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Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

It's going to take a while. Most companies ordered as much inventory as they could before the tariffs hit. Companies have to work through that lower-cost inventory first, then deal with the tariffs, then have that data start to show up in later decisions.

There's also a lingering hope that the tariffs will be struck down and disappear, so companies are waiting as long as possible before taking the tariff hit on new orders.

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Yep, there is a lumber company near me that has filled their yard with so much product that the employees have started parking along the street recently.

The handwringing is so amazing here, as is the denial of what needs to be done to stabilize the US economy, which is to bring more manufacturing home, create jobs organically, and stop relying on China, who is not our friend.

That may or may not be true. But what is immediately clear is that Trump has no idea how to accomplish it. Americans are in I believe 6 months of contraction in manufacturing jobs.

To reduce dependence on China, tariffs should ONLY be on China, and not the entire world including neighbors and close allies.

To help bring manufacturing back to the US, the tariffs should have been fixed, in legislation, with 2+ years of advanced notice before implementation, to allow companies to plan for them and implement something.

The ad-hoc approach taken by the current administration ensures 100% that neither of those will happen.

To be fair China can rapidly setup factories in many countries or just use them as re-sellers. Heck many of the "Made in India" goods are just re-branded stuff from China. This is why the tariffs encompass everything, even remote deserted islands. If you don't tariff everywhere you leave a loophole open for China to potentially exploit.

(Note I am not saying I 100% agree with the near-global tariffs, but I can see why they cover so many regions.)

> To be fair China can rapidly setup factories in many countries or just use them as re-sellers.

Then China should setup factories in the USA. Problem solved.

It's idiotic to claim the tariffs on the rest of the world are because of China. CBP has real, non-idiotic ways to deal with incorrect country of origin labeling, and illegal transshipments. See: United States v. Akua Mosaics, Inc. and Kenneth Fleming

Trump's tariffs aren't any lower on countries that have already cracked down on use of their ports for illegal transshipments from China.

"bring manufacturing back to America" keeps getting thrown around and I'm genuinely curious how that would work. Let's say we do bring the bulk of manufacturing jobs back to America, what does the country look like in 10 years?

- Which manufacturing jobs? All of them? We'll have Americans sewing t-shirts and making every widget?

- How much would those jobs pay? More or less than China pays their workers now?

- If it's more, where does the extra money come from? If it's not more, who's going to do those jobs? If the answer is automation, then there aren't going to be a whole bunch of jobs created.

Also fundamentally, if American in general can work in positions higher up in the value chain. Shouldn't we be pushing for more jobs in healthcare, tech, finance etc vs low value manufacturing?

The manufacturing is necessary because if China becomes adversarial, none of those exports are getting to the US anymore. That's what they see that you don't. Why don't you answer those questions yourself? Work on it, instead of just denying it and telling us all that's it's totally impossible and we shouldn't try to right the ship.

Reducing economic dependence on China is a bipartisan issue. Biden passed plenty of large bills that aimed to bring manufacturing to America with the continuation of the Trump 1 tariffs and additional subsidies.

That's too subtle and long term for Trump. The subsidies have been torn up and the tariffs tripled. Now it'll be far more expensive to build the manufacturing capacity in America.

Color me skeptical of tariffs that include Heard and McDonald islands, which are exclusively populated by penguins and seals.

There's a fair argument to be made that surgical application of tariffs could potentially raid in restoring manufacturing jobs in the US. However, the ham-fisted manner in which Trump's tariffs were applied can at best be explained by incompetence and at worst deliberate economic sabotage.

Who would build a factory right now in the US?

Next month, those tariffs might be gone and your investment with it.

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