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Comment by sebstefan | Hacker News Reader

Tariffs don't work to bring manufacturing back home if they change every 2 weeks and are sure to disappear in 4 years

You need to have reasonable certainty that your factory is going to be profitable on a 20+ year horizon to commit into building a production line.

I don't understand how MAGAs don't get that.

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You think a CPU factory won’t be profitable for 20 years? MAGA movement won’t listen to you here if we can’t even agree on basic facts.

The thought took a shortcut. Profitable wasn't the right word

When you offshore a production facility, it's not about being profitable, it's that it can be more profitable elsewhere.

If you have no guarantee that the tariffs will still be there to artificially maintain your profitability so high, then you don't build.

I think we can agree on the facts there

A CPU factory may (because of high margins), but, for example, a car factory may not. A factory isn't just the labour, it also requires inputs, and tariffs that change weekly means that you can't rely on being able to source the inputs reliably. When your margins are smaller, random input costs can easily sink you.

If you want to bring back manufacturing you need to consider the entire supply chain, and make sure that inputs for whatever factory you are bringing in are secure and will be equal or cheaper in 20 years. These things need to be predictable.

Also, let's not pretend the MAGA movement listens to anything other than the propaganda.

My son-in-law works for a domestic truck manufacturer (semis, not pickups). Orders are down because nobody knows how much the order will cost, because of tariff uncertainty.

Yes, nothing kills business activity more than uncertainty. High prices can be planned for and dealt with. Constantly fluctuating ones with no upper bound cannot.

And lower activity creates more uncertainty, as people get laid off, banks start adjusting mortgage rates upwards and borrowing becomes more expensive. Leading to even less activity and more uncertainty. It's a scary road to go down toying with this house of cards at the level Trump has been doing.

"Tariffs won't work because we won't actually use them" is not an argument against tariffs, that's an argument against corporate control of the economic levers.

When Biden came into office, he kept MOST of Trump's tariffs on China and even added a bunch of his own.

Despite the marketing, the tariffs are fairly bi-partisan among the congress.

The ones on Chinese EVs to protect the local car industry maybe, the blanket 10% he puts on your allies and the 25% if the allies are too woke maybe not.

Reciprocal tariffs have been something many people (on both sides of the isle) have been wishing for forever... It's not normally a D vs. R thing, except right now where the D's feel a need to play the opposition role.

On the other hand... most of the tariffs you hear about aren't real and never had/will-have an impact, and are clearly being weaponized as a way to get trading partners in-line. Few actual tariffs have been realized as-of yet... but if you read the news you'd be led to believe everything you buy is tariffed all to hell.

> and are sure to disappear in 4 years

I wouldn't be so sure about that. The Biden Admin left in-place a lot of Trump foreign policy, and Democrats (the likely next admin-party) have been wishing for tariffs for years. Currently they're playing their part as the "opposition" but I'd bet money most of the tariffs stay during the next admin.

Your point about changing every 2 weeks is sound, however.

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