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Comment by ApolloFortyNine | Hacker News Reader

I think blanket tariffs are dumb don't get me wrong.

But tariffs have been used in the car industry for decades. If you got rid of them completely within 5 years the American car companies would be closing plants.

The whole reason Japanese auto manufacturers build plants in the US was to avoid tariffs. Shipping costs are actually incredibly minimal for a vehicle.

So in my opinion, we've seen where they can work. If you value American jobs anyways. It does get hard to math out when you have to weigh the money the average consumer would save over the 10 million auto jobs in the US.

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What if, instead of all of us paying in order to have a car industry, we take that tax money and pay to an ecological restoration industry or functioning healthcare industry or whatever. Have you seen the map of superfund sites? Statistically speaking, you are almost certainly living within 10 miles of a superfund

https://epa.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=...

There is a LOT of other work we could be doing if we stopped trying to uphold existing uncompetitive industries

Transportation is like farming and yielding ownership of critical industries gives foreign adversaries too much leverage.

I’m with you though. If humans could just get along we could build an amazing world.

Japan, India, Germany, Mexico, etc all have massive auto manufacturing industries. If we're at war with all of those countries at the same time then maybe we deserve what's coming

China only became an auto industry power house in the 00s.

I wonder if the argument turns on Michigan being a helpful state in presidential elections - many other parts of the Midwest have lost their former industry and fallen on hard times.

That sounds to me like spending money to fix broken windows, rather than building our own windows (and not buying the old windows that were always breaking)

> It does get hard to math out when you have to weigh the money the average consumer would save over the 10 million auto jobs in the US.

Not that hard to math out, the deadweight loss of tariffs is always non-zero. IIRC there was a pretty good paper that mathed out the impact of Obamas tire tariffs and concluded that it cost the economy significantly more jobs than it saved.

That's pretty much impossible. If it costs a company 1% less to make a widget that takes 1000 hours of labor to make it overseas instead, the company is incentivized to move overseas.

The thousand of hours labor, the material to source the widget, the real estate for the factory, the transportation now all occurs overseas.

At the very least, you can't spew something like that then not even bother to link a source.

https://www.piie.com/publications/policy-briefs/2016/us-tire...

Ratio of 3 jobs lost per tire job saved.

> The thousand of hours labor, the material to source the widget, the real estate for the factory, the transportation now all occurs overseas.

This frees up massive amounts of capital that is more effectively spent playing to Americas strengths, this isn’t a zero sum game.

The problem is that it's all connected. Sure, the widget company may have local jobs saved, but what about the downstream companies that buy the widget to make something else? They can't hire as much because they are paying the higher price. Look at the steel tariffs. Sure they saved some steel jobs, but were a much larger net loss for jobs impacted by the higher prices.

Don't American cars have some of the lowest levels of reliability?

I'm not super educated on all the happenings in the car industry globally, but I've seen a few videos of Chinese EVs that put anything Ford, GM or other US brands have put out to absolute shame.

The purpose of the US auto industry is primarily a jobs program and secondarily a way to ensure the existence of supply chains for national security. The fact that it produces cars is tertiary at best and explains the quality of vehicles it produces.

I think American car companies are orthogonal to the question. The larger point is that _Japanese and German_ cars for the American market are largely themselves American by many important metrics.

Protectionism in the auto industry led to american auto makers being the laughing stock of the world. Acting like it is a good thing is absolutely insane

I am confused by your logic.

You start off with

> I think blanket tariffs are dumb don't get me wrong.

Then add a conjunction and use a single example to just make a point opposite to what you started with.

> So in my opinion, we've seen where they can work.

I can't help but think that you don't believe blanket tariffs are dumb because it worked for one industry and helps American jobs. Just start with that please.

Something something competition.

I mean no shit though? People calmly said this in Trump's first term where he (unsuccessfully) first tried to go tariff crazy. What does it add though? Nobody is freaking out saying "all tariffs are bad", they're saying "blanket tariffs for no/the stupidest reasons possible are bad".

And "tariffs that are utterly unpredictable and can change after barely-concealed bribery" are unhelpful to plan a business around.

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