The US needs an offshoring tax. If you want to sell to Americans you also need to hire Americans.
Regional headquarters. That helps with their taxes in Europe. It wouldn't work to avoid taxes on money made in the US.
Ok, given you can only tax stuff when it passes into your territory what you really have there is called a "tariff", it is paid by… the customer, when they buy the thing.
The seller has an entire planet to sell to. The US has about 25% of the money to buy things with, but even then only because we all like your money. Moment we stop liking your money, that probably drops to 20%.
>>The seller has an entire planet to sell to.
For a lot of goods US is responsible for 50% of profits. It was for me for a long time when I was selling software. Quick googling suggests some EU automakers make close to 50% of their profits in US as well.
US is the premium market everyone wants to sell to. There is nowhere else like that, especially for high margin goods.
For an example, take a look at the 1888 US presidential election, which largely revolved around tariffs. Grover Cleveland lost re-election due to being part of the pro-business wing of the Democrats, and he came to the conclusion that tariffs were a negative to the economy overall, while his opponents were strongly protectionist. After McKinley's Republicans won the election on a protectionist platform, he instituted the McKinley tariffs (average import duties of around ~50%), which were devastating to the economy despite being extremely popular with the nation in the election. It led to massive price increases which led to the re-election of Grover Cleveland in 1892 (only other non-consecutive term president aside from Trump). Despite expert opinion being fairly solidified against tariffs even at the time, the idea of "protecting American business" and "punishing other countries for their unequal trade deficits with the US" was pretty popular with specific interest groups!
Parts of this sound rather familiar, do they not? I would then argue that it points to a cultural element, out of the two options of a failure of education or a culture of rejecting it. History certainly rhymes on this point.
Also, during the period you describe the US was a major export economy. Now the US economy is far more insular (even before Trump) than it was during that period (foreign trade was more than 50% in the late 19th century vs 7% today). Why would you assume that doesn't impact the effects of tariffs?
1. Making the same mistake as Trump et al.
2. Quick and easy reaction to other nation's tariffs, which we saw this year when Trump announced all his tariffs.
3. Targeted at specific industries to influence politics in other nations. IIRC, the EU is actually doing this to the US, specific states that have a lot of support for Trump, in the hope those voters will make the connection and get Trump to back off.
4. Targeted at specific industries to protect domestic industries from being undermined. The USA has accused China of this in various cases, any "anti-dumping tariffs" would be perfectly reasonable where this happens. China was accused of trying basically the same thing Uber was accused of, spending (VC|tax) money to corner the market then raising prices when all the old (taxi drivers|PV makers) were gone.
5. Sin taxes. Singapore doesn't have their own car industry to protect, they make it really difficult to get a car just because they don't want lots of cars. I mean, it's more of a registration fee, but the effect there is much the same given the lack of local industry.
1: A government wants to protect domestic industries over ones outside of the country by applying price increases to the foreign ones, with the idea being that the domestic industries just need to grow into being able to compete with the industries in other areas. This is called the infant industries argument. A central problem with this is that the industries will always benefit from the protectionist policy, and are unlikely to ever admit that they have "grown up" so to say. My general view on this is that groups will of course lobby to have benefits specific to their industry, and that there are probably scenarios where we would prefer to have things handled domestically rather than abroad, but I would generally want this to be highly targeted and time-gated(Once the industries are mature enough to compete, we wouldn't want to keep subsidizing them), and that other tools are probably more efficient for this purpose.
2: Some sort of national security argument, where production being cut off during war would be a serious concern. My general thought on this one is that if something is specifically important for national security, broad reaching taxes on all imports probably aren't as useful as targeted government interventions in those specific industries. The government can build whatever factories it wants or contract people to do specific things if it passes a law to do so. If we're worried that we need a domestic supply of beets(randomly selected example) and the government is willing to produce them at a loss for national security reasons, they should probably just do that rather than tax imports of coffee, chocolate, bananas, beets, beef, and cars in order to encourage domestic production of beets. The broad spectrum nature of across the board tariffs doesn't specifically protect any given industry, unless the specific protection desired is "nothing should be imported, only ever produced domestically."
3: Historically speaking tariffs were a major source of government revenue. There was no income tax in the very early US (and this was the case in many places), and tariffs were seen as an efficient way to raise a lot of money for the government. At the time it was also something that was a lot easier to measure than things like property value, sales, or individual income, because all the goods had to come in through a port. Pretty easy to check the majority of the things coming in, compared to other taxation methods. A major argument in the time period was actually that the government was making too much revenue, such that it was constricting the growth of the private economy! A huge debate in the 1880s and 1890s was on how the share of government revenue could be lowered, and the growth of the economy could be encouraged. Republicans argued that implementing more tariffs would actually reduce imports and lead to lower revenues, which was the stated goal of the McKinley tariffs.
The general reason some people oppose tariffs overall is that they represent an approach to economic growth based on zero-sum thinking, i.e. an idea that if another country experiences economic growth, ours must suffer economic decline. There tends to be more support from many people behind the idea that international trade allows multiple economies to grow in tandem, as I understand it, but I'm definitely not an expert in this stuff, haha. I just find the historical aspect interesting.
On your second point, describing it as a major export economy in the period I describe is maybe not capturing the scenario, because we were in the middle of a major change in manufacturing. We were major importers of manufactured goods in the preceding time period, and we exported agricultural goods! The period from 1890 to 1910 roughly(depending on when you draw the cutoff) is when the US mainly started exporting manufactured goods more than importing them, and it was a massive transition. The period we're talking about is probably best understood as when we were in the process of industrializing more.
It's fair to point out that the economy was pretty different at the time, but it was different in a bigger way.
They really don't there is a reason the EU pretty much instantly caved in the last trade "negotiation" and it's most of the world frankly doesn't have much money. There certainly isn't enough untapped demand to fill a USA sized hole anywhere.
Here's a report: https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/us-lawmakers-scruti.... Is it factually wrong that "In the first half of 2025, Amazon and its cloud-computing unit, AWS, received approval for more than 12,000 H-1B visas, while Microsoft and Meta had more than 5,000 H-1B visa approvals each" and that they did layoffs?
What has changed is that they are or will soon be allocated by pay level instead of randomly. That's going to bias hiring toward Big Tech firms like Microsoft and Meta and away from body-shops like Infosys and Wipro.
[1] https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...
Another thing to keep in mind that these are also the largest and most innovative companies, and that’s in part due to having access to the best available talent. Those H1B workers cost the companies MORE than American workers. These companies have standardized compensation by job and level and it isn’t different for immigrants. But immigrants come with the additional costs of the immigration process, on top of having the same salary. This isn’t a cost saving measure, it’s a path to continuing to stay innovative and relevant.
As for layoffs - these are mega corps so one part of the company may be doing layoffs in their business while another business within the same company is hiring. And you’re seeing the total effects (layoffs and hiring), and it seems contradictory, but it’s actually just a bunch of little decisions that aren’t tied to each other.
Most of these visas are likely these companies simply renewing their existing employees’s visas.
Yeah, probably because they're offshoring instead. Which is, you know, worse.
People need to understand that it matters how they spend. They can't expect everyone else to pay for things to be made in America when they're not willing to themselves.
Of course the four morons of the broken winds don't see this as a failure, but merely an excuse to normalize that violence until it reaches the extent that they will face little to no consequence when they push it to the logical extreme and attempt to exterminate the many opposing groups rather than simply subjugate them.
How many American-made garments are in your closet right now?
Or is this more of an imaginary preference you're expressing right now?
For years, I’ve tried to buy only American-made denim. When the Cone Mills plant closed, I bought a bunch of dead stock jeans. There was one attempt since Cone Mills closed to open a new US denim factory, but it failed. Unless you’re buying whatever’s left of that increasingly rare stock, you can’t buy American-made denim.
Another example — I’m currently in the market for custom-formulated silicone and acrylic products. Every US manufacturer I’ve approached just sends an email that says “no we don’t do that”. I have like 5 Chinese suppliers on Alibaba trying to make a deal with me.
I would much rather source domestically as soon as someone tells me how to do it.
> How many American-made garments are in your closet right now?
This is a tired argument. The electorate was told "not to worry, we're offshoring the low value work so we can focus on high value work." Then, they offshored and automated the high value work.
You are aware we do make many things in America today, right?
> Then, they offshored and automated the high value work.
Huh? American workers are more productive than ever, and vastly more productive than workers anywhere else in the world.
As someone who owns quite a few American made garments (and has paid the price to do so), I'm amazed you got such a long response that basically dodged the question.
So! I think it makes a lot of sense to impair the offshoring of these service and knowledge jobs when there isn't a labor shortage and we're likely in a recession. If you need more data, I can provide as much as you would like on this topic.
America’s missing manufacturing renaissance - https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2026/01/06/a... | https://archive.today/3qQUq - January 6th, 2026
The U.S. is losing thousands of manufacturing jobs, analysis finds - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jobs-manufacturing-trump-tariff... - October 1st, 2025
Trump’s Trade War Squeezes Middle-Class Manufacturing Employment - https://www.americanprogress.org/article/trumps-trade-war-sq... - September 5th, 2025
USA Facts: What does the US produce? - https://usafacts.org/articles/what-does-the-us-produce/ ("Over four-fifths (83.3%) of value added to the US economy in 2024 was via services, for a total of $24.3 trillion.")
USA Facts: The diminishing role of manufacturing in the American economy - https://usafacts.org/articles/diminishing-role-manufacturing... - October 16th, 2020
It's not as easy as saying "just tax imports" or "just tax offshoring" because that hits the average folks who are barely getting by, as every cost gets passed down to the consumer.
I live in a country that used to be heavily industrialized (back in the previous regime when the goal was to be self-sufficient). In the 90s we lost most of the domestic industry as the factories got privatized and opening foreign trade enabled cheaper foreign products to flood the market. Most factories were sold off or just went out of business.
There's been some success with small businesses doing manufacturing domestically but it's mostly niche and not near what it used to be back when every house had at least some domestically made clothes, furniture, electronics...
Labor is expensive, market small, taxes high, and lately even high energy costs and rising import fees on materials from abroad. Plus of course the fact that people can't afford to pay 5-10x for the same thing made domestically when they can barely afford the thing at 1x the price.
Why?
I am asking why this is intrinsically a problem.
Or if it's not intrinsically a problem, then what are the downstream consequences we should care about, and can we talk about them explicitly instead of just assuming the best way to mitigate them is to put our economy into reverse advancement.
You could buy US-made garments in the 80s and 90s. Just like you could buy American TVs, vacuum cleaners, computers, and everything else. In fact Americans had a great quality of life back then, arguably a better one if you go by the attainability of things like housing, affordability, and economic inequality.
Just make sure you have a degree and a service sector white collar job though.
Where I'm sitting, the only manufacturing that exists in the USA is, for subassemblies or components that are purchased by larger companies on a contract basis, and manufactured by lower-middle class citizens. Boeing and GE is an example. And the reason Boeing buys domestically is only because they have to in order to limit their liability, reduce labor costs, and protect their IP. If the America you're looking for existed, Boeing would happily pay twice as much for labor to make components in house. If that America existed your television would be made here too, by people who weren't being subsidized themselves by Food Stamps.
There are no consumer commodity manufacturers in the USA who provide gainful employment without significant consideration towards corporate profit. There is basically nothing at Wal-Mart that you can buy that is made in the USA by people who are living in financial comfort. That's just not how late stage capitalism works.
Otherwise, those businesses will go to somewhere with a less regulated environment and ship it in.
The only way to truly protect workers is to increase the cost of bypassing the regulations that you want to protect them so that operating within the regulations is the best choice for the business.
This is a disconnect that we see in numerous topics nationally, like pushes to raise the minimum wage which just result in lots of job losses while companies relocate. So instead you see politicians push for a national increase to the minimum wage, so that there’s nowhere else in the US to relocate to because they are all equally expensive.
The moment you start creating policies where the first concern is making sure people can’t escape, it should be an indicator to rethink the policy.
No harm should come to humans of course, but corporations, entities, and systems are all fair game.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45851620 (citations)
[2] 31% of Wealth Owned by People Over 70 - https://www.apolloacademy.com/31-percent-of-wealth-owned-by-... - December 7th, 2025
[3] The housing crisis is pushing Gen Z into crypto and economic nihilism - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46079617 - November 2025 (4 comments)
[4] https://www.cato.org/blog/81-say-they-cant-afford-pay-higher... ("A recent survey by the Cato Institute and YouGov paints a troubling picture: 62 percent of Americans aged 18–29 say they hold a “favorable view” of socialism, and 34 percent say the same of communism.")
[5] Why millennials feel hopeless about the economy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46062082 - November 2025 (15 comments)
(think in systems)
I don't know what the future holds but I assure you it does not involve the people vesting yet more power in institutions that have only led them astray in their lifetimes (governments, unions and other industry groups, academia, etc). As the evil among us like to say "demographics are destiny" [1].
[1]https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...