5 ms·

Tariffs only make sense to protect a fledgling domestic industry which is already receiving investment. Even then, does anyone think that for instance US car ma

Tariffs only make sense to protect a fledgling domestic industry which is already receiving investment. Even then, does anyone think that for instance US car makers will suddenly be competitive globally?

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ChocolateGod 2y ago
Europeans don't tend to buy American cars because they're too big for smaller older roads and are inefficient (Europe has no domestic petroleum source, so fuel prices are much higher and volatile). Tarrifs aren't going to change that.
- Gud 2y ago
  Europe has domestic petroleum production.
- n3storm 2y ago
  "Smaller older roads" XD We don't live every family in a house miles away from work, schools and friends. Many of us live in cities, within flats, with lines of metro or bus close by. Our children go walking to schools. Roads are fine and maintained so regular vehicles can be used instead of 4x4, bikes are respected. Roads have sidewalks to walk.
  - poincaredisk 2y ago
    Have you ever been in the US? The roads there are huge. Road lanes are huge. Cars are huge. Crossroads are huge. Parking spots are extremely large. European roads are fine, but they are way more narrow and tuned for smaller vehicles. It's easier to drive with a smaller car (or "normal sized" for you). Also in Europe in the west we have narrow or paved historical roads, and in the east we have many poor quality roads. In both cases smaller (non-huge) car is beneficial.
    - n3storm 2y ago
      They are huge indeed. But is not the reason we don't buy USA cars. In the countryside yes, for years, because they are useful. Transport tools, materials, dogs... Cities center are transitioning to no-cars, so paved historical roads is not an issue. Europe is quite a mix also, maybe is an issue in your area, not in Spain.
    - rstuart4133 2y ago
      I think the point @n3storm is making isn't about the size of the roads. It's far more radical than that. They are saying European city's haven't just ditched SUV's - they have ditched cars. If you come from somewhere like the USA, Canada or Australia, it's hard to imagine that's even possible. Actually, it isn't possible in the suburbia's those countries have built to house their people. But it turns out it is not just possible if build your cities differently, it's better in some ways. It costs less because there are no cars, you waste far less time in commute, and its healthier because people get more exercise (they use their legs to move around). "They have ditched cars" is an exaggeration of course. A lot of them still have cars. But most days, they won't use it. Daily commutes are done on foot, or bike. Long distance commutes have a public transport leg. It's hard to get your head around unless you live there for a few weeks.
      - washadjeffmad 2y ago
        Most of the world didn't ditch cars, exactly. They just predate them. Car culture is recent and pretty uniquely American. I lived in a pre-car city with a lot of ~8ft lanes and "double lanes" that were converted into one-ways to accommodate modern cars and trucks.
        rstuart4133 2y ago
        > Most of the world didn't ditch cars, exactly. They just predate them. It's true they predate them, but then so do most American cities. When the car arrived the American cities opted to expand their cities, giving everyone their own block of lawn to live on. The European cities could have expanded in the same way too. Utrecht went as far as to build freeways to make it possible. But in the end, they opted not to and Utrecht in particular turned their brand new freeways into canals. > Car culture is recent and pretty uniquely American. American certainly has it's own unique culture, but I think we are discussing a specific characteristic of that culture which it shares with other countries like Australia, Canada and New Zealand. The density of most cities in those countries is so low owning a car is mandatory. Existing without one is almost impossible. I know because live in one. Quoting a Japanese exchange student who lives with us for a while - to her surprise even with two cars getting to everywhere we had to be in an average week was a major logistical exercise. In the countries @n3storm is talking about, car ownership is completely optional.
  - kubb 2y ago
    There's no point in explaining that. A lot of them have never been outside the country and maybe Canada. Even if they can afford to go somewhere they don't have the time. They can only imagine the world outside as a version of what they know. And everywhere they went hasn't been very different from what they have at home. They won't be able to imagine it.
    - Aloisius 2y ago
      You're assuming a lot given HN's American demographic isn't exactly reflective of the general population. Even among the American general populace, most have traveled to a country besides Canada.
      - willhslade 2y ago
        Doubt. https://www.apolloacademy.com/48-of-americans-have-a-passport/ https://www.apolloacademy.com/48-of-americans-have-a-passpor...
        Aloisius 2y ago
        Just because only 48% of people have a current passport, doesn't mean only 48% have ever had a passport. A majority of Americans have traveled to two or more countries: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/08/12/most-americans-have-traveled-abroad-although-differences-among-demographic-groups-are-large/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/08/12/most-amer...
        magicalhippo 2y ago
        Interesting. When I visited the US in 2003, I recall the news reporting on a study showing that more than half had never been to another country, and they stressed that that included Canada and Mexico. It became a bit of a discussion point during the ride with the those I visited.
  - ChocolateGod 2y ago
    When I say "old", I am referring to that the layout/route was thought of centuries ago, long before the invention of the car or anything remotely close. e.g. London.
    - mananaysiempre 2y ago
      London is somewhat unusual in that its streets are actually rather wide for a European city, due to urban planning regulations enacted after the Great Fire and (until recently) the willingness of its inhabintants to demolish historical buildings. Paris, Vienna, or Prague, for example, are generally much denser, not to mention genuinely medieval cities like Girona.
    - n3storm 2y ago
      London is not a representation of Europe, nor Madrid. Even Paris is completely differente. Germany was full rebuild after war. So, is Europe is a mix, but roads are not the reason to not buy tractors, is utility. Tractors are for country work.
  - lucianbr 2y ago
    The roads are smaller and older. It's just that that isn't a bad thing. And it is a bad thing for cars. It's just not a bad thing for people, because good alternatives to cars exist.
- loudmax 2y ago
  Ironically, the one American car company that was interesting to Europeans was Tesla. European governments may be reluctant to put a tariff on Tesla because of Elon Musk's political association with the Trump government. This is literally how fascism works, and appeasing the bully is distasteful, but that's realpolitik. It will be up to European consumers to reject Tesla because the brand is now toxic.
  - jajko 2y ago
    I keep asking 2 colleagues how their nazi car is, suffice to say they are not very happy and ashamed of owning it now. Of course both have semi-mandatory stickers with 'I bought this car before elon turned nazi' but that's a bit bullshit... he was utter piece of shit way before he entered government with his salutes. Very effective manager with a good nose on hiring actually brilliant technical people, but that's about it with his positives. Horrible parent, horrible boss, racist spoiled nepo kid out of touch with reality with gigantic ego, who grew up in apartheid and evidently took not so good lessons from it... I could go on, it was out there for all who cared to look. Most didn't due to his stellar successes.
    - bryanlarsen 2y ago
      I imagine that being a poor Dad with a gigantic ego is pretty common amongst CEO's. Sure there were troubling signs but there were also signs of Musk working for the better good, like pulling out of Trump's advisory council in 2017 to protest pulling out of the Paris accord. It was obvious the guy was weird and a little unhinged, but many of my interesting friends are weird and a little unhinged. Buying a Tesla before 2024 was an unequivocally "left" statement.
- meekaaku 2y ago
  I think US and other non-european companies can and do make cars targeted to EU market that complies with local laws and customer preference. They can make the cars smaller to fit road/lanes/parking spaces, just like they put the steering wheel on the right for UK. Infact Tesla is (or was) best selling car in Norway and UK too.
- stop50 2y ago
  Have you never heard of the north sea oil fields? Norway funded its pension fonds with it and a few other states use the oil from there.
CPLX 2y ago
They already are. In addition it’s precisely because of tariffs (of which there have been many on cars and SUVs long before all this) that we have tons and tons of foreign brands actually building cars in the US.
- chrisandchris 2y ago
  I think that doesn't answer the question parent asked. Do European car makers build in the US? Yes. Is that going to change? I don't think so. Do US cars sell good in Europe? No. Is that going to change? I don't think so too.
  - CPLX 2y ago
    Have you been to Europe? There are American cars everywhere, though yes they don’t sell as well there as European cars do here. > Europeans don't tend to buy American cars because… Wait until you realize that the EU tariff on American cars has been 4x the US tariff in EU cars for awhile.
    - gls2ro 2y ago
      > Wait until you realize that the EU tariff on American cars has been 4x the US tariff in EU cars for awhile. Can you share the specifics of this lets say end of 2024? I could find for example: EU has 10% on cars from US while US has 2.5% in general and 25% on pickup trucks. Important to note in USA the pickup trucks market is the biggest one vs mid size being the biggest one in EU. When looking at it it seems to me that both entities wants to protect their biggest markets: EU with only 10% protecting midsize and USA with 25% their pickup trucks.
    - xorcist 2y ago
      > Wait until you realize that the EU tariff on American cars has been 4x the US tariff in EU cars for awhile. That's a simplification beyond what's truthful. Import taxes are different on different types of cars, both in the EU and the US. There's certainly some type of car where the above is true, maybe some type of gas guzzling pickup truck or something, but over the total amount of sold cars it is not. Trade-weighted differences simply aren't that great, which is not a coincidence because a) both the US and the EU are developed economies which are likely to benefit from free trade, b) taxation works in nudging the market what to buy which evens out the differences further, and c) we have had trade agreements where this was an explicit goal.
sightbroke 2y ago
Ironically I believe I've seen that U.S. EV manufacturing has already started to slow down & projects being cancelled. Edit: relevant links https://archive.ph/J1wSt https://archive.ph/J1wSt https://apnews.com/article/trump-tariffs-electric-vehicles-automakers-a106cce5b6acbf5d14ad1e583e301b50?utm_source=copy&utm_medium=share https://apnews.com/article/trump-tariffs-electric-vehicles-a...
- justahuman74 2y ago
  I'm not in EVs, but I'm already seeing a "don't import anything to the US if you can avoid it" message at work. Datacenter space in Canada is now suddenly very appealing, you can put machines there directly from Asia without paying tarrifs, but still get good network latency into the US
  - darreninthenet 2y ago
    The Great Cheeto will be demanding network latency tariffs next
aiaisabsicjbd 2y ago
Tariffs make sense to protect industry critical to the independence of a country. Imagine how different the Ukraine war would look if the EU wasn’t dependent on Russian (or US) energy. Yes, profits and growth may not be optimal. But it’s like complaining your 401k isn’t doing as well as it could since you’re paying for healthy food and a gym membership. That being said the manner trump is implementing these tariffs is ridiculous. They should be slow, meticulous, and announced far ahead of time. These seem optimized for chaos and are likely aimed at political goals (see TikTok and China already) or simply crashing the market (wouldn’t be the first time Bessent has profited off a financial crash).
- _heimdall 2y ago
  > They should be slow, meticulous, and announced far ahead of time. The main lesson they learned from Trump's first term was that they were better off making big changes and fixing what they broke later. Moving slowly seemed to make it too easy for "the machine" to stop them as it were. I don't say this as the right lesson to have learned or a good approach, just an observation.
  - SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
    I just think this is an unreasonably charitable way to frame the observation. "The machine" identified, in Trump's first term, that many of the policies he wanted to implement would be bad for the country or would violate the law. It's true that moving more quickly and chaotically provides fewer opportunities for people to identify and mitigate the problems in advance - but that's not good, even for someone who wants big changes, unless you view causing problems in and of itself as a good thing. (In that vein, I should note that Trump shared a video last week from a guy saying he intentionally crashed the stock market.)
    - _heimdall 2y ago
      Yeah that's totally reasonable. People tend to get so emotionally and politically charged today with anything that mentions Trump that I tried there to just comment on their lesson learned regardless of my opinion on it. I could definitely see that coming across as too charitable
energy123 2y ago
Tariffs will make them less competitive, mainly because the inputs are also being tariffed whereas international competitors can buy tariff-free inputs. These blanket tariffs will destroy any potential for internationally competitive manufacturing.
_heimdall 2y ago
Is anyone expecting tariffs to improve global competitive advantage? Tariffs may work towards an isolationist goal of producing and consuming our own goods. Tariffs are an attempt to unwind globalization though and disconnect our markets from the rest of the world. Whether it makes us more competitive globally is really a non-goal. It could happen if our resources, labor, and manufacturing costs are lower than other countries but that's extremely complex to predict even if you wanted to try.
- aaomidi 2y ago
  Yep I think this is really the important point. Free trade has its own set of negative consequences. Namely that it’s good for owners of the means of production but not for the workers. What’s interesting to me is that tech is effectively the last “American made manufacturing”, and the relative lack of outsourcing (compared to other forms of manufacturing) has kept tech workers powerful. The same logic of h1b workers weakening the American citizen tech worker, applies to free trade.
  - _heimdall 2y ago
    > tech is effectively the last “American made manufacturing” Its at least the largest industry manufacturing here, I'd expect. I have friends that work in manufacturing in the US though, it does happen. One, for example, runs a family business making steel buildings and storm shelters. They use American made steel if I'm not mistaken, I'm less certain about other inputs like the paint or equipment used (certainly the welders, heavy equipment, etc are foreign). Another works in the automotive industry. Parts come in from overseas and we largely just assemble vehicles here today, but I'm not so sure how different that is from software. I write code on foreign hardware that runs in someone else's server farm also running foreign hardware. Hell, when Microsoft was still shipping software on CDs you may have noticed a little fine print mentioning the Caribbean island on which the disc was technically manufactured. US employees designed the software, but for tax purposes the manufacturing technically happened offshore. Software is a huge industry, but it is still heavily dependent on globalization.
    - 2y ago
chgs 2y ago
Trunk whines that American cars aren’t bought in. Europe. Americans cars are “big as bars”, a “compact” is larger than my “big car”, let alone the small one. Their trucks literally won’t fit down the road.
- tim333 2y ago
  Also many Fords and Teslas are bought there.
analog31 2y ago
I'm not going to quibble with you on this, because I think you're right, but I can think of a secondary use. A country with weak governance could use tariffs to raise money because it's easy to manage at the point of entry, rather than requiring more sophisticated systems such as income or property value reporting. This could explain why, for instance, poor countries use tariffs on goods that have no chance of building a local industry.
- xorcist 2y ago
  This is also why some economists like them, they're hard to cheat on. Know what's even harder to cheat on and has much less long term impact on the economy? Sales tax. A federal sales tax would have been preferable to the import tax. But there are probably other political concerns at stake here.
rsynnott 2y ago
They can also make sense where you largely have primary industry (that is, extractive; mining and forestry and so on). There’s a reason that pretty much all high-tariff countries are low-income developing countries; it _does_ make more sense there.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

ChocolateGod 2y ago

Europeans don't tend to buy American cars because they're too big for smaller older roads and are inefficient (Europe has no domestic petroleum source, so fuel prices are much higher and volatile). Tarrifs aren't going to change that.

Gud 2y ago
Europe has domestic petroleum production.
n3storm 2y ago
"Smaller older roads" XD We don't live every family in a house miles away from work, schools and friends. Many of us live in cities, within flats, with lines of metro or bus close by. Our children go walking to schools. Roads are fine and maintained so regular vehicles can be used instead of 4x4, bikes are respected. Roads have sidewalks to walk.
- poincaredisk 2y ago
  Have you ever been in the US? The roads there are huge. Road lanes are huge. Cars are huge. Crossroads are huge. Parking spots are extremely large. European roads are fine, but they are way more narrow and tuned for smaller vehicles. It's easier to drive with a smaller car (or "normal sized" for you). Also in Europe in the west we have narrow or paved historical roads, and in the east we have many poor quality roads. In both cases smaller (non-huge) car is beneficial.
  - n3storm 2y ago
    They are huge indeed. But is not the reason we don't buy USA cars. In the countryside yes, for years, because they are useful. Transport tools, materials, dogs... Cities center are transitioning to no-cars, so paved historical roads is not an issue. Europe is quite a mix also, maybe is an issue in your area, not in Spain.
  - rstuart4133 2y ago
    I think the point @n3storm is making isn't about the size of the roads. It's far more radical than that. They are saying European city's haven't just ditched SUV's - they have ditched cars. If you come from somewhere like the USA, Canada or Australia, it's hard to imagine that's even possible. Actually, it isn't possible in the suburbia's those countries have built to house their people. But it turns out it is not just possible if build your cities differently, it's better in some ways. It costs less because there are no cars, you waste far less time in commute, and its healthier because people get more exercise (they use their legs to move around). "They have ditched cars" is an exaggeration of course. A lot of them still have cars. But most days, they won't use it. Daily commutes are done on foot, or bike. Long distance commutes have a public transport leg. It's hard to get your head around unless you live there for a few weeks.
    - washadjeffmad 2y ago
      Most of the world didn't ditch cars, exactly. They just predate them. Car culture is recent and pretty uniquely American. I lived in a pre-car city with a lot of ~8ft lanes and "double lanes" that were converted into one-ways to accommodate modern cars and trucks.
      - rstuart4133 2y ago
        > Most of the world didn't ditch cars, exactly. They just predate them. It's true they predate them, but then so do most American cities. When the car arrived the American cities opted to expand their cities, giving everyone their own block of lawn to live on. The European cities could have expanded in the same way too. Utrecht went as far as to build freeways to make it possible. But in the end, they opted not to and Utrecht in particular turned their brand new freeways into canals. > Car culture is recent and pretty uniquely American. American certainly has it's own unique culture, but I think we are discussing a specific characteristic of that culture which it shares with other countries like Australia, Canada and New Zealand. The density of most cities in those countries is so low owning a car is mandatory. Existing without one is almost impossible. I know because live in one. Quoting a Japanese exchange student who lives with us for a while - to her surprise even with two cars getting to everywhere we had to be in an average week was a major logistical exercise. In the countries @n3storm is talking about, car ownership is completely optional.
- kubb 2y ago
  There's no point in explaining that. A lot of them have never been outside the country and maybe Canada. Even if they can afford to go somewhere they don't have the time. They can only imagine the world outside as a version of what they know. And everywhere they went hasn't been very different from what they have at home. They won't be able to imagine it.
  - Aloisius 2y ago
    You're assuming a lot given HN's American demographic isn't exactly reflective of the general population. Even among the American general populace, most have traveled to a country besides Canada.
    - willhslade 2y ago
      Doubt. https://www.apolloacademy.com/48-of-americans-have-a-passport/ https://www.apolloacademy.com/48-of-americans-have-a-passpor...
      - Aloisius 2y ago
        Just because only 48% of people have a current passport, doesn't mean only 48% have ever had a passport. A majority of Americans have traveled to two or more countries: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/08/12/most-americans-have-traveled-abroad-although-differences-among-demographic-groups-are-large/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/08/12/most-amer...
        magicalhippo 2y ago
        Interesting. When I visited the US in 2003, I recall the news reporting on a study showing that more than half had never been to another country, and they stressed that that included Canada and Mexico. It became a bit of a discussion point during the ride with the those I visited.
- ChocolateGod 2y ago
  When I say "old", I am referring to that the layout/route was thought of centuries ago, long before the invention of the car or anything remotely close. e.g. London.
  - mananaysiempre 2y ago
    London is somewhat unusual in that its streets are actually rather wide for a European city, due to urban planning regulations enacted after the Great Fire and (until recently) the willingness of its inhabintants to demolish historical buildings. Paris, Vienna, or Prague, for example, are generally much denser, not to mention genuinely medieval cities like Girona.
  - n3storm 2y ago
    London is not a representation of Europe, nor Madrid. Even Paris is completely differente. Germany was full rebuild after war. So, is Europe is a mix, but roads are not the reason to not buy tractors, is utility. Tractors are for country work.
- lucianbr 2y ago
  The roads are smaller and older. It's just that that isn't a bad thing. And it is a bad thing for cars. It's just not a bad thing for people, because good alternatives to cars exist.
loudmax 2y ago
Ironically, the one American car company that was interesting to Europeans was Tesla. European governments may be reluctant to put a tariff on Tesla because of Elon Musk's political association with the Trump government. This is literally how fascism works, and appeasing the bully is distasteful, but that's realpolitik. It will be up to European consumers to reject Tesla because the brand is now toxic.
- jajko 2y ago
  I keep asking 2 colleagues how their nazi car is, suffice to say they are not very happy and ashamed of owning it now. Of course both have semi-mandatory stickers with 'I bought this car before elon turned nazi' but that's a bit bullshit... he was utter piece of shit way before he entered government with his salutes. Very effective manager with a good nose on hiring actually brilliant technical people, but that's about it with his positives. Horrible parent, horrible boss, racist spoiled nepo kid out of touch with reality with gigantic ego, who grew up in apartheid and evidently took not so good lessons from it... I could go on, it was out there for all who cared to look. Most didn't due to his stellar successes.
  - bryanlarsen 2y ago
    I imagine that being a poor Dad with a gigantic ego is pretty common amongst CEO's. Sure there were troubling signs but there were also signs of Musk working for the better good, like pulling out of Trump's advisory council in 2017 to protest pulling out of the Paris accord. It was obvious the guy was weird and a little unhinged, but many of my interesting friends are weird and a little unhinged. Buying a Tesla before 2024 was an unequivocally "left" statement.
meekaaku 2y ago
I think US and other non-european companies can and do make cars targeted to EU market that complies with local laws and customer preference. They can make the cars smaller to fit road/lanes/parking spaces, just like they put the steering wheel on the right for UK. Infact Tesla is (or was) best selling car in Norway and UK too.
stop50 2y ago
Have you never heard of the north sea oil fields? Norway funded its pension fonds with it and a few other states use the oil from there.

CPLX 2y ago

They already are. In addition it’s precisely because of tariffs (of which there have been many on cars and SUVs long before all this) that we have tons and tons of foreign brands actually building cars in the US.

chrisandchris 2y ago
I think that doesn't answer the question parent asked. Do European car makers build in the US? Yes. Is that going to change? I don't think so. Do US cars sell good in Europe? No. Is that going to change? I don't think so too.
- CPLX 2y ago
  Have you been to Europe? There are American cars everywhere, though yes they don’t sell as well there as European cars do here. > Europeans don't tend to buy American cars because… Wait until you realize that the EU tariff on American cars has been 4x the US tariff in EU cars for awhile.
  - gls2ro 2y ago
    > Wait until you realize that the EU tariff on American cars has been 4x the US tariff in EU cars for awhile. Can you share the specifics of this lets say end of 2024? I could find for example: EU has 10% on cars from US while US has 2.5% in general and 25% on pickup trucks. Important to note in USA the pickup trucks market is the biggest one vs mid size being the biggest one in EU. When looking at it it seems to me that both entities wants to protect their biggest markets: EU with only 10% protecting midsize and USA with 25% their pickup trucks.
  - xorcist 2y ago
    > Wait until you realize that the EU tariff on American cars has been 4x the US tariff in EU cars for awhile. That's a simplification beyond what's truthful. Import taxes are different on different types of cars, both in the EU and the US. There's certainly some type of car where the above is true, maybe some type of gas guzzling pickup truck or something, but over the total amount of sold cars it is not. Trade-weighted differences simply aren't that great, which is not a coincidence because a) both the US and the EU are developed economies which are likely to benefit from free trade, b) taxation works in nudging the market what to buy which evens out the differences further, and c) we have had trade agreements where this was an explicit goal.

sightbroke 2y ago

Ironically I believe I've seen that U.S. EV manufacturing has already started to slow down & projects being cancelled. Edit: relevant links https://archive.ph/J1wSt https://archive.ph/J1wSt https://apnews.com/article/trump-tariffs-electric-vehicles-automakers-a106cce5b6acbf5d14ad1e583e301b50?utm_source=copy&utm_medium=share https://apnews.com/article/trump-tariffs-electric-vehicles-a...

justahuman74 2y ago
I'm not in EVs, but I'm already seeing a "don't import anything to the US if you can avoid it" message at work. Datacenter space in Canada is now suddenly very appealing, you can put machines there directly from Asia without paying tarrifs, but still get good network latency into the US
- darreninthenet 2y ago
  The Great Cheeto will be demanding network latency tariffs next

aiaisabsicjbd 2y ago

Tariffs make sense to protect industry critical to the independence of a country. Imagine how different the Ukraine war would look if the EU wasn’t dependent on Russian (or US) energy. Yes, profits and growth may not be optimal. But it’s like complaining your 401k isn’t doing as well as it could since you’re paying for healthy food and a gym membership. That being said the manner trump is implementing these tariffs is ridiculous. They should be slow, meticulous, and announced far ahead of time. These seem optimized for chaos and are likely aimed at political goals (see TikTok and China already) or simply crashing the market (wouldn’t be the first time Bessent has profited off a financial crash).

_heimdall 2y ago
> They should be slow, meticulous, and announced far ahead of time. The main lesson they learned from Trump's first term was that they were better off making big changes and fixing what they broke later. Moving slowly seemed to make it too easy for "the machine" to stop them as it were. I don't say this as the right lesson to have learned or a good approach, just an observation.
- SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
  I just think this is an unreasonably charitable way to frame the observation. "The machine" identified, in Trump's first term, that many of the policies he wanted to implement would be bad for the country or would violate the law. It's true that moving more quickly and chaotically provides fewer opportunities for people to identify and mitigate the problems in advance - but that's not good, even for someone who wants big changes, unless you view causing problems in and of itself as a good thing. (In that vein, I should note that Trump shared a video last week from a guy saying he intentionally crashed the stock market.)
  - _heimdall 2y ago
    Yeah that's totally reasonable. People tend to get so emotionally and politically charged today with anything that mentions Trump that I tried there to just comment on their lesson learned regardless of my opinion on it. I could definitely see that coming across as too charitable

energy123 2y ago

Tariffs will make them less competitive, mainly because the inputs are also being tariffed whereas international competitors can buy tariff-free inputs. These blanket tariffs will destroy any potential for internationally competitive manufacturing.

_heimdall 2y ago

Is anyone expecting tariffs to improve global competitive advantage? Tariffs may work towards an isolationist goal of producing and consuming our own goods. Tariffs are an attempt to unwind globalization though and disconnect our markets from the rest of the world. Whether it makes us more competitive globally is really a non-goal. It could happen if our resources, labor, and manufacturing costs are lower than other countries but that's extremely complex to predict even if you wanted to try.

aaomidi 2y ago
Yep I think this is really the important point. Free trade has its own set of negative consequences. Namely that it’s good for owners of the means of production but not for the workers. What’s interesting to me is that tech is effectively the last “American made manufacturing”, and the relative lack of outsourcing (compared to other forms of manufacturing) has kept tech workers powerful. The same logic of h1b workers weakening the American citizen tech worker, applies to free trade.
- _heimdall 2y ago
  > tech is effectively the last “American made manufacturing” Its at least the largest industry manufacturing here, I'd expect. I have friends that work in manufacturing in the US though, it does happen. One, for example, runs a family business making steel buildings and storm shelters. They use American made steel if I'm not mistaken, I'm less certain about other inputs like the paint or equipment used (certainly the welders, heavy equipment, etc are foreign). Another works in the automotive industry. Parts come in from overseas and we largely just assemble vehicles here today, but I'm not so sure how different that is from software. I write code on foreign hardware that runs in someone else's server farm also running foreign hardware. Hell, when Microsoft was still shipping software on CDs you may have noticed a little fine print mentioning the Caribbean island on which the disc was technically manufactured. US employees designed the software, but for tax purposes the manufacturing technically happened offshore. Software is a huge industry, but it is still heavily dependent on globalization.
  - 2y ago

chgs 2y ago

Trunk whines that American cars aren’t bought in. Europe. Americans cars are “big as bars”, a “compact” is larger than my “big car”, let alone the small one. Their trucks literally won’t fit down the road.

tim333 2y ago
Also many Fords and Teslas are bought there.

analog31 2y ago

I'm not going to quibble with you on this, because I think you're right, but I can think of a secondary use. A country with weak governance could use tariffs to raise money because it's easy to manage at the point of entry, rather than requiring more sophisticated systems such as income or property value reporting. This could explain why, for instance, poor countries use tariffs on goods that have no chance of building a local industry.

xorcist 2y ago
This is also why some economists like them, they're hard to cheat on. Know what's even harder to cheat on and has much less long term impact on the economy? Sales tax. A federal sales tax would have been preferable to the import tax. But there are probably other political concerns at stake here.

rsynnott 2y ago

They can also make sense where you largely have primary industry (that is, extractive; mining and forestry and so on). There’s a reason that pretty much all high-tariff countries are low-income developing countries; it _does_ make more sense there.