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Had tariffs been applied early when American corporations stated offshoring manufacturing to increase their profits the industry base might have been saved. But now these tariffs are just going to introduce pain to people in substantial price hikes and no company in this chaotic environment is going to put the collective trillions of dollars to building capability back in the USA. This requires a better plan.

I wonder whether you realize that the US is currently second in manufacturing capacity and far ahead of the country (Japan) in third place. (I'm not defending Trump's tariffs.)

The situation in electronics manufacturing specifically I will concede is concerning.

Is that a per capita metric, or overall? America is fuckin huge.

Overall.

Energy costs (particularly natural gas prices) are much lower in the US than in the other manufacturing powerhouses, and some manufacturing is very energy-intensive.

That's a goofy argument because manufacturing did not start to be offshored until AFTER tariffs were removed.

Chart: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ad/Average_...

Eh, doesn't that chart support their argument?

Domestic manufacturing decreasing as tariffs decrease implies that increasing tariffs would increase domestic manufacturing. With their argument being that you needed to do it 50 years ago when the shift started because if you do it now it's really painful.

> if you do it now it's really painful.

That's a misnomer if ever there was one. The current batch of tariffs will destroy enough American wealth to nosedive the economy before any long-term change. Manufacturing is not coming back, there's just not gonna be enough wealth in the US to warrant it. Plus there are counter-tariffs, so if you make it in America, you can't reliably export it.

The pain increases with time, but we don't have a time machine so what is the alternative?

the current strategy seems to be the equivalent of taking a chainsaw to someone's chest and calling it heart surgery. I don't know how to do a heart transplant, but I know the tools require some amount of subtlety.

This. There's always two ways to do things: the right way and the wrong way. And they chose the wrong way.

This isn't 1971 where Nixon could tell the world "suck it. our dollar, your problem" because America was the sole hegemon.

Today, there is a rival player. China. Its a completely different game.

Invest in economic zones. Enforce the usage of the investment into infrastructure and not stock buybacks. Rebuild industry. Then establish tariffs to cement it.

Correct, however that doesn't mean that bringing tariffs back will have any immediate impact to reverse this change. 2025 is not 1980.

If your goal is to prevent cheap throw-away items from ending up in landfills, there's a straight-forward policy the Govt could adopt - just make it very expensive to send stuff to landfills (and stop the practice of sending our garbage to poor countries where it just ends polluting rivers and oceans).

This would encourage people to buy only high-quality items that are longer-lasting and are not just discarded very quickly. If it costs $200 to discard your dishwasher, maybe you will buy a high-quality product that might have a higher sticker price upfront but it has better reliability and won't break down quickly requiring you to replace it and therefore pay the hefty landfill price. This in turn would encourage manufacturers to build products with better reliability.

But how do you even know if it's actually higher quality. I find that expensive stuff breaks just as readily as cheap stuff in many cases. Speaking to dishwashers specifically in my rentals I've found that pretty much they all have similar flaws. The $1500 Bosch doesn't last longer or clean better than the $300 Frigidaire. What I've learned is that the best is to get the cheapest, but popular model with the decibel rating you want. Samsung Stormwash has been the best for me because the replacement parts are readily available. The cheaper models they keep changing parts every 6 months so it's more difficult to replace them.

You would find them the same way you find any good products today (word of mouth, product reviews, etc). But currently consumers don’t care so much about the longevity of any product or its repairability because throwing it away and getting a new one is the more economical choice. Manufacturers instead focus on gimmicky or useless features while not focusing on reliability. If disposing an item to a landfill is made to be expensive, then consumers will start making different choices and manufacturers will change their products to meet their needs.

Does it have more than the minimal legal manufacturer warranty ?

As you mention, how long are the repair parts available ?

What do repair shops say about the repairability of the model ?

Where is it made ?

>I won't defend these tariffs, or their rollout. But I will say that our dependence on Chinese manufacturing (and engineering, these days) is not good for our nation.

How would you solve it differently?

With what we know now, or going back in time and making different decisions than what were made? offshoring isn't necessarily the wrong decision, but sending it all to one country with hostile form of government to your own does seem like a bad move. China just happened to be smart enough to develop in this way where Mexico or other Latin American countries did not, nor did other Asian countries. They are all now trying to play catch up, but only after China became THE place for all of this manufacturing.

There is no overnight solve at this point. But a solution would be working to help countries with more friendly government to your own to build up their manufacturing with the promise of guaranteed business to help prop it up by moving away from the hostile government.

> But a solution would be working to help countries with more friendly government to your own

In other countries we are scared of, not friendly too, the USA

Not OP, but it's clear that slow, low, scheduled tariffs are how you move manufacturing. When a business say, hmm... in 5 years, we're going to be unprofitable, we should probably invest in an American fab.

This is also why you pass the tariffs through the legislature and not via some literal "emergency" order, which means that the tariffs could disappear at literally any point, and probably will if things get bad. So what's the point of investment if you have a better than 50-50 chance and you're going to feel the pain either way?

It's just exactly the opposite way anyone who is seriously trying to shift manufacturing would go about doing it. There is also some strong dollar issues, but that's really complicated.

Have a diverse economy and tell corporations "no" when they want to move manufacturing to other nations. Or tell them to delist off American markets and move the actual company to the cheaper nation. They want the protections and freedom of the US economy but they don't want to pay for any of it. That's called a parasite and they aren't needed here.

The Chinese and others often prefer to subsidize their important industries rather than taxing their own citizens in the form of tariffs.

I'm confused. Average tariff rate in China is higher than in US https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tariff_ra...

No, China imposes rather large tariffs on external goods to force internal consumption. That's beyond a bunch of other measures that prevent foreigners from starting businesses or owning property.

Of course as other comments in the thread have pointed out: a much smarter way to roll out tariffs to encourage domestic manufacturing is by slowing ramping them up to give industry time to react.

My lathe was $3400. A week later the price is now $4000 thanks to tariffs. There are no domestic manufacturers left and banks/Wall Street aren't going to finance someone spinning up a machine tools company. The difference in price isn't enough to erase China's excessive subsidies to their industry combined with their lower labor pay rates so even if someone did try to compete they still couldn't match $4000. My best guess is more like $6-7k. In the end all the tariffs are doing is making it more difficult to get into machining.

If idiots and sycophants weren't steering the ship the US would have a state-run investment bank that partnered with private capital to offer investments to anyone who wanted to start a business. Frankly I think there is lots of opportunity in various spaces like machine tools to make innovative products at all scales from the small hobbyist to big industrial shops. It won't be a 1000x return though so no one cares.

> That's beyond a bunch of other measures that prevent foreigners from starting businesses or owning property.

In defense of the comment you're responding to: measures like making it impossible to compete by subsidizing their domestic competition. (I wasn't trying to suggest China and others do not use tariffs)

> If idiots and sycophants weren't steering the ship the US would have a state-run investment bank that partnered with private capital to offer investments to anyone who wanted to start a business.

Fwiw this sounds like an aspect of fascism. Just defining, not criticizing. It clearly works for China.

Call it a sovereign fund then.

> Fwiw this sounds like an aspect of fascism

Can you explain that?

There's also another effect though : that money goes to the government. What is it going to do with it ?

Not expecting a positive effect from that from this administration, but in theory there could be one. Like that investment bank. Or just lowered taxes.

Here's a different argument: there's nothing to solve in relation to Chinese manufacturing.

The US "dependence" on Chinese manufacturing is not a problem at all. It's mostly just a wedge/scapegoat/distraction issue to placate constituents who have faced decades of declining general welfare due mostly to domestic policy and not trade issues.

For example, trade policy with China didn't force the government to lower taxes on the wealthy to cut public college funding (college used to be free in California, where do y'all think Silicon Valley's innovations came from?), refuse to implement single-payer universal healthcare, or refuse to address the housing affordability crisis.

> our dependence on Chinese manufacturing (and engineering, these days) is not good for our nation

If we only tariffed China, this argument would hold water. Instead, we’re handing every country’s imports to China on a platter.

The bulk of US wealth and economic strength is is high value, highly profitable services. I worked in sales support for Engineering and a 60% profit on labor was the norm. There’s a tremendous gap in low value services (restaurants) which distort the efficiency of the US economy as best reflected in a lack of social safety nets on morality grounds rather than economics. COVID stimulus proved that the nation would not collapse if the most vulnerable were subsidized, and it’s against the political machine’s interests to confront this reality.

> COVID stimulus proved that the nation would not collapse if the most vulnerable were subsidized

The resulting inflation has lowered the purchasing power of the vulnerable and increased the wealth gap.

> Families are drowning in low-cost, low-quality products that wind up in a landfill. Free trade created this situation, and I don't think it's good for anybody except importers and factory owners.

No, free trade did not create this situation. People like you did. I'm not over here drowning in useless plastic and we've lived in the same globalised world together.

Sure. But this is not the way to do it. In fact if I were to think of a way to destroy the USA, this plan of Trumps would be it.

especially with the recent military changes. everything I'm seeing just reeks of foreign operatives initiating plans that benefit the foreign government.

> Then we pulled a surprised mug when those same companies decided that they don't need us any more.

What does this mean?

mug = face

The clearer wording is probably:

>Then we were surprised when those same companies decided that they don't need us any more.

We all know this, and most people I know are all for onshoring more stuff back here as well as with friendly nations around the world. What Trump is doing is insanity, zero business acumen, zero chances of success. To bring some (certainly will never be all) manufacturing back, we could have real business incentives, ending h1b visa program, tax relief for industries that "disappeared", target tariffs and trade agreements. Instead we get some kind of shitty AI math conjured up by DOGE boys that claims "trade deficits" are the same thing as "tariffs" and whispering it into Trump's ear.