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Honest question: If you want environmental and labor regulations in America, how can you oppose tariffs? American businesses following those laws can't compete

Honest question: If you want environmental and labor regulations in America, how can you oppose tariffs? American businesses following those laws can't compete with countries using slave labor and toxic lakes of poison.

BugsJustFindMe 1y ago
> If you want environmental and labor regulations in America, how can you oppose tariffs? Environmental and labor regulations are not the same thing as domestic production. Plenty of domestic production uses slave labor and produces toxic lakes of poison. > Honest question It feels like a dishonest question given that we know the tariffs are coming from an administration trying to gut the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Labor.
- red-iron-pine 1y ago
  > Plenty of domestic production uses slave labor and produces toxic lakes of poison The US basically runs on illegal immigrant labor. That's why food is cheap, houses cheap, lots of other crappy services also cheap -- it's all a buncha Mexicans working under the table.
  - BugsJustFindMe 1y ago
    I was thinking more along the lines of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labor_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labor_in_the_United_Stat... but yes, illegal hiring too (the employers know exactly what they're doing).
churchill 1y ago
America's uncompetitiveness in certain industries isn't because of strong environmental and labor regulations. It's scale. That's why, despite working 996, Chinese software technology companies are still in (admittedly) second place compared to the US. Places like Silicon Valley, etc. have such a dense concentration of talent that if you want to build anything at the cutting edge, you need to pack up, leave your life behind and move over there. Likewise, this is why China dominates in hardware. You can walk into a random store in Shenzhen and pick out enough off-the-shelf parts to build a reasonably high-end smartphone. No one in the US or Europe will even talk to you if you're not ordering 10k MOQ. And that's if you can find a supplier. Scale is also the reason why China and South Korea build nuclear reactors at a fraction of Western prices. On budget too! Not because they carelessly expose everyone to toxic radiation. That's why China has 200* America's shipbuilding capacity. They build so much of it that they unlock economies of scale. It's the reason why China is churning out more PV systems and batteries than the rest of the world combined. They're building so much that their per unit costs fall tremendously. Then they parley those gains in one industry into adjacent industries like EVs where batteries are 40% of the cost. When you stack economies of scale back-to-back, you end up with an order of magnitude's difference. That's why high-end Chinese EVs cost, say <$20k, while American manufacturers are struggling.
tastyface 1y ago
Maybe if competent economists were in charge and not some fascist dingbats?

BugsJustFindMe 1y ago

> If you want environmental and labor regulations in America, how can you oppose tariffs? Environmental and labor regulations are not the same thing as domestic production. Plenty of domestic production uses slave labor and produces toxic lakes of poison. > Honest question It feels like a dishonest question given that we know the tariffs are coming from an administration trying to gut the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Labor.

red-iron-pine 1y ago
> Plenty of domestic production uses slave labor and produces toxic lakes of poison The US basically runs on illegal immigrant labor. That's why food is cheap, houses cheap, lots of other crappy services also cheap -- it's all a buncha Mexicans working under the table.
- BugsJustFindMe 1y ago
  I was thinking more along the lines of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labor_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labor_in_the_United_Stat... but yes, illegal hiring too (the employers know exactly what they're doing).

churchill 1y ago

America's uncompetitiveness in certain industries isn't because of strong environmental and labor regulations. It's scale. That's why, despite working 996, Chinese software technology companies are still in (admittedly) second place compared to the US. Places like Silicon Valley, etc. have such a dense concentration of talent that if you want to build anything at the cutting edge, you need to pack up, leave your life behind and move over there. Likewise, this is why China dominates in hardware. You can walk into a random store in Shenzhen and pick out enough off-the-shelf parts to build a reasonably high-end smartphone. No one in the US or Europe will even talk to you if you're not ordering 10k MOQ. And that's if you can find a supplier. Scale is also the reason why China and South Korea build nuclear reactors at a fraction of Western prices. On budget too! Not because they carelessly expose everyone to toxic radiation. That's why China has 200* America's shipbuilding capacity. They build so much of it that they unlock economies of scale. It's the reason why China is churning out more PV systems and batteries than the rest of the world combined. They're building so much that their per unit costs fall tremendously. Then they parley those gains in one industry into adjacent industries like EVs where batteries are 40% of the cost. When you stack economies of scale back-to-back, you end up with an order of magnitude's difference. That's why high-end Chinese EVs cost, say <$20k, while American manufacturers are struggling.

tastyface 1y ago

Maybe if competent economists were in charge and not some fascist dingbats?