what we in the EU will need to do? In the end it will be loose-loose for everyone, but in the long run the then friendless US will be the biggest loser.

We do not want manufacturing jobs, they suck. America has an amazing thing going on where we can trade 1s and 0s in exchange for physical goods. We have an infinite renewable resource which costs nearly nothing to reproduce infinitely. We have a defacto monopoly on technology and digital services.

I understand the national security reasons for having a domestic commercial manufacturing base. However, there is ZERO economic reasons to bring back manufacturing jobs.

Just wait until we ramp up the t shirt manufacturing. Dozens of dollars will flow. DOZENS!

>We have an infinite renewable resource which costs nearly nothing to reproduce infinitely. We have a defacto monopoly on technology and digital services.

That doesn't work for ever. And Trump was voted by the blue collars. So he wants to create more blue collar jobs.

The exception, of course, are the poor and lower working class who have no technical expertise or training, or would be unable to learn same... for those individuals the prospect of a manufacturing job is a step-up.

The types of manufacturing jobs which would be a step up would be high-tech and high gross-margins manufacturing (which we already do), not whatever crap China is producing. If you want the quality of life of a Chinese manufacturing worker - which is still much worse than that of a retail worker in America - sure. There is no basis in reality that the kind of jobs Chinese manufacturers would yield a higher quality of life for a blue collar worker.

Furthermore, those kinds of jobs are not long for this world. They're inevitably going to be automated away and the replacement jobs robotics maintainers are not ever going to be in numbers great enough to replace those manufacturing jobs. It's beyond stupid especially when you consider that the labor market was already incredibly strong at ~5% unemployment.

A lot of skilled jobs were shipped of to China, particularly heavy industry.

Then the solution is targetted tariffs such as the ones they placed on BYD, not across the board tariffs.

I keep hearing this BS, but unskilled manufacturing jobs are a downgrade from unskilled service jobs, and if official statistics aren’t lying, there’s been a growing shortage of unskilled labor in service. Expecting people without a skill and can’t even bother to flip burgers to want to do heavy labor in factories is ridiculous.

So what you’re saying is, Trump fights for the poor and underprivileged.

Wait till they hear that it pays $1.50 an hour, and if they dont make 1,000 pairs of sneakers every shift they dont get paid for the month.

That's why they'll find a way to make and label more criminals to throw them in prison where they will be out to work for those minimal wages...

I don't doubt part of making America great in their minds includes bringing debtor prisons back too.

I don't believe that working on a assembly line is better than driving for Uber or delivering for Amazon.

Depends very much on the assembly line. Some are quite reasonable, especially in smaller firms where you don't have a completely detached management in their ivory tower passing efficiency edicts for grinding through disposable anonymous minions. You can't abuse your staff too much if you have to sit next to them in the canteen! It's not exactly stimulating work and obviously not a rockstar salary, but it's comfortable enough indoor work and you don't have to pee in bottles and have a psychopathic delivery schedule every day.

An assembly line still gives you a path to management, and possibly insurance / healthcare and maybe a 401k or some retirement.

With gig work you get none of that.

I hear this repeated, “we don’t want manufacturing jobs, they suck”. I work in manufacturing, and my job definitely does NOT suck! That short sighted western leadership were so eager to ship off manufacturing jobs to China has been a disaster for the west. I can’t be the only one who sees this?

> That short sighted western leadership were so eager to ship off manufacturing jobs to China has been a disaster for the west.

In what way are you quantifying this? Would you agree that the quality of life has improved significantly compared to the 1980s or whatever period you want to compare to?

For many people, no.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_Belt

For many people, sure. I can always find exceptions to the rule. I am talking statistically. Fact of the matter is, the bottom 20% QoL has improved significantly, correct?

Frankly looking at many indicators it would seem large chunks of the US is doing terrible, not just the bottom 20%.

You now have enormous piles of debt, obesity, millions hooked on drugs, a blossoming private prison industry and a nation without a future?

I quote from Wikipedia: ‘In 2013, George Friedman, the head of Stratfor, wrote that the middle class' standard of living was declining, and that "If we move to a system where half of the country is either stagnant or losing ground while the other half is surging, the social fabric of the United States is at risk, and with it the massive global power the United States has accumulated."[54]’

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_of_living_in_the_Un...

Looks like most of the gains since the 80s have been concentrated to the top.

If you were serious about improving the lives of normal people you would be voting for Bernie Sanders. Not the party handing out tax cuts for the rich, that is against the minimum wage and destroyed the pension system.

I’m not allowed to vote in the US. I’m not American.

If you listen to Bernie's speeches, he talked about high tariffs too.

Link to a speech where he does this? I’d love to see receipts.

Sure, but most of that has nothing to do with the loss of manufacturing jobs. It has much more to do with the tremendous transfer of wealth from the bottom quintiles to the top, enabled by the gutting of unions, the destruction of regulations, and the abandonment of any kind of effective antitrust policy.

> enabled by the gutting of unions, the destruction of regulations, and the abandonment of any kind of effective antitrust policy.

Isn't this what happened because companies moved their manufacturing to other countries?

Some, yes, but the cause and effect are somewhat blurred because both were happening over a long period of time. They each contributed to each other in a feedback loop, and I don't claim to be enough of a scholar of that period to know for sure which one started first.

> For many people, sure. I can always find exceptions to the rule. I am talking statistically. Fact of the matter is, the bottom 20% QoL has improved significantly, correct?

That's really a decision each person should make for themselves, and it was a big part of the reason Trump won the election. Most people don't think their QoL has improved.

Obviously the perspective here is different due to the success of the US software industry, but that industry only employs a tiny fraction of the population.

So the idea is to destroy 75% of the economy that is the service/tech economy? I'm sure that will work out well for all of us. He could have had more pro business, less regulations, trade agreements, but he didn't he just set the house on fire and wants to see what he can make out of the ashes. I guess we can all get jobs in construction to build the newest 3rd world nation on the world playing field?

We have the Senate for these long term decisions. But somehow it has become a useless bureaucracy due to the partisanship.

Technically the President is not allowed to dictate financial policy. The current actions are done in the name of “emergency”, bypassing the Senate.

> Trump was taking about tariffs, but nobody thought he’d take them this far, this fast.

Stop saying "nobody". People predicted this. The people who are blindsided by this dismissed the people who predicted it as crazy, hyperbolic doom casters. Yet today, when their predictions come to fruition, they don't even exist.

Here's a wild idea: let's start listening to the people who had the foresight to predict this instead of pretending they don't exist because it soothes our own egos for having missed this.

He has at most 3 to 6 months to get this sorted. After that a recession is all but guaranteed. His voters may not own stocks, but the people who own stocks are responsible for a huge part of consumer spending, and when they cut on spending, it is Trump voters who lose their jobs. As Cruz said, he has a very narrow window to not be wiped out at the midterms. I don't think anyone who voted Trump signed up for a recession.

He's not doing tariffs though. He's doing some kind whacked out plan that he can somehow correct decades of trade imbalance with "tariffs" when all he can do really is start a second Great Depression by riding the nuke all the way to ground zero like Major "King" Kong in Dr. Strangelove

>Countries like China can do more long-term plans without worrying about silly things like electability.

China always does long term and very long term plans and executes them. US, on the other hand, is much more agile and reacts very fast to changes and opportunities.

Probably the best strategy is a mix of both, have long term plans but be able to react fast when needed.

I’m about to sound like a China shill, but China reacts and executes very fast when they need to. A stupid example is both implementation and removal of pandemic protocols. The second society started protesting, they acted pretty fast.

This reminds me of an amusing anecdote in Dutch history.

In the late 1930s the queen of the Netherlands asked her prime minister if he had read a certain book written by the German leader. He had not.