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Comment by hallole | Hacker News Reader

Yeah essentially this. In my mental model, tariffs give an advantage to domestic suppliers / penalize foreign suppliers, and thus encourage domestic production by making it more viable. And bringing manufacturing back to the U.S. has been a pretty big GOP selling point.

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The implementation matters a lot. When fiscal policy is hand-wavy and unreliable, manufacturers can't risk huge domestic capital investment. They're trying to strategize on the order of decades, this administration is more so acting on the order of weeks.

> And bringing manufacturing back to the U.S. has been a pretty big GOP selling point.

Which is comical since the US is the #2 manufacturer in the world behind China. And that makes sense given the absolute size of China. The US manufacturing output continues to increase every year. What's not increasing are the manufacturing jobs because of automation.

If there are strategic industries the US wants bolster, like microchips, there are ways to handle that through long term incentives. The CHIPS act did this, but was killed by Trump because Biden put it in place.

> (...) Donald Trump (...) asked (...) to "get rid" of the (...) act. (...) However, as of October 2025 the Trump administration has instead preserved the Act, even adding an additional 10 percentage points to the advanced semiconductor manufacturing tax credit. (...)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIPS_and_Science_Act

Tariffs and this act are not mutually exclusive, they can be complementary and seems both are currently in place?

Good catch. Initially it was defunded, but looks like something has now survived.

Also in my opinion it's more about removing dependency than just job count (which is just nice to have side effect).

US/Trump doesn't want China to have any levers that control US economy, ie. they want situation where any China decisions that can be made to be immaterial to US economy.

If you look at it from this perspective then things like Greenland also do start to make sense as it is indeed long term investment into independency (minerals, rare earth elements). It's not about military presence, they already have it through NATO, it's more about setting up industry around resources – military advantages do exist as well of course but imho that's lower on the list, it just sells better to plebs.

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