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Everyone seems to be saying it's "tough medicine" and will help bring industry back to the USA, but what if the reverse is true? The tariffs hit American compa

Everyone seems to be saying it's "tough medicine" and will help bring industry back to the USA, but what if the reverse is true? The tariffs hit American companies hardest - it is companies in the USA actually paying the tariffs, and it's paid on every step of importing in the supply chain. People are acting like Ford and GM will bring back the factories and make America great again, but it's just as likely that the other countries lower their trade barriers and while Ford is stuck dealing with the hit from tariffs, BYD etc. just take all of their market share internationally - as they aren't affected. This might actually accelerate the decline of US industry, as manufacturers cannot move their entire supply chain to the US overnight (and wouldn't keep the same profit margins even if it were possible), meanwhile they become much less competitive in foreign markets. E.g. when OpenAI is stuck paying tariffs on GPUs, then DeepSeek will be even more competitive. Same for Boeing vs. AirBus and COMAC. > Third, there are a lot of other things the Trump administration could be doing, particularly in terms of relieving regulation, ensuring equal opportunity throughout the economy, etc. It seems like a missed opportunity to be burning political capital on deficit reduction and trade rebalancing when there are major pro-growth opportunities still available. This seems particularly pertinent given the rise of AI, which has very high variance in terms of potential outcomes. I agree with this completely, I'm surprised Trump didn't couple it with a bonfire of NIMBY regulation to help jump-start domestic growth that way too.

stevenAthompson 2y ago
> Everyone seems to be saying it's "tough medicine" and will help bring industry back to the USA Everyone just assumes that bringing manufacturing back would be a good thing. I can't see why. It will make everything cost more, and our unemployment was already as low as it could be. Our problem was inflation, not a lack of low paying jobs.
- thechao 2y ago
  U.S. manufacturing was already near an all-time high. Bringing more manufacturing onshore will just get us more robots, not more jobs. There's a steel plant a few hours south of me, outside of Corpus, it runs at a few % of nominal capacity, and generates 2 millions tons of new steel per year. It has 200 employees, mostly for regulatory purposes. How many thousands of people would a plant like that have employed in 1980? I can tell you: at least 10000 at current nominal, without overhead, just on the floor; at full capacity it'd be 100k+. Similarly, our naval yards are inefficient because we're fucking with last minute change orders, because there's no effective oversight. (And, due to DOGE, none, now.) China produces vast amounts of manufacturing output because it's a huge country. So does the U.S. So does India.
- UncleMeat 2y ago
  I believe that a significant portion of this is gender coding. The political parties in the US are segmenting by gender. Manufacturing is coded male and service jobs are coded female. Once you drill in things get more complex, since something like garment manufacturing would still be coded female, but this is correct at the largest levels. So a political movement that is soaked in a desire for a return to some idealized past of traditional masculinity concludes that manufacturing is virtuous while service roles are not, independent of whether manufacturing actually creates greater economic prosperity. "Email jobs" are disdained as valueless. Hawley compares manufacturing to God's Creation in his book on masculinity and concludes that men must carry on this legacy of creation to fulfill their purpose. That's not an economic argument but a moral one, which concludes that it is better to be paid less pressing steel into sheets than to be paid more teaching undergraduates.
  - stevenAthompson 2y ago
    I wonder if you're being downvoted because people disagree with you, or because they agree and it makes them feel yucky? I hate everything you just said, but feel like you're at least partly correct. The metaphors we live by might be eating us alive.
    - UncleMeat 2y ago
      I'm back at +1. HN has a small enough population that one or two votes can't really be taken to mean anything. I would not be surprised if there is a general resistance to this sort of framing among some HN readers, but I'm not going to take snap decisions of one or two people to mean much.
    - UncleMeat 2y ago
      Amazingly, this was made extraordinarily explicit on Fox News yesterday. "When you sit behind a screen all day, it makes you a woman" with the chyron "Trump's Manly Tariffs."
  - bryanlarsen 2y ago
    Which is ironic gender coding, because for the US job market of 2025, exported services are almost completely tech, and tech is primarily male.
- xnx 2y ago
  Agree. > Our problem was inflation, not a lack of low paying jobs. Emphasis on "was". Inflation had largely been tamed by the time Trump started this recession.

stevenAthompson 2y ago

> Everyone seems to be saying it's "tough medicine" and will help bring industry back to the USA Everyone just assumes that bringing manufacturing back would be a good thing. I can't see why. It will make everything cost more, and our unemployment was already as low as it could be. Our problem was inflation, not a lack of low paying jobs.

thechao 2y ago
U.S. manufacturing was already near an all-time high. Bringing more manufacturing onshore will just get us more robots, not more jobs. There's a steel plant a few hours south of me, outside of Corpus, it runs at a few % of nominal capacity, and generates 2 millions tons of new steel per year. It has 200 employees, mostly for regulatory purposes. How many thousands of people would a plant like that have employed in 1980? I can tell you: at least 10000 at current nominal, without overhead, just on the floor; at full capacity it'd be 100k+. Similarly, our naval yards are inefficient because we're fucking with last minute change orders, because there's no effective oversight. (And, due to DOGE, none, now.) China produces vast amounts of manufacturing output because it's a huge country. So does the U.S. So does India.
UncleMeat 2y ago
I believe that a significant portion of this is gender coding. The political parties in the US are segmenting by gender. Manufacturing is coded male and service jobs are coded female. Once you drill in things get more complex, since something like garment manufacturing would still be coded female, but this is correct at the largest levels. So a political movement that is soaked in a desire for a return to some idealized past of traditional masculinity concludes that manufacturing is virtuous while service roles are not, independent of whether manufacturing actually creates greater economic prosperity. "Email jobs" are disdained as valueless. Hawley compares manufacturing to God's Creation in his book on masculinity and concludes that men must carry on this legacy of creation to fulfill their purpose. That's not an economic argument but a moral one, which concludes that it is better to be paid less pressing steel into sheets than to be paid more teaching undergraduates.
- stevenAthompson 2y ago
  I wonder if you're being downvoted because people disagree with you, or because they agree and it makes them feel yucky? I hate everything you just said, but feel like you're at least partly correct. The metaphors we live by might be eating us alive.
  - UncleMeat 2y ago
    I'm back at +1. HN has a small enough population that one or two votes can't really be taken to mean anything. I would not be surprised if there is a general resistance to this sort of framing among some HN readers, but I'm not going to take snap decisions of one or two people to mean much.
  - UncleMeat 2y ago
    Amazingly, this was made extraordinarily explicit on Fox News yesterday. "When you sit behind a screen all day, it makes you a woman" with the chyron "Trump's Manly Tariffs."
- bryanlarsen 2y ago
  Which is ironic gender coding, because for the US job market of 2025, exported services are almost completely tech, and tech is primarily male.
xnx 2y ago
Agree. > Our problem was inflation, not a lack of low paying jobs. Emphasis on "was". Inflation had largely been tamed by the time Trump started this recession.