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Comment by axiolite | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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