Sans near-total embargoes on goods from a country, have we ever imposed sweeping tariffs of 145% on all goods coming from one of our most-imported trade partners?
No, no we have not. Certain tariffs were very targeted for specific reasons, you are correct. But those were not blanket-applied haphazardly at such high levels. Hence, "unprecedented".
This is another apples/oranges comparison.
Canada or the EU doing that and sorting their own food isn't the huge conspiracy against America that Trump seems to think it is.
To what degree relative to what we're seeing now, though?
edit: ok, I didnt know that bussiness stop buying, but they must buy somethings in the future right either buy from other tax exempt or buy thing with add value tax
1. new 30% tax
2. people stop buying so many goods due to (1)
3. due to lack of demand, our shipping industry seizes up and goods stop flowing, at least till (1) goes away
My main source for that theory is https://medium.com/@ryan79z28/im-a-twenty-year-truck-driver-...
I’m curious when they plan on deploying this. It specifies a 3-year schedule so you think okay is this to be signed into law in 2025 so that the IRS is abolished during the next election year, or are they going to wait a year or two and have the IRS abolishment only “trigger” if Republicans continue to control the government beyond 2028? Or perhaps they will push it through if/when Democrats retake some or all of Congress in 2026?
One thing’s for sure though, the 1% will use cryptocurrency to dodge this consumption tax and it will (as usual) disproportionately affect the lower and middle classes, who aren’t as savvy in tax fraud/evasion/“loopholes”.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/25/t...
The idea that we would give up progressive taxes is pretty antithetical to their platform, given how many campaign on raising taxes on high income earners.
Given how slow even a single-party-controlled Congress is, I sincerely doubt such a bill would ever see the light of day.
The Senate still has the filibuster, as well. This will not pass in the current Congress either.
The filibuster rule is vulnerable, but I don't think there's enough support from Senate Republicans to do so. If I'm wrong, it would be an escalation which would add more fuel to the 2026 fire.
Also, I remember there being talk when the DINOs were voting with the Republicans of ending the filibuster…. So… I mean the current admin just ignores rules, why wouldn’t this be the Congress that ends the filibuster? This could be their one shot to implement the “Final Solution” (Project 2025).
You're right -- if this Senate abolishes the filibuster, it will likely be for "budget votes only" or somesuch. The Senate isn't quite as full of short-term thinkers as the House is though. I don't think the Senate Rs will go for it, because it's the only thing stopping a future D majority from doing what majorities do, and smart Rs know they are a minority party under ordinary circumstances.
But if I'm wrong, it will mean that the Senate Rs are going for broke on a short-term play, and may be discounting future risks. That would be the behaviour of the very desperate, or of the very powerful.
If the Senate Rs believe they are one of those two things -- either one -- the consequences could be enormous.
This is all very dramatic of course. Normally I'd dismiss such ideas. But the temperature is very high right now, and this time might actually be different, this time...
Full sales and gasoline taxes, and relative to income, disproportionately more.
Not only is that not a “given”, I’d argue that you’re completely wrong. One doesn’t have to look very hard to find out how much income tax is paid by lower class: effectively zero.
1. Non-discretionary spending as a percentage of income is much larger for the lower (and middle) classes, who spend 100% or near 100% of their income on “essentials” like food and shelter.
2. The tax itself is obscene- 30% or thereabouts. As others have pointed out, the poorest of the poor don’t pay any income tax, and many essentials (like unprepared food) are not currently taxed. I don’t recall if the bill would add a tax on unprepared food. I wouldn’t be surprised if it does.
https://www.tax.ny.gov/pubs_and_bulls/tg_bulletins/st/listin...
There are about 10 that still charge taxes on groceries, but are considering phasing them out.
Shelter is always tax exempt. There is no tax on rent. Mortgages, if anything, come with a tax rebate, as amounts paid can be claimed against collected income taxes.
Also, you are wrong when you wrote, "Given that the lower and middle classes pay a disproportionate amount of income tax".
In fact, most Americans who earn under about $40,000 a year pay no federal income tax. I believe the vehicle that effects this outcome is mainly the earned income tax credit.
> FairTax is a fixed rate sales tax proposal introduced as bill H.R. 25 in the United States Congress every year since 2005.
An R-GA sponsors it every year and it never gets further than "introduced", with fewer co-sponsors on it now than ever AFAIK. Technically, if it did get into law, it could create greater chaos, it has a provision to terminate itself if the 16th Amendment isn't repealed, so enough incompetence could eliminate taxes entirely.
Edit to add:
Better example for me was the semiconductor industry. It was hard for years to design hardware because key ICs would disappear. You needed to buy the ICs the moment you thought you might use them, a form of stockpiling that had no winner - it's very expensive to buy stock that you potentially never use, and it deprives the rest of the market simultaneously.
The tariffs are effectively a 30-150% price increase on all retail products, along with some marginal price increase on all manufactured goods. Given the nearly assured recession, it is unclear how willing American consumers and corporations are to eat this tax. Some businesses will take it out of the margin, others will pass it along.
Not true. If you have watched Shark Tank you have seen that products cost, as an example, $6 landed, but retail for $24. Tariffs are 145% of $6, so around $9. So they only have to increate the retail price from $24 to $33 to keep the same profit margin. In this example that's a 37% increase, not 145%.
We're about 1 or 2 months right now from some goods not being available in the US at any price. If people lost their mind over that happening during COVID, well, this is going to be just as bad.
... You don't actually believe he cares about Bitcoin or the technology, right?
When the stock market (and confidence in the U.S.) falls, people typically flock to gold and bonds. If the U.S. is seen as unstable and at risk of not making debt payments, bonds are a bad place to move money into. That leaves gold (and to a lesser extent foreign stock markets).
With crypto though- that’s a con man’s wet dream. Volatile. No government oversight. Crypto pump and dumps are literally legal (though come close to being fraud, as people like Du Kwon have learned).
EDIT: I can find very few voices (not currently working directly for the administration). There's Jeff Ferry who believes "tariffs imposed during the 19th century spurred industrialization and ultimately positioned America as a global superpower". (That historical view is uncommon and wouldn't account for the current realities of global supply chains.)
It's a political angle because it's to the responsible politicians' advantage to push that economic theory. I think the claim is not necessarily that economists who believe this theory are acting politically, but that their voices may be amplified by politicians for, let us say, less than scientific reasons.
The Democrats could never do anything against China that imposes short-term economical pain because their own voters would immediately punish them for it and the entire media from left to far-right would put them under fire. Even marginal economical pain has immediate political consequences - I'd argue that Harris' loss was mostly due to rising and unanswered problems about exploding cost of living, chiefly eggs.
The Republicans however? They still have the same constraint from the left to center media and voters - but crucially, their own voter base is so darn high on their own supply (and their media has long since sworn fealty to even the most crackpot people), they are willing to endure anything because their President told them to.
It's "Only Nixon could go to China" all over again, and frankly it's disgusting.
Our current situation is the result of decades of deliberate greedy systematic outsourcing of everything that can be outsourced. It's our own dumb fault. And it will take decades to reverse it if it's even possible. It's not a "short-term" kind of thing.
We want a more 'just' system, it requires regulation, so everybody is playing the same game.
Oh! We've deregulated. That's supposed to help make folks more profitable. But, whoops, it's the same playing field no matter the particular rules. So deregulation helps who? Big players, international players. Not you and me.
Our being the office working city/suburb living HN posting white collar types who have no visibility into the non service parts of the economy beyond what is made available in our investment account dashboards.
The industrial workers, the farmers, the blue collar tradesmen, none of them wanted this even back in 1995 or 2005, the evidince that rampant outsourcing was bad in the long term just wasn't concrete enough for their opinions to gain traction and there were other seemingly more important issues that decided elections back then and we did make a lot of money selling our economy out so everyone was willing to let outsourcing hum along even if they didn't like it.
The people who made bank shipping industrial tooling to the far east and bulldozing old factories, the middle managers coordinating with overseas suppliers, etc, etc. didn't want to do any of those things, they were uneasy about the long term impacts but they did it anyway because the managerial class structured the economy such that that's what they had to do to keep the lights on.
These countries also were lifted from poverty and into relative prosperity by this. It looked like a win-win, under a certain angle, back in the day; the US would turn into an innovative economy producing high-tech gear, doing high-grade R&D and engineering, and producing software, all the stuff the Bangladeshi or even Chinese were not supposed to be able to do comparably well. It just turned out that the engineering and development thrive next to the actual production capacity, and can be studied and learned. Now Chinese electronic engineering rivals that of the US, same for mechanical, shipbuilding, even aircraft / space and weapons.
A similar thing once happened to Japan, then to South Korea: they turned from postwar ruins and poverty into high-tech giants competing successfully with the US by exporting inexpensive, good-quality stuff to the US. But these are politically aligned with the US and the West in general; places like Bangladesh or Vietnam, not so much, and China expressly is not.
A toaster off of the 1958 Sears catalog cost US$12.50 which amounts to ~US$ 160 today. We can make a $160 toaster today that'll survive nuclear war but no one will buy it.
Some things do get better with time, home appliances are the best example. They consume on average less energy today, are lighter, have more safety features, etc.
Cheaper prices are also a feature: more people have access to goods today because of it.
Not all that is old is great.
More recently, US capital owners for the last 20 years 100% understood that they were selling off the industrial capability of the USA to the CCP. It was their monetary gain but our problem, so they went forward with it.
For last 20 years, I can agree; but the boom of outsourcung started nearly 40 years ago.
These are the goals of any "free market" company.
One of my great critiques of capitalism and the economic analysis of it is that all the economists seem to believe that every company wants to happily exist in a open market with lots of competitors optimizing entirely working to reduce costs for the consumer.
All you have to do is read my first paragraph and to see how utterly fantastical that notion is, and why regulation is needed to counteract every one of those simple game theory power politics end goals
Game theory should be taught much wider, I agree.
This isn't really true except for perhaps the most naive sort of person. It was well understood by most folks that there were going to be winners and losers. You can't gut entire segments of the workforce in less than a generation and not expect extreme pain.
It's just those people had very little political power.
Exactly zero people in actual power are genuinely surprised by the outcome here. Perhaps they are at the political backlash and how powerful it became, but that's about it.
How would you reverse it?
Appealing to economists is the opposite of what they want, because economists look at macroeconomics efficiency which encourages globalism. They would rather be inefficient and hold on to their identity.
If you really want answers, best thing to do is hang out in an area dominated by Trump supporters for a few weeks. Talking to them has changed my perspective on a lot of things. I don't agree with a lot of what they say, but I understand them now. They often aren't great at articulating their thoughts. They think in terms of macro-level complex systems. I shouldn't say 'think' - more like they intuit. They feel something is wrong, and they don't necessarily know why. You have to (kindly and with curiosity) interrogate them a bunch to figure it all out.
I follow a bunch of them on X, and they seem outraged by some of what Trump is doing, particularly the pro-war stance. Hence the low poll numbers?
[Sorry I really geek out on anthropology and understanding cultures.]
Sadly, it's mostly just cult of personality which I figure you are graciously trying to avoid assuming.
Tariffs are the perfect example of this. Trump announces tariffs? Good, we need long-term investment in domestic production. Trump cancels them? Good, they are just a short-term negotiation tactic. Trump negotiates a trade deal? Good, now we get a better deal on imports from that country. Trump says tariffs are back on the table? Good, we need domestic production long-term.
There are no macro-level complex system ideals here. Pinning them down to one claim is like fighting jelly where on every strike it morphs into something else.
I guess saying you don't understand tariff consequences and the like but you trust Trump to know what he's doing and make things great could be a reasonable position?
I'm hazy on some economics myself but don't especially trust Trump to make thing great. But I did kind of trust some previous presidents to do a decent job without following all the policies. (Clinton and Obama seemed quite good).
In 2016 that might have been a reasonable position without digging too much in to his background/history.
But we've had years of him in and out of office now, repeatedly lying. Lying about big things, small things, changing the lies, doubling down on the lies. Threatening people who question any of his lies in even the most polite/positive way possible.
Why anyone today would "trust" him on anything is just... insane.
The trickiest bit is navigating the, ah, information gap. If you don't listen to Mark Levin or watch Fox News, your interlocutor is going to teach you about a bunch of things going on that you had no clue about (and when you look up the stuff afterward, at least 90% of it's pure bullshit) and you're going to get blank stares or hostility if you bring up any of a wide swath of current events that you assume everyone knows about.
You've gotta just roll with what they say and not do much talking, basically. You mustn't act surprised or incredulous when they make claims about things going on that you're pretty sure aren't real, you mustn't present counter-examples, you mustn't keep pushing if you try to broach a topic you assume is neutral and widely understood and they start to bristle at it.
It reminds me of that experiment where a part of the brain gets stimulated and the subject performs an involuntary action—then comes up with a logical explanation for why they did it, even though they didn’t choose it. I think that’s what’s happening with a lot of these Trump supporters. They're reacting to environmental triggers without really understanding why. It’s fair to say they’re being driven by something external—though then you have to ask, what’s driving that? Who's driving us?
In the end, they’re just human, like me or anyone else. We're all playing the Human game. No one’s really 'awake' or enlightened. After talking to enough people, I’m convinced most 'truth' is concocted, and no one’s actually in control. Truth lasts only as long as it’s useful.
The 'uniparty' narrative denigrates the Western system of multi-party representative democracy and checks and balances, and equates it with Putin's monstrously corrupt and brutal one-party state.
Unfortunately these fascist narratives are extremely effective on underinformed and unintelligent people -- and our enemies know these people vote.
(Personally, I think they got played.)
Man, those guys are doomed. This is what they're aspiring to: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/25/michael-alex...
why are there are a great many democratic nations with (many) more than two parties, even with new parties arising and old parties diminishing. (I have firsthand experience with some of them. I highly recommend the experience.)
Is it wrong to 'intuit' that those nations may have a more vibrant democracy than a system of two parties that are both beholden to corporate capture?
Of course I will not be surprised at how asking this on HN will affect the scrip - oops I meant to say karma of course! - of such an inquirer as myself.
>They would rather be inefficient and hold on to their identity
What identity?
Open a news website. Several news websites. Turn on the TV. Talk to some people about politics. How often do those topics come up?
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691169446/de...
Do not imply that both parties are the same on this. That is factually incorrect and Democrats have repeatedly demonstrated an interest in improving democracy.
The GOP, on the other hand, is cheering Trump on as he arrests judges and ignores due process.
While Democrats don't like losing to Republicans they also don't like losing to a third party. Elected Democrats oppose any system that modifies the status quo that "correctly" elected them.
This is such nonsense there's no reason to take you serious as a person. The two independents in Congress caucus with the Democrats.
> Their preferred world is a two party system where the Republicans are losing.
A private political party doesn't support other private political parties?! Definitely a first in the world.
Meanwhile Republicans have pre-emptively banned all forms of ranked choice voting at all government levels in eleven states.
But do go on.
These are not the same.
Honestly IRV is worse than plurality so there are plenty of reasons to oppose it other than a two-party domination conspiracy theory. Using IRV gives up monotonicity, possibilities for a distributed count, and some elements of a secret ballot (for even a medium-sized candidate list) for basically nothing.
Monotonicity is not a theoretical concern. Alaska almost immediately ran into a degenerate case [2].
[0] https://rangevoting.org/NoIrv.html
[1] http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Alaska%27s_at-large_congr...
And probably without even trying. Once it becomes better known, gaming the system like this will happen more often.
Range voting may well be much better, and there are certainly more mathematically sound versions of ranked-choice than IRV, but I think they utterly fail to convince that IRV is just as bad as plurality. They also seem to only take their game theory as far as necessary to reflect Range Voting in the best possible light. For instance, they argue that voters will almost always rank their less preferred of the front-runners last even if they have greater opposition to other candidates, but they don't explore that candidates can and do chase higher rankings among voters that won't rank them #1. It's an obvious and common strategy (candidates were already doing it in my counties first ever RCV election) so I can only assume the reason its not mentioned is that it improves the soundness of RCV in practice.
Their link is referring to the Irish presidential election, which does use IRV—but it’s a meaningless figurehead position, so it’s unclear how relevant the comparison is.
Also to note, there's nothing technically stopping the US House from moving to proportional representation along with ranked-choice and dems have proposed it recently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Representation_Act_(Unite...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_transferable_vote#Unite...
Because we have a two party system. Third parties are nothing more than spoilers. If their ideas were good enough, they could gain traction with one side or the other, and build a caucus to get their candidates elected. But they don't, because that's never the actual goal.
I don't see any reason to think this is accurate.
What we've lost is independent media having outlets to reach an audience. Pre proliferation of centralized social media platforms, it was easier to find independent voices on the internet through more de-centralized means. I remember coming across the works of Fredrich Hayek and Paul Krugman via the same message board in the early 2000s. Diversity of thought was at least respected, even if it got heated.
I've noticed a steady decline in diversity of thought co-existing on the internet as general social media coalesced around Meta (Facebook, Instagram), Snapchat, Twitter and TikTok. Reddit has also had a slower but meaningful decline in the co-mingling of ideas on merits, and perhaps subjectively, I feel it took longer to get there but ultimately has ended up in the same place, an echo chamber.
There was a time I remember, when progressive, liberal, and conservative people also could seem to agree on some baselines, like not enabling racists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked-choice_voting_in_the_Un...
Oops
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/3040...
I don't think RCV would do much to change that. In order to be elected, you need to be seen, so you need a sizeable media presence. The billionaire class controls enough of the media (traditional, social and "independent") that the people will keep voting for their servants under pretty much any voting system, bar a few exceptions here and there. It's a fundamental issue of electoral democracy, not of the voting system.
One potential alternative would be to switch to non-electoral democracy, e.g. drawing representatives at random rather than electing them, but that's even less likely to happen, and it may end up having different problems. At least it'd suppress all the circus around elections and all that party nonsense, so there's that.
Long term, the estimate is a 15% hit to the economy.
And only 12% of people think that it went well. (For reference, that's about the same proportion as 'Americans who believe shape-shifting lizards control politics, or aren't sure' [1].)
In personal experience, my purchases of UK products have taken a massive drop.
And that's not even mentioning the losses to the environment or human rights.. So... Not what I would call a mixed bag. More like a deeply homogeneous bag.
0 - https://uk.news.yahoo.com/damning-statistics-reveal-true-cos...
1 - https://www.publicpolicypolling.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/...
Like, I worked for a few companies (I live in Ireland) who had moved their roles from the UK to Ireland because of it.
More generally, it's just made life much harder for UK exporters, as they now have way more customs declarations and tariffs on both sides.
The big thing for me (and lots of Irish people) was that we now avoid ordering from UK sites as it's likely to take longer and cost more.
Overall, it's been bad and kneecapping your productive industries on the promise (not fulfilled) of reducing immigration seems to be a bad idea.
That being said, the UK is still there, still a big market so it's more that they get less investment from multinationals than they otherwise would have, and their companies face much higher barriers to export.
And the worst part was that the EU introduced checks on agriculture immediately, while the UK didn't which basically meant that EU farmers were much more competitive in the UK than UK farmers could be outside it.
To be clear, Brexit could have been managed much better, but it was a bad idea executed poorly.
I'm curious what the response is from folks who voted for it. Denial? Didn't go far enough? Resignation? Change of mind? Something else?
For me personally, nothing much really has changed. You can't bring as much wine back from France on holiday, and it is harder to take your pet to Europe.
The UK economy is shite, but it's not a significant outlier amongst other EU countries.
There is a huge impact on people who export things like food to the extent that some of them have given up
I have a friend who voted for Trump because (paraphrasing) "he's different or we need to shake things up". Like our entire country is some game where the outcome doesn't affect people.
I'd rather use the scientific method: make predictions, let the experiment run, and compare to the results. Predicting that the national debt ceiling will be raised or removed, taxes cut, labor unions attacked, and "elites" not correcting anything or being heroes.
There are people who consider themselves 4th generation Republicans. It's passed down through their family like their religion.
When (not if) the economy craters, each team's news bubble will spin it how they like, and ultimately both teams will keep doing the same things and voting the same way for the foreseeable future.
Are you sure? People often claim this, but don't follow through. There's even an expression, "fair weather fan".
It's true some people seem to support some political parties beyond all reason. But to keep the support through personal hardship is different, and hasn't been tested as often. Worldwide, nothing particular to US.
America is getting less and less involved with traditional organized religion, and I honestly think this personality cult is taking a lot of its place.
That story applies to both sides of the aisle in US Government. The battle is for the 1/3 that doesn't vote and the sliver of folks who switch back and forth.
That will only intensify if his policies go and tube the economy; the reason he got re-elected was because enough people wanted the 2019 economy back and thought his policies would do it better than Harris's.
What does "senate reform" mean other than filibuster reform, which if you ask anyone who has studied government will tell you is an intentional design decision for a more deliberative body. "Pass laws quickly" is, depending on who you ask, either not the right thing you want to optimize for, or the exact opposite of what you want.
"Tax law reform" okay great but that's going to mean 15 different things to 10 different people.
But from what I've read/heard/understand tariffs can have the effect of on-shoring but only if they are fixed an unlikely to change/fluctuate. On-shoring production is not quick. Some Trump rep made a comment about how they delayed the tariffs on phones/computers 3 months because "Companies would need time to move production" which is just laughable, as if anyone could move production in 3 months (let alone 3 years).
None of it matters since the Trump admin changes its mind like it changes its socks. No serious company is going to do more that PR about how they are moving production back to the US because they can very easily get burned when Trump changes his mind. Moving production is a massive task and getting caught half-way through with policy changing (making it no longer profitable) could be a death blow to some companies.
The consequences are so bad that everyone who remembers the disasters brought on by high tariffs must be dead for anyone to think it is a good idea.
So, even if the purported goals are good, even achieving them will be outweighed by the disaster.
Plus, companies in countries protected by high tariffs inevitably become globally uncompetitive.
Edit, add: Even worse, most high tariff schemes have distinguished between placing the high tariffs on only finished goods and exempting the raw materials or components from the tariffs. This administration makes almost no such distinctions, just sprays tariffs everything, so harms US manufacturers as well. The only exemptions are the ones who pay tribute (e.g., sponsoring inauguration, etc.), so it is almost more of an extortion scheme than a tariff plan. A particularly bad example was revealed as the Japanese delegation came to negotiate, asked what concessions the US wanted, and could get no straight answer [0]. It seems the US group just expects the tariffed nations to supplicate and bring adequate gifts, not make adjustments according to a master plan. Very strong indication there is no plan, which is the worst possible case.
So, while I completely agree with the concept of looking for a silver lining, I'm not seeing any...
[0] https://petapixel.com/2025/04/21/japan-cant-get-an-answer-on...
You need to read more history. The link between tariffs, or any specific federal policy, and how a time period looks to the next generations is iffy at best and probably not really correlated much or at all.
The 1820s-40s were looked upon by following generations the way many look at the 1950s today. From the POV of the mid to late 1800s it was seen as uncomplicated and peaceful because the tension and strife leading up to the civil war and the cultural messiness that followed had yet to build. From the POV of the industrial economy of the late 1800s and early 1900s it was seen the same way but with a heavier emphasis on cleanliness and purity because even if you were nominally poorer and subject to more chance of starvation living and working on a farm you owned was arguably nicer than a tenement and factory you didn't.
The 1890s on through the 1920s were also looked upon fondly by subsequent generations as a time of massive progress. Mechanical power via fossil fuels and steam became the norm, railroads were everywhere, factories sprung up, all manner of goods and services formerly reserved for the wealthy became the domain of the everyman.
Obviously the 1930s don't get looked fondly upon and the jury is still out on the 2020s.
Not exactly an economist of note.
The issue is that labor productivity (level of tech) in American mfg hasn't broadly increased at the rate we'd need to manufacture many things at reasonable prices for the American consumer. This makes Baumol's cost disease a huge issue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect You can see this manifest in healthcare as one of the most egregious examples; the top cause of margin pressure for hospitals is labor: https://www.hfma.org/press-releases/health-systems-near-thei....
While we can still manufacture things that require comparatively high levels of skill, technology, and capex, it's never again (absent a depression greatly outstripping the 1930s) going to be profitable to pay American workers to make t-shirts rather than Bangladeshis.
There's a good argument to be made that a combination of outsourcing and illegal labor caused problems by suppressing investment in tech and automation for thirty years plus, and there are certain things we probably should make here. But ultimately the stuff we actually need to manufacture are things core to sustaining life and the military. Medical supplies, weapons, food, oil, metals, chemicals, etc.
We can, with time and good industrial policy, bring back some manufacturing. That would be a case of short-term pain for long-term benefit. But even then, that's true only insofar as we give people a shot to actually buy American. Moonshot investments in roboticization and industrial automation for a few years would really make this easier, along with using the huge amount of post-HS education dollars we spend to focus on training skilled engineers to implement this sort of thing, along with things like skilled machinists. But these tariffs don't really give American companies a shot.
We cannot, with any reasonably-good outcome, bring back manufacturing jobs. That midwest factory worker is never going to be paid $30/hour plus pension/retirement contributions, good medical, etc. to make regular, el cheapo consumer goods.
Well, this is possible, but it will take very few workers to produce the huge amount of goods to make it profitable. Case in point: e.g. a Novo Nordisk factory that produces like half of the EU supply of insulin employs like 15 workers per shift, who mostly oversee automation at work, handle incoming / outgoing trucks, and ensure physical security of the plant.
It's the same thing that happened to the US agriculture: in 1800, it used to employ like 80% of the population, in 2000, 2% to 3%. Machines replaced human labor almost fully.
Your parallel to ag is a good one: it's something we need to be here, and we wisely embraced automation to ensure 1. we could do it even in wartime, when our male population is needed elsewhere, and 2. that we could produce in a way that cost little for the average consumer and the export market. We need the same thing to happen here.
I mentioned the "factory jobs aren't coming back" point more because Trump is playing hard to a rust-belt base that wants those jobs back, doing this in some ways as a hand-out.
Places like Bangladesh are experiencing the industrial revolution; to remember what it looked like in England, read some Dickens (or even K. Marx, haha); for the US, read some Mark Twain or Theodore Dreiser. It was bleak.
The paradise of 1950s, when a Ford factory worker could be the only breadwinner in a middle-class family, was only possible because most of the rest of the world was devastated by WWII, from which the US emerged relatively unscathed.
Maybe this is the situation the Trump administration is striving for
> the top cause of margin pressure for hospitals is labor
While it's true that the highest cost to hospitals is labor, the highest cost to consumers is insurance company bureaucracy.
And that is a secure seas. Well, I don't think piracy or u boat torpedoing and many other forms of threats to overseas trade is going to appear in the near future, I do think that overseas shipping is going to get less secure.
China is exerting its "rights" in its near area seas and attempting to expand further. Ukraine has shown that capital naval vessels can be threatened with cheap drones. The red sea trade is being assaulted by Somali raiders and yemeni rebels armed with Iranian missiles.
The other thing I think is missing from your analysis is that the cost of labor to business is laden with healthcare costs. And the US has the most expensive healthcare by far in the world. So perhaps a comprehensive universal healthcare system and reform of all the profit and rent seeking systems that are in the medical establishment in the United States would need to be reformed. Can't wait for that unicorn to fly.
So again, while I agree with a lot of your analysis and it matches mainstream economic analysis, this mirrors a lot of my criticisms of economic analysis. It basically is a defense of capital interests and the rich, and strenuously avoids analyzing anything that doesn't serve those interests from a fundamental assumption standpoint.
Indeed, America is the world leader in manufacturing Bangladeshis ;)
Well and having chip fabs as well.
More generally, though, there is another variable in-between wages and cost of products, and that is profits.
Perhaps the likes of Apple, Amazon etc could maybe make do with a few less billion in profits.
I read an article (in, I think the NYT) about how, prior to Jack Welch at GE, companies used to boast in their annual reports about how well paid their employees were. The only company I know of that does this now is CostCo.
I genuinely believe that this will be a decade long struggle to generate a long-term benefit to the American nation (ie, the average person) via tariffs as a tool of class warfare and economic restructuring. If you read around MAGA forums, you’ll see this described as a “Mag7 problem, not a MAGA problem”.
But that may not be what you’re asking.
1. Tariffs directly take money out of the coffers of private companies and move it into the government. Private companies therefore have less money to invest.
2. Tariffs are a tax on economic activity and therefore suppress it. This causes companies to want to hold more cash and invest more conservatively. Major changes take appetite for risk, which tariffs reduce.
In addition, the arbitrary, legally questionable way in which this particular set of tariffs has been imposed means they are not affecting long-term corporate planning. Instead most companies are seeking to just “wait them out” while issuing hollow press releases with big numbers they think the president wants to see.
Skilled and willing workers (except, ahem, Mexicans) don't grow on trees in a couple months.
Motivation for companies to pay real wages to Americans doesn't exist
Tariffs are a consumption tax that will probably be highly regressive.
Honestly, it seems like the Trump administration thinks he's they're just playing a game of civilization or some other 4x game and just needs to adjust the slider for a couple cities in order to enact broad-scale production changes.
Tariffs allow otherwise more expensive domestic products to compete against cheaper products from abroad.
In and of itself, that says nothing about quality one way or another. In practice, it often means the opposite of what you suggest: domestic goods are often of higher quality, and/or are made by workers in better conditions, because of stricter laws here than in the places manufacturing has moved to. (And not by coincidence—the cheaper labor and looser laws are exactly why manufacturing moved to those places.)
Of course, all of this only applies when tariffs are carefully considered, strategically applied, and left in place for a long and predictable length of time.
Surgeons can push the limits of better and better surgery if they can spend their entire career focused on just that. If they’re required to farm or sew clothes half of every day, they will not be able to advance surgery as far.
The same specialization-driven innovation happens between companies who can trade freely, and between countries who can trade freely. Paul Krugman won a Nobel prize for exploring this idea.
The goal was never to bring manufacturing back to the US. It's to negotiate new tariffs.
With China specifically, I could also see a deal that included stricter enforcement of US IP laws, which is definitely destroying businesses and the job loss that comes with it.
I don't. I see this as the intentional razing of the US economy and interests.
If you were thoughtful about economic policy and truly believed a trade war was the solution, you'd prepare ahead of time (e.g. by stockpiling things like rare earth metals that are important to your economy and likely to be impacted by retaliatory tariffs).
That they haven't done that is one more indicator that they are thoughtlessly winging this. Even if there's a solution that involves tariffs, that's not the play they're running.
But, it is possible that his policy of "do everything at once, without taking the time to do it right" is more reflective of his belief that whatever he tries [even just being president] will be fought, so his options [from his POV] are "do it now" or "don't do it at all", not "do it right".
EDIT: Am willing to be learn, would the downvoters explain - do you disagree that this is his view? Or does his understanding not matter when he acts upon it?
edit: The pro trump voting bloc showed up. Comment went from +2 to -3 in a minute. This chain will probably be flagged to death within the hour.
That doesn't make Trump any less demented.
They have a guy who can make the stock go up or down with a tweet, and usually seems to agree with the last thing he's heard. It's not difficult to see how this could be exploited for financial gain.
Now it's just about the concrete numbers and "wait and see." It all looks a lot higher right now than I imagine makes any sense, but you know what they say about the market and irrtionality...
Normally someone makes a case and tries to sell it to the public, congress. What's the purpose of tariffs to bring in income or to bring back jobs or to level trade agreements? You can't do all things at once and how does that work with other promises like lower prices. The lack of an overall plan is causing the issue.
If you take immigration he has a plan and he stuck to it and those are where his highest approval numbers are. Imagine he one day opens the border another day closes it starts kicking out American families the next day invites the world back in. That's his trade policy.
Get a solid plan, understand the downsides and if you can live with it stick with it and keep the personal insults out.
Doesn't his party control both houses of Congress?
2: What 10 democrats would work with Trump? It would be gridlock for four years (which is fine).
Do we love or hate kyrsten sinema for protecting the filibuster now?
Hes the most powerful President America has seen in living memmory.
He is not. A President is a lame duck between the election of their successor and the end of their term, not at the beginning of their Constitutionally-final term.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lame_duck_(politics)#United_St...
A president elected to a second term is sometimes seen as a lame duck from early in the second term, since term limits prevent them from contesting re-election four years later.
That is not the solution. In business yes, but for the president the answer is still NO.
Presidents should be eliminated for writing executive orders. It should be a constitutional amendment if necessary. Everything the president wishes to order is either under the responsibility of the legislature or is already within the President's scope of responsibilities.
This is a sufficient question, and sufficient answer for a meager understanding of how economies work.
For the kind of place America is, with the kind of intellectual, economic, and procedural fire power it holds?
Again, he isn't President of some backwater, and he isn't lacking for advisors, to give even more sophisticated analyses than what any Econ 101 student can do.
And now, to your own point:
> he tries [even just being president] will be fought,
by who? the Repubs have all 3 branches. Thank god, otherwise people would spend another decade ignoring the obvious and blaming forces other than Trump and Trumpism for Trump's actions.
---
The emperor has no clothes. Everything else, is people projecting from past Presidents upon the tableau they see.
If these hnedditors ran an ice cream shop it would have one flavor. If you asked where the other flavors are they'd say those other flavors aren't even ice cream.
Yes, you can argue that [person] is [performing an action] because they believe, from their POV that [reason1, reason2, reason3].
> Or does [what person believes] not matter when they act upon it?
Yes.
What people choose to believe is distinct from fundamental baseline reality.
Let me put it another way for you; if I believe that fairies have invaded from space and I go out smashing peoples cars because, I personally, believe that this will make the fairies go home…
…does it help to argue about whether I believe in fairies or not?
It does not.
The arguement must be about whether fairies exist in baseline reality or not.
What I believe is not a point worth discussing.
…so, to take a step back to your argument:
Does he believe this will help? Who. Gives. A. Flying. Truck? Does it matter what he believes? Can we speculate what he thinks? It’s a useless and meaningless exercise and a logical fallacy; because anything can be justified if the only criteria are “you believe it will work”.
The discussion worth having is, in baseline reality, will it actually help?
Which is what the post you are replying to is addressing; but instead or following that up, you’ve moved this discussion into a meaningless sub thread of unprovable points about what people may or may not believe.
Which is why you’ve received my downvote.
The consequences of your actions matter even if you disagree. When your actions hurt people, you've still hurt people. Doesn't matter what you thought you were doing.
You see this kind of thinking through all levels of American life. You, personally, are the only person on the planet who matters, fuck everyone else and let them deal with the consequences. You run a red light and someone else gets T-boned and killed? That's their problem, you got to your destination 3 minutes faster.
The trump administration is simply the manifestation of how sick our country is.
It's going to take us generations to recover from this kind of societal illness, if we ever can.
The fact that the MAGAts are so utterly incompetent that even the idea of opposition sends them into chaos and whining fits while they control the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government is itself supportive of if the "these morons are too stupid to make a plan" type theories. Instead of planning they attacked anyone who asked how they would handle the obvious consequences, they deny that the obvious consequences that are clearly happening are actually happening. They attack anyone asking for metrics that the plan is working, make unbacked claims that they are in talks to fix the situation that caused the trade war (while refusing to even articulate what the goals are and attacking anyone who asks that too). They aren't even communicating with each other to coordinate something that looks like a plan: how many times have one group of lackeys been talking about plan X while another group or the president himself does the opposite to the surprise of everyone.
There is no evidence that one of the key bullet points of a campaign platform was ever more than a bullet point - no plan, no attempt to prepare for consequences, nothing indicative of a plan at all. They truly believed that imposing tarrifs would magically make factories appear overnight.
I am firmly of the opinion that his only goal is the be the center of attention, and the more outrageous the things he does are, the better. Ie, there's no such thing as negative publicity.
He could do it the right way, if he wanted to.
Is it the imposition of tariffs on Canada and Mexico? Or is it the rescinding of those tariffs a day later. Or is it the pause but when the pause was supposed to end nothing really changed?
Or is it the liberation day tariffs on everyone? Or the subsequent reduction of liberation day tariffs a few days later but an increase in tariffs against China.
Or is the “it” the fact that the administration reveals these major market moving actions a few hours before making them public to friends, family and donors?
Once anyone can figure out what “it” is supposed to be one can have a discussion about whether it’s good or not.
This seems completely wrong and ascribes motivations to Trump he clearly doesn't have. I think his framing is much more "everything I do is correct therefore this will work." Everything he does makes sense when framed that way.
Trump is 100% convinced his (long disproven both theoretically and empirically) trade theory is true, and no one can talk him out of it.
So it has to play out until the effects are unbearable.
Or until congress votes to take his tariff powers away: https://www.kwch.com/2025/04/30/senate-voting-resolution-tha...
Also nobody tries particularly hard. The secret to longevity in a Trump administration is to effusively praise the boss constantly and minimize direct contradictions. Which turns into "good tzar bad boyars" - the boss is never wrong, only badly advised.
it's not "the one thing", which contributed to it. There are multiple factors which spurred industrialization, some of them are:
* Europe and Japan was destroyed and they had other problems to deal with
* Soviet Union was seen as an enemy
* Many US soldiers returned home from war and they needed a job
* When many people started working in manufacturing, they needed different optimizations for their process, which lead to more manufacturing
It was a combination of US soldiers returning home after drawing government pay while fighting abroad, rationing limiting what could be purchased by those who remained home, and the one-two-three punch of the GI bill subsidizing land purchases, the interstate highway system effectively creating the American suburb, and process improvements from the war making automobiles drastically cheaper.
If I were Trump, I instead would have pushed congress to take away the power of tariffs back from the presidency and make something like the Fed to manage them instead, with some checks added in. I normally don't like unelected officials making policy like that but in this case I don't see what else would work. As we've seen, broad tariffs are very unpopular even if they might be necessary, and we'd need them to have the potential to stick around much longer for them to be effective.
That said, I'm willing to bet this will finally put the nail in the inflation coffin. Taking money away from consumers and "burning it" by returning it to the government is the best way to deal with inflation.
The power of the tariff is typically reserved for Congress; the executive has declared an emergency giving itself that power, while Congress (specifically the House) has abdicated its responsibility by redefining "legislative days" to extend the length of the emergency.
> That said, I'm willing to bet this will finally put the nail in the inflation coffin. Taking money away from consumers and "burning it" by returning it to the government is the best way to deal with inflation.
Long term, maybe; short term, it'll spike inflation as the price of both raw materials and finished goods will rise to account for the tariffs.
No competently run company is going to invest in more-expensive domestic production based on what the administration is doing because there can't be any expectation that policies will remain in place until production can be brought online. It doesn't even make sense to consider planning to onshore production because there's no reasonable expectation that the current policies will be in place in a month, much less in the year or more needed for a production change.
When people actually want to solve large problems they want information and input. They move with deliberation and precision so they can accomplish the goal without creating unnecessary harm or stress. They communicate. I know: Techbro doofuses will be, like, "I know everything already, just do it all right now YOLO!" But that's not how the world works.
There is no evidence that these major actions are being taken with any amount of care. They're erratic. They're often illegal. They're clearly creating destructive side-effects. Instead of engaging with real information, the administration seeks to destroy it. Musk, in my opinion, has big ideas he thinks are good but no mechanism to actually implement them in a good way. Trump is just an ignorant, self-serving man. He neither knows nor cares except to the degree that something can make him feel powerful in the moment.
I've been shopping for an Airbrush. These were a dream of mine as a kid. Back then the major brands were Made in the USA and were expensive enough that they were out of reach for 14 year old me.
Today the main companies from back then have "Made in the USA" on their websites but Badger (https://badgerairbrush.com) doesn't look like it's been updated since 2018 and Paasche (https://www.paascheairbrush.com) seems only slightly better.
Another popular and slightly newer brand is Iwata from Japan.
I suspect that Chinese imports have been eating these companies lunch for decades. I suspect that the Chinese government is subsidizing the products and their shipping and artificially lowering the cost and that they have been doing this for a very long time.
An important detail.
The US does not tax trash, it taxes the origin of products. That applies regardless of if it's good or bad.
Then furthest in the back you have the fresh produce: Eggs, vegetables, meat and chicken, fish sometimes, dairy and bread. The good stuff.
Now look down the shopping carts of your fellow shoppers: Filled to the brim with big boxes of the most unhealthy sewage on offer. They are subsidizing your shopping for quality ingredients from near and far.
I think it's the same with other stores. The low quality junk that appeals to the average shopper is subsidizing the quality niche item that you need to buy.
Thank you. I didn't realize until now that some cultures/regions distinguish between meat and chicken. Had to turn 41 for learning this.
Seems pretty paternalistic to me. Why not let people decide for themselves whether they "actually need" the $5 plastic trinket from china? Do you not trust adults to make informed decisions on what they're buying?
The free rational market has no way to price these in.
So if the only lever you have to affect consumers is price, then you must factor in the negative factors with higher prices.
i.e. If the price is supposed to be a lever for labor conditions, why just tax China heavily and not Bangladesh?
Why tax more fuel-efficient European cars instead of American-Built Jeep Grand Cherokees?
And if reducing plastic waste is the priority, why would Trump's day include unbanning plastic straws?
Answer: It's not actually about reducing negative externalities, it's about geopolitics, otherwise it wouldn't be so negatively weighted towards a single actor.
In defense of those who may sincerely disagree, they may frequent higher quality retail than the bulk of U.S. shoppers.
It's funny that the same party that likes to warn of "you will own nothing and be happy" is now defending economic policy that will decrease material wealth, but it's ok because it is "good for you" to practice having less.
For example, buying solar panels is probably good for the environment and public health. On the other hand, buying sugary sodas is probably not so good for your health and maybe has some minor negative environmental impact. Most things are more complicated; running shoes might be good for your health and bad for the environment.
The tarrifs are just a blanket tax on all consumption, so I imagine the effects will be a wash. We’re getting rid of the good and bad.
Fundamentally this is a game of chicken, and China will definitely blink first. This will be for a few reasons:
1. Unemployment in China is rocketing. Prior to the trade war in February it was sitting at an estimated 16.9% [1] (although it's difficult to believe the stats). In the US it sits at about 4.2% [2], which feels about right with the UK at 4.4% [3]. China doesn't have the "disadvantage" of a significant welfare system, but these people will become increasingly desperate to survive and burden the system in one way or another.
2. With unemployment so high in China, demand for jobs is increased and the salaries are decreased. With less excess money, domestic spending is largely reduced. With the excess stock produced for the US market no longer being delivered, manufacturers look to dump into the domestic market at below cost just to recoup some of their investment and to pay back the supply chain. Remember that with such low margins, manufacturers often get supplies on the promise of payment upon selling the goods they prepare. You're looking at complete supply chain disruption from top to bottom even if the manufacturer didn't export to the US.
3. The Chinese housing market continues to be an extremely large problem. Housing represents approximately a third of their economy and you have several key problems. Prior to the trade war, Chinese property developers were having customers buy properties (with mortgages) before ground was broken and using this money and borrowing to develop the properties at relatively low margins. Due to corruption and corner cutting, a considerable number of these buildings were "tofu dregs" (meaning poorly constructed). Despite these cost cutting measures, there was still not enough money available to develop the promised properties. This lead to the likes of Evergrande, Country Garden, Zhongzhi, Vanke, etc, to (begin to) fail. The customer's money is gone and the bank paid it out to the developer, so the customer is still on the hook for a property that doesn't exist - the bank tells them to pay up and to take up their issues with the property developer. Even those that managed to get a property found that the developers were desperately liquidating properties at discount rates to cover debt interest, lowering the value of properties in the market. With reduced income, increased mortgage rates due to instability, some look to sell their properties and escape the backlog of missed mortgage payments. Those people may find their property devalued by some 50%, and that they still have an outstanding debt despite selling the property and receiving no equity due to the devaluation of the property.
Although not outwardly said, the Chinese leadership have long considered themselves at war with the US. They have celebrated every issue the US has had, reacted negatively when the US experiences wins, and generally want to see the US fail. We're talking about the same CCP of the Mao Zedong era that considered the UK, US and Japan as enemies to crush. This is why that despite very obvious economic issues being experiences, the CCP refuse to negotiate.
> “What we’re going to see next is retailers have about five to seven weeks of full inventories left, and then the choices will lessen,” Seroka told CNBC. That doesn’t mean shelves will be empty, but in Seroka’s hypothetical, it could mean if you’re out shopping for a blue shirt, you may see 11 purple ones—but only one blue that isn’t your size and is costlier.
Maybe you can't find a blue shirt for a while and have to wear a purple one whilst textile manufacturing is scaled up in other asian/middle-eastern nations, but things could be far worse.
> Earlier Tuesday, Gabriela Santos, JPMorgan Asset Management chief market strategist for the Americas, told CNBC: “Time is running out to see a lessening of the tariffs on China.” Everyone knows the tariffs are unsustainable, she said, but markets need to see them actually drop.
Translation: The tariffs will affect our bottom line. Remember that JPMorgan as an entity do not care if jobs are lost in either the US (historically) or China (currently), as long as it does not affect their margins. The idea that JPMorgan does well and so does the US populace is wishful thinking.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-youth-jobless-rat...
[2] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/unemployment-rate
[3] https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peoplenotin...
I'm trying to think of a public traded company that could be true for. It just doesn't seem that there is going to be a company that is tied to the fortunes of the US populace. Conagra maybe.
> And it does appear that Trump has blinked first, last week hinting at a potential U-turn on tariffs, saying that the taxes he has so far imposed on Chinese imports would "come down substantially, but it won't be zero". Meanwhile, Chinese social media is back in action. "Trump has chickened out," was one of the top trending search topics on the Chinese social media platform Weibo after the US president softened his approach to tariffs.
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-creates-list-us-ma...
I'm not sanguine. I think their leadership prides itself on being tougher and smarter than American leaders, and I think when they look at the results Canada and Mexico have gotten, complying with Trump, they're not going to feel like compliance will help.
There are other countries in the world apart from US and China. US has effectively alienated most of these with tariffs (save for Russia).
So prepare for a lot of friendly blinking between these countries to gang up on the bully.
I'm not saying that it's right, it's just an observation.
You are correct, I cannot edit any more.
In any case it is definitely trending upwards [1], and I'm hearing from people inside China that unemployment is rapidly increasing. A lot of factories are either on pause or shut down until further notice.
That all said, it's unclear how many of those are gainfully employed, or how that would even be measured in China. There are many working in the delivery economy that sleep homeless. I think those working unsustainably is also on the increase.
China thinks in terms of decades and their population is very culturally disciplined. They will endure years of economic downturns if necessary. Historically they have.
They also have quite a few advantages being a planned economy, with a higher appetite for wealth redistribution than the US and the hability to shift investments very quickly. This quells most internal dissatisfaction that recessions bring.
They merely have to wait it out, as they have. Trump dropped some tariffs without them doing anything.
I think this is a lie that somehow gets propagated in the West. They are not somehow smart and forward thinking, they are stuck within a dictatorship.
Over a span of 3 years from 1959 15-55 million people died in China [1]. It wasn't because of a natural disaster. It wasn't because of a war. It's wasn't because of a disease. It was purely because the leadership was trying to achieve the same ambitions as they do today.
Nothing changed, it is still the same party and CCP will go to the same lengths to try to achieve it again. The result in 1961 was a -27.3% growth [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_GDP_of_China#Annual...
Manufacturing jobs of the future will be fewer and higher in the value chain, requiring technical abilities. Workers won't be mindless stamping parts over and over.
Now, the question is, do you want our adversaries to develop and own this new era or do you want the US to lead this next generation of industrialization?
Finally, if you don't think China is our adversary, then we're not living in the same reality.
The current administration's actions are not meaningfully helping push us towards that. There are plenty of things they could do to help motivate that, but what they've done so far isn't really in that direction.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-03-21/-chine... https://militarnyi.com/en/news/usa-unable-to-make-drones-wit...
TLDW: "Americans are a bunch of babies, they're hard to work with", which basically applies to all developed countries. It's the same in Germany.
April 30 2025: Port of Rotterdam - Congesting shipment containers originally inbound towards the United States but halted (by Chinese exporters?). Also risking storage and transhipment of containers inbound to Rotterdam. (Heard on local news a few minutes ago)
If Trump keeps this up, within ~12 weeks he is not going to destroy the economy of the United States but the entire West...
alchemist1e9•4h ago