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Comment by notahacker | Hacker News Reader

Yeah. If you actually wanted to bring manufacturing back to the US you'd figure out which industries you wanted to develop, probably subsidise them, communicate very clearly what you were going to do and then ratchet up the tariffs on those specific finishes products, whilst being sure to maintain access to raw materials and components you still needed. What you wouldn't do is slap unexpectedly high tariffs on absolutely everything, shout about how you'll do a deal if only they respect you, and then walk them back in as inept and inconsistent a manner as possible. That's what you'd do if you wanted to destroy what's left of your industry. Think there's anyone in the rest of the world relying on US suppliers that hasn't started looking elsewhere? And it might now be cheaper for Americans to import from Japan or South Korea than from US companies dependent on Chinese components in their supply chain...

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Subsidizing specific manufacturing and having at least some consistency was a big part of the US strategy until the last few months. Most notably, the US passed huge subsidies for semiconductor manufacturing in 2022.

I don't know how effective that will be but it at least seems more coherent than these goofy tariffs (whatever people think of tariffs overall we absolutely cannot keep shifting them week to week).

> we absolutely cannot keep shifting them week to week

We absolutely cannot create the expectation that we plan to get what we say we want: zero trade deficits.

If we even succeed in making the rest of the world believe we're going to do this it will be catastrophic. So much of the advantages the US enjoys rides on trust and goodwill, and zeroing trade deficits would wreck the world economy and destroy trust in the US dollar as a safe haven. Just like paying down the national debt would.

Zeroing trade deficits means by definition that the rest of the world won't have (many) US dollars.

(Pedantically: it means the rest of the world has exactly as much US currency as the US has the rest of the world's currency)

The trade deficit is a measure of the flow of currency, not the stores.

No, it could also mean that US have many foreign currencies stockpiled.

It was insanely effective: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PRMFGCON. Notice the sharp dip at the end there.

(Software dev working for a European manufacturer of industrial automation equipment)

We just hit pause on a major product development effort in order to go back and re-evaluate some of our vendor choices. Specifically to see how we can eliminate as many dependencies on US companies as possible. Fortunately we were relatively early in a 18-24 month development cycle for a somewhat complex hardware device.

The company already started a project two months ago to look at how we can migrate off AWS and Azure and instead use domestic alternatives for our online systems.

For the hardware components this is a bit more work, but it looks like we can find replacements for most of the key items. Though there are a few components where we would have to rearchitect some of the systems to eliminate US components.

For us it is simple: we need stability and predictability. We have long development cycles and long lifecycles for the things we make. Stopping development and trying to eliminate things that depend on the US is a bit unreal and shocking, but management have to deal with the world as it is.

I know some of my colleagues at other companies in the sector are going through similar exercises.

Right now changes are taking place that will not be visible for years, but that will stick around for decades. The current administration in the US is doing real, long term damage to the US.

It is really weird for us (Europeans) to read hacker news and it see mostly indifference to what is happening in your country. You probably should worry a bit more about this than you do.

You also wouldn't go out of your way to piss off America's two biggest export markets: Canada and Mexico. As it stands, not only are there significant counter-tariffs that would make U.S. manufacturers even less competitive in Canada[1], there is significant consumer backlash to anything American-made where, just a couple months ago, products "Made in the U.S.A." would have been viewed favourably[2].

The way Trump has done things, any company that manufactures in the U.S. had better be able to get by with just the domestic U.S. market, because exports to Canada and Mexico aren't likely to be significant for quite some time, even if Trump backs off quickly. Lasting damage has already been done.

________________________

[1]It remains to be seen if Mexico will eventually retaliate.

[2]Perhaps not favourably in terms of price/quality competitiveness, but certainly in a geopolitical "support your neighbour instead of China" sense.

It also breaks a lot of the way businesses make and sell stuff today.

For example, several car makers makes cars in Canada, Mexico and the US but sells them across the borders (and globally). Honda makes Civics and CRVs in Canada but sells them in the US, but the Accord is made in the US and sold in Canada. So now if there are tariffs on car imports and especially if there is also a reciprocal tariff, Honda gets hit both ways. What would they do? Make some civics in the US and some in Canada? Seems very inefficient.

Factually despite all the noise there are no significant tariffs in either direction at this point in time, 98% of trade is tariff free under the free trade agreement. Mexico and to a lesser degree Canada are in a more favorable position than they were before the tariffs as they are the only countries in this position [1]

[1] https://semianalysis.com/2025/04/10/tariff-armageddon-gpu-lo...

My experience is this: The majority of Americans have a hard time believing we (Canada) are their biggest export market and trading partner generally. Because they barely think about Canada, and when they do it's as a quaint and cold place of no real importance to them.

And this perception has worked in Trump's favour. "Those weak irrelevant people up there are taking advantage of us, time to teach them a lesson" works well when the people you're telling it to don't realize "those people" are their single biggest customer and a source of wealth for them.

American business people aren't generally accustomed to treating their customers this way. I hope they come to their senses.

I'm guessing a few weeks of higher prices will change consumers' minds.

Will that even matter though?

There's a while before another election and longer while before the person imposing tariffs would expectedly leave.

There is a non-zero chance he have at least one more term.

Non-zero in the sense that there is a non-zero chance of an outright coup.

There is absolutely, unambiguously no Constitutional method by which this will ever be true.

It is unfortunately not as unambiguous as one may like:

https://www.npr.org/2025/03/31/nx-s1-5191889/is-trump-runnin...

No, it really is.

22nd Amendment:

> No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.

12th Amendment:

> no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.

You can produce the same bullshit arguments for literally any law in existence because language is inherently ambiguous. If someone starts wiggling into, "well technically it's a bit ambiguous whether we're allowed to mow down peaceful protestors with machine guns," it is incumbent upon all of us to say "no, actually that's not ambiguous."

Courts will look to the public attitude to assess these arguments, and the public attitude should be that blatant accounting tricks like the VP switcheroo are incompatible with both the language and intent of the law.

Or you could try and read the link I provided:

> But winning an election is not the only way a person can become president. And there are hypothetical situations involving presidential succession, Baude adds, that are "not addressed as fully" by the Constitution's text. They reveal ways in which the common understanding of the 22nd Amendment's presidential term limits could be challenged in court. One theory: Trump could become vice president and then president in 2029

> Still, in court, a lawyer could try to argue that being a "natural born" citizen, at least 35 years old and a resident within the U.S. for at least 14 years are the only presidential eligibility requirements specified in the Constitution, says Stephen Gillers, a professor emeritus at New York University School of Law, who proposed in 2004 that Clinton run for vice president.

I'm unconvinced that the Supreme Court will look towards public sentiment.

I did read it, and that argument is bullshit, just like a hypothetical argument that e.g. the government can mow down protestors because they held a mass trial declaring ("satisfied due process") that all people in the street are guilty of a crime and subject to the death penalty. Nothing in the Constitution precludes such an interpretation.

There is no way to write words that preclude all such interpretations, that does not make all possible interpretations valid or reasonable.

> I'm unconvinced that the Supreme Court will look towards public sentiment.

Yet stunningly, SCOTUS decisions overwhelmingly align with cultural attitudes of their time because that is in fact the role of SCOTUS — to adapt interpretations of text to the current cultural moment. That's why it's notable in the few occasions where they conflict.

I know originalists and textualists like to act otherwise, but they're liars, and you know this because they do in fact rule against the text of law when the text conflicts with their cultural imperatives.

Your first argument is hyperbolic.

Secondly you may wish to argue the Supreme Court has acted in such a way historically but recent history clearly demonstrates otherwise:

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2022/07/06/majority-of-...

The more hyperbolic the example, the easier it should be to demonstrate why the language of the Constitution precludes it. Yet you cannot, because that's not how language works, per my point. If I start pushing for this interpretation of the Constitution, the civic, intellectual, and honest reaction is not to say, "hmm, actually it is pretty ambiguous!" It's to say: "that obviously is not allowed and would be tantamount to a coup."

Everyone knows Presidential terms are meant to be limited to two. Everyone knows going for a third term would be an accounting trick. They know it, you know it, I know it.

Your selection of one example out of the 47 cases SCOTUS decided that year (+ countless cases they didn't grant cert to) is evidence of my point, not yours. How many of the other 46 cases can you name? How many of the other 81 cases between then and now?

I'll guess you could name fewer than 4 of them, ergo, as I said: "That's why it's notable in the few occasions where they conflict."

I take it then the courts finding on presidential immunity also supports your view of unambiguous interpretations and the court following public opinion?

I said neither that there are unambiguous interpretations (in fact I said the opposite, that all texts are intrinsically ambiguous but that does not make all interpretations equally sound)

Nor did I say "the court follows public opinion."

I said "courts will look to the public attitude to assess these arguments", which is true, and "SCOTUS decisions overwhelmingly align with cultural attitudes of their time" which is also true.

And yes, the Presidential immunity argument is exactly one such argument: the pro-dictator cultural movement in the US is significant and vocal, while the anti-dictator movement is full of equivocators like yourself who say, "well you know, the Constitution is a bit ambiguous on this point..."

So yes, actually, that decision is an excellent case in point, and a clear reason that SCOTUS should know the American public has no pseudo-intellectualized appetite for a third term.

> in fact I said the opposite, that all texts are intrinsically ambiguous but that does not make all interpretations equally sound

Your original comment was this:

> There is absolutely, unambiguously no Constitutional method by which this will ever be true.

So which is it, there's absolutely no ambiguity or there is some?

> And yes, the Presidential immunity argument is exactly one such argument: the pro-dictator cultural movement in the US is significant and vocal, while the anti-dictator movement is full of equivocators like yourself who say, "well you know, the Constitution is a bit ambiguous on this point..."

So you're saying that the Supreme Court ruled Presidential immunity because of vocal public opinion for dictatorship but suddenly the same court won't rule in favor of interpreting the law to support a third term?

Seems contradictory chief. Regardless I personally hope it doesn't come to a court decision but we'll see in 4 years.

I didn't say that SCOTUS won't rule in this direction. In fact, again, my caution indicates I believe the exact opposite: it is very possible they will, which is why we should cede no ground on the "it's ambiguous" argument. It truly is not ambiguous. It is not even ambiguous to the people who are pushing it. Again: everyone knows it's an accounting trick.

I mean the constitution was effectively ruled to be unconstitutional with the presidential immunity case, so what does anything even matter anymore?

All the more reason to aggressively nip this in the bud so we can get to work repairing the horrible damage they've done to our country.

Yes, republicans in congress can stop this at anytime, and once people tangibly feel prices increase congressional leaders will get scared.

If congress turns heavy blue in 2026, they can rain hell on the mild conservative goals that Trump seems to have taken a nuclear approach to. Congressman do care about their seat, and they do get scared of losing power. Right now Americans are particularly sensitive to price increases as well, with the pandemic inflation still fresh on everyone's mind.

What is the margin for 2026 changing the Senate majority significantly?

I personally am not seeing what influence Congress could push that will hinder the current executive branch even if it wished to.

Personally disappointed to see opposition US liberals in the US still fantasizing that the problem of Trump is going to be solved "eventually" in 2026 or in the courts.

More protests needed. This is tyranny-lite in action, huge overreach by the executive that I'm pretty sure the hallowed founders -- that people always talk about with reverance down there -- would be horrified by. 18th century revolutionaries would be disappointed to see the way people are rolling over.

> which industries you wanted to develop

yup

> probably subsidise them

yup

> communicate very clearly what you were going to do

Probably not. At least, not until right before the ratchet up. You'd want to first subsidize then once industries are starting to build up, you'd want to start the ratchet up. You probably also wouldn't want to say "We are doing this because we want to be better competitors" or whatever. It'd be better if you said something like "We believe country x is doing terrible thing y and for the safety of our country and others we are going to apply a tariff on good z until x stops doing y".

But yeah, universal tariffs are the dumbest idea in the world. We've essentially sanctioned every single nation which is going to massively damage us and manufacturing. Going to be real hard to unwind this.

You might add a bit of "Country X" is bad spin in there as political justification for what you're doing, agreed.

But you would make damn sure you communicated when the tariffs would hit punitive levels so the rest of the value chain knew and had already had chances to find themselves domestic suppliers

Gotta be REAL careful about how you signal things if your intent is ultimately to take over a market. Telling manufacturers you intend to isolate could leak out and ultimately trigger pre-emptive tariffs.

Honestly, just subsidizing is a lot simpler to do and it doesn't run the risk of making the world mad at you or triggering retaliatory tariffs.

You're a lot less likely to get retaliatory tariffs when you're communicating to manufacturers that you intend to raise your $nicheproductclasses tariffs to support domestic manufacturing under industrial strategy and national security policy than when you announce blanket tariffs with threats. The US imposed 100% tariffs on EVs last year for example[1], which wasn't exactly a universally popular move but wasn't likely to provoke a trade war. Much easier to accept losing share of a market than every market, plus also less likely to accidentally punish the manufacturing industries you're trying to support.

[1]there's a certain irony in one of Biden's last actions being to impose tariffs in a way which massively helped Tesla, and one of Trump's first being to propose tariffs that could seriously hurt its supply chain if they don't get exemptions...

Wouldn't you prioritize subsidizing local production over taxing foreign production? It just seems like a much cleaner and more straightforward way to increase local production. It seems like this has been at least somewhat effective with semiconductors over the past ten years. And then you don't have the risk of harming consumers. Everybody wins!

Its why China is technologically eating everyone else's lunch when it comes to renewables and battery tech. Their government dumped massive amounts of money into R&D and building out manufacturing and mining infrastructure.

Heck, it's why the US has been (not for long) a leader in medicine. We've historically dumped huge amounts of money into medical research through the NIH.

Biomedical companies don't like research, they like making money. Research is expensive and by its nature filled with deadends. A biomedical companies would much rather take and run with cheap (to them) NIH research.

China is also clear on the timetable they will turn off the subsidies in order to consolidate the market into the strongest survivors.

Businesses like clear timetables which is the opposite of what Trump is doing right now. So no matter your theories about tariffs what he is doing cannot be good for business.

this narrative doesn't sound right. There isn't very much preventing anyone in any given other country from using NIH research. Moreover a substantial amount of NIH research grants goes to PIs or postdocs or grad-students who are Chinese nationals who then advance their careers back to their home country.

Universities concentrate experts, and that leads to local economies. That's why SF is right outside of Stanford. Google wouldn't be there if that wasn't where Stanford grads lived. The stories about the Chinese government's tremendous efforts to repatriate skilled professionals (like giving them entire factories to run) come about as a result of the fact that they're working against a strong default of staying in the same place.

Because when you subsidize, the taxpayer is paying for it. You are socializing the costs and privatizing the profits.

Whereas in a tariff situation, you are penalizing the consumer for creating an externality (foreign dependence).

The customer and taxpayers are generally the same people here.

So, knock on effects can dwarf direct effects. Tax foreign computer components at some insane rate and perhaps you get a domestic market but you could also see companies start moving their US data centers to Canada and Mexico. Which then has it’s own economic disadvantages.

But not exactly the same people which is the point of motivating behavior. There is at least some degree of flexibility in what you can buy.

Insane rates will of course have insane effects. Which is a separate issue.

> Because when you subsidize, the taxpayer is paying for it. You are socializing the costs and privatizing the profits.

I think that's a really good point. It's extracting money from consumers through taxes and handing them to industry in the hopes they innovate.

Tariffs though. In that case you're extracting the money from the consumer (through the international organizations being taxed) and giving the profits to the government. What are they going to do with it?

Who pays for the tariffs if not the taxpayer?

The US got dominance over the entire world's economy, an unprecedented amount of weal, and almost complete technological dominance with high taxation and direct intervention on the market. And even more, they then taught it to Japan who came and repeated basically the exact same actions with basically the exact same result. Oh, yeah, and then China did it...

Then they organized a bunch of morons to create an school teaching not to do that, celebrated them so they would teach every foreign school, and managed to stop most of the world from competing with them. But a couple of decades later everybody in a position of power there was a moron from that school.

The resources for subsidies come from the taxpayer. Plus how you and who you subsidize becomes political. Lots of complications.

The resources for subsidies come from printing new money (which is possible by having the world reserve currency), and then spending that new money for deliberate purposes instead of just giving it to the banksters to bid up the asset bubbles. In an imaginary world where we had a Congress that served the People and a mentally competent President, of course.

Who gets subsidized is indeed political, but I don't see a way to sidestep that since there's centralization as soon as you take action to prevent the currency from deflating.

To be clear, the US is not unique in its ability to do this. Many other countries would benefit from understanding it! In the UK we have a government wanting to build a growth strategy around finance. It's like a parody that nobody gets (yet).

But Congress doesn't actually decide to print new money? When they decide to spend they have to raise taxes or issue debt (treasuries).

The federal reserve, on the other hand, controls interest rates and other mechanisms which actually result in money "bring created" for practical purposes.

Yes, that is one of the mechanisms that has hamstrung us from being able to appropriately respond to the economic effects of offshoring. It can obviously be changed.

Or the mechanisms themselves might not actually have to be changed if we could cast off this myopic political red herring about "the deficit". What we perceive as the balance sheet of "the government" needs to include The Fed, Fannie/Freddie, etc. Treasuries owned by other countries are the equivalent of a big savings account. Treasuries owned by the Fed are the same as all the other other debt owned by the Fed - monetary creation / monetary inflation.

Political patronage and cruelty is the point.

Nobody says it is effective, only that it is possible.

One way could be to send the message to the market that a certain area is strategically important and any startups will have access to extremely cheap loans and not have to worry about natural resources or personel.

Then follow up on those promises, take a step back, watch the Cambrian explosion that follows and when the businesses seems to have grown legs simply scale back funding and watch them fight it out. One could even say that is exactly what has happened in the world several times over. It is not unique to China.

Subsidization also makes products viable outside of the tariff bubble where tariffs can only really make it viable to places with the same tariffs against the same source(s).

If you really wanted to fix the US economy you'd uncouple the $ from the oil markets and let it float downward - the cost of imports would go up and exporters would earn more (and be more competitive in their domestic markets). The BTW is why China is pushing the yuan down now, because unlike Trump, they understand how this stuff works.

Trade imbalances are simply currency imbalances that haven't been allowed to find their own levels - what you can't do is have an artificially high currency (by requiring all global oil sales be made in it, creating an artificial scarcity) and not have a trade deficit - you can't have your cake and eat it too

The dollar is kept artificially strong through oil, so america can maintain an effectively infinite debt and an arbitrarily large deficit without the dollar ever weakening despite how much is printed…

I’m sure this sounds bad to someone, but if I was America, I wouldn’t try to put the gift horse into the wood chipper.

Oil supported by the world's biggest military and huge subsidies.

It's why moving to renewables would be catastrophic for the US. And for all of the big Fossils, including Russia and the Saudis. And the smaller second-order beneficiaries like the UK who make money from "services" - moving the big money around and avoiding taxes on it.

We're in a messy transition to a post-fossil global economy. It's going to take decades, and it's not obvious how much will be left standing when it's over.

But one way or another, it's locked in and unavoidable.

> uncouple the $ from the oil markets and let it float downward - the cost of imports would go up and exporters would earn more

can you explain it with more details?

If your currency is high value (which USD is due to demand in part due to oil and part due to others having reserves of it), foreign goods are cheap to you. This makes importing attractive, but it makes it very expensive for other countries to buy your exports.

If your currency has a lower value, it’s cheap for others to buy your exports, but expensive for you to import goods.

I don't know if that's true, but it sure is more well thought out than what the US is currently doing. You have my vote.

> If you actually wanted to bring manufacturing back to the US you'd figure out which industries you wanted to develop, probably subsidise them, communicate very clearly what you were going to do and then ratchet up the tariffs on those specific finishes products, whilst being sure to maintain access to raw materials and components you still needed.

I'm not here to defend the current approach, but what you're describing sounds like a centrally planned communist / state-directed economy or something. Is that really the way forward?

The whole idea of the government bringing manufacturing back to the US is central planning. The free market approach is to remove barriers to trade and let things develop as they may.

> The free market approach is to remove barriers to trade and let things develop as they may.

And the events of the last 30-40 years have shown why this is a beyond foolish approach. The 47th and MAGA didn't rise out of nothing, they rose out of the economic devastation brought upon by completely unchecked turbo-capitalism.

Conversely the Chinese government has split their economy into 50% privately owned and 50% state owned, which has fueled decades of rapid and consistent economic growth, so much so that the current administration now views China as our primary strategic and economic rival.

> And the events of the last 30-40 years have shown why this is a beyond foolish approach.

No. The events of the last 30-40 years have shown that extremism is beyond foolish.

Extremism on the other direction got much quicker and way more destructive results.

> what you're describing sounds like a centrally planned communist / state-directed economy or something. Is that really the way forward?

What they are describing is basically what every sane government does, and what the US used to do until, er, a few months ago.

If you consider most western countries to be centrally planned communist states (including the US up until very recently), then I don't have anything else to argue.

It's not quite as bad as central planning, but it's definitely a big dollop of state aid (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_aid), distorting competition.

You may think this is fair, while others disagree. As there's no "world government" arbiter for these kinds of actions, there are only the actions your country takes, and the actions other sovereign countries take in response - for example, all countries in the world could ban import of anything produced by your burgeoning state-aid factories, leaving you with only a domestic market to sell to; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)#Anti-...

Fun part is, the USA and some other nations of 1947 realized that free markets needed some kind of "universal arbiter" to curb such shenanigans and brought the World Trade Organization (originally GATT, WTO since 1995, not affiliated with the UN) on the way. Most of you probably heard of it.

Virtually all the world's nations are voluntary members. Sure, many criticize it for being a tool of the USA and other western nations to browbeat other nations into shape (e.g. China). There is merit to this claim, but obviously it is not so clear-cut. However, it can't be denied that the WTO has been a tremendously useful tool for the USA and its allies to shape world trade. Somehow the 45th president of the USA thought the USA would get the short end of the stick here and started to obstruct WTO proceedings in 2018. The WTO has lost a lot of its influence since then, removing a powerful tool from the USA's arsenal.

Make of it what you want.

A lot of Americans thought the WTO was a disaster for America. There were violent protests over it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Seattle_WTO_protests

I think this is the root of the disconnect. A lot of people say "wait, Americans wanted X because it's a useful tool for projecting American power" - whether X is the petrodollar, the WTO, free trade, whatever. But largely it was one segment of Americans that wanted and benefited from it.

As a comparison, Maggie Thatcher imported communist Polish coal in the 1980s and just stopped paying British miners. It saved the country a fortune - it got the same quality and amount of coal for far less money - and sent entire segments of the country into a death spiral from which they'd never recover.

Similarly, the windfall of finding oil off the coast of Scotland in the 1970s made fat stacks of cash for Britain. Maggie Thatcher did not spend that on deindustrialising Scotland. She did not spend it, like the Norwegians, on a sovereign wealth fund that would benefit everyone in the country. Instead, she spent it on revitalising the old docklands of London, and now they're the epicentre of high finance, where the UK makes most of its money in financial services -- mainly for the people who work in that industry, and the South East of England where they live.

These choices ruined the lives of large swathes of the country. But they hugely benefitted the country overall. Were they good choices or not?

Please, give me some credit. Who assumes that any nation's population, or any sufficiently large group of people, really, is a homogeneous, uniform, or monolithic in their opinions? I certainly don't.

Sure, but the point is that a wide spectrum of people, particularly on the left, believed so strongly that WTO was such a net negative for the average American they were willing to violently riot over it.

So when we talk about “a useful tool” in the American toolbox, we should keep in mind that tool mostly, or at least has the perception, of benefiting only the rich.

> You may think this is fair, while others disagree.

I said nothing about fairness. What I said is that every government and some point or another makes use of protectionist economic measures.

> for example, all countries in the world could ban import of anything produced by your burgeoning state-aid factories

This just doesn't happen, at least not for the reasons you mentioned.

China is a good example, as it gives many forms of subsidies to its industries. Other countries respond with a mix of measures to protect the industries they care about.

When I hear about the concept of central planning, it tends to remind me of a mathematician named Leonid Kantorovich I had read about in a textbook. I am not too familiar with the economics concepts that he might have run into, but this article [1] is pretty interesting in regards to how centrally planned socialist economies also need to use the idea of interest rates and prices like capitalist ones.

[1]: https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bios/Kantorovich.html

Kind of line railroads, or ship building, or the spice trade, or automotive manufacturing, or agriculture in general.

Nuclear power. Solar panels. CPU manufacturing. Weapons manufacturing. Biomed research.

Capitol intensive projects require coordination. Especially projects that can take decades before they pay off.

If you do this to the entire economy, yes sure, fair. If you decide that you want Americans to eat American garlic and you give garlic farmers a tax break or grants to buy seed and fertilizer I wouldn't call that central planning. More "strategic investment".

Replace garlic with whatever industry it is that the gov wants to strategically invest in: semiconductors, automobiles, aerospace, weapons, renewable energy.

I dislike this sort of binary thinking. It's why we are having the problems we have.

Just because some industry gets subsidized and/or ran by the government, doesn't mean we are now all communists. Every government has SOME industry that is ultimately state ran. Fire departments, police, and education are prime examples of nearly universally state ran systems.

There are some industries that just, frankly, work better when state directed, not all of them, but a few. Private fire departments don't work, neither do private police departments.

This is not nor has it ever been an all or nothing thing.

yeah i was thinking subsidizing is exactly what the European Union does, which as everyone knows is very much a radical left soviet like institution

>If you actually wanted to bring manufacturing back to the US you'd...

Sure this seems like a great way for if you can sustain a multi-decade effort

If you have 3.5 years to re-negotiate a deal, maybe you need to move faster.

If you're spending 3.5 years trying to "renegotiate a deal", you don't have a strategy to bring manufacturing back. If you change your policy multiple times in a week you don't even have a strategy.

Easier to onshore manufacturing with multi-year timelines, but you don't need multi-year timelines to impose tariffs on carefully selected industries, not penguins and your existing industries' key suppliers.

Well, if your goal is to pump and dump the stock markets, this is a strategy and it is working.

I don't think that the current administration has enough foresight to actually plan for such a scheme but I think they are smart enough to see an opportunity, to wit the posts on social media shortly before withdrawing some tariffs.

This ignores the reality of power in the US. Presidents can't implement multi-decade initiatives.

>If you change your policy multiple times

you're missing the forest for the trees. the policy has not changed: bring manufacturing back to the US.

> This ignores the reality of power in the US. Presidents can't implement multi-decade initiatives.

Which is why if anyone wanted to actually bring manufacturing "back" to the US they would work with congress and pass laws that curtailed the tariff powers in a way that ensured that in the areas where you wanted long term investment the president would not have the power to change policy unilaterally. At which point the typical congressional gridlock would serve to ensure stability going forward and allow businesses to invest.

That's not a policy, that's a goal.

Presidents don't need multi-decade initiatives to be not so hopelessly inept at trade policy they end up hurting manufacturing rather than bringing it back.

Trump shouting about how his amazing tariffs are going to bring manufacturing back and then promptly cancelling most of them and bragging about how everyone wants to do deals with him and he's going to do beautiful deals isn't any kind of strategy for bringing manufacturing back, and frankly the fact that so many Americans are dumb or partisan enough to insist it is represents a bigger problem for US industrial policy than term limits

Meanwhile, every other country is also negotiating amongst themselves to remove any dependence on the US. Dealing with the US is only to soften the blow and buy time.

>so many Americans are dumb or partisan

This is what it boils down to for you. Other people have a different opinion than you so they're dumb or partisan

Nope, only the people defending the dumbest and most pointless act of economic vandalism in history.

In fact the only argument I can think of in favour of setting tariffs for the Heard and McDonald islands is that the average American that thinks that this level of attention to detail helps US manufacturing probably is less intelligent and capable than the penguins that live there....

Trump-Biden-Trump are 12 years of protectionists being president, if DJT wasn't DJT he could've utilized this to advance his agenda.

Biden was a protectionist?

Biden's Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) was definitely viewed as protectionist. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_Reduction_Act#Relati...:

> ... some were concerned about the law's provisions favoring American industry. ... the chairman of the 2023 G20 meeting in India, called it "the most protectionist act ever drafted in the world", asking American officials, "You believed in market forces and now you do this?" Other countries have begun to create their own similar laws. China requested WTO dispute consultations with the United States.

> 27 European Union finance ministers have expressed "serious concerns" about the financial incentives of the Inflation Reduction Act, and are considering challenging it. They have listed at least nine points in the legislation, which they say could be in breach of World Trade Organization rules. They were opposed to the subsidies for consumers to buy North American-assembled electric cars, as EU officials believe the subsidies discriminate against European carmakers. One EU official told CNBC that, "there is a political consensus (among the 27 ministers) that this plan threatens the European industry" and its supply of raw materials. In February 2023, the European Commission announced it would propose the "Net Zero Industrial Act", similar to the IRA, in turn putting pressure on the United Kingdom and South Korea.

In the mild sort of way. Mostly Biden didn’t change much and kept things stable (the way businesses like it), but there was definitely room in that for the CHIPs act, which is a double edged sword (by pushing China to invest more in its local chip production). He didn’t bother getting rid of the DJT tariffs that survived after COVID hit either.

This was the entire purpose of the CHIPS act. Biden just took some of the protectionist policies Trump started in his first term and did gave them an actual objective.

Bringing back such industry would take a multi decade effort, in the best scenario (which the US clearly isn't now)

I don't think it's physically possible to move much manufacturing in that time. If you think it is, please give estimates in dollar values, number of jobs, and square footage of factory construction expected.

What is your takeaway? That no effort should be made?

Do it the right way through Congress.

Are the commenters defending the chaos serious or just trolls?

Previous government efforts do not need to be sabotaged every time there's an election. For example, when Biden came in he didn't immediately unwind all of Trump's industrial efforts. He kept the China tariffs, and built on top of them with the CHIPS act to add the "carrot" part of "carrot and stick".

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