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It’s reasonable to want to bring back american manufacturing. But the random, temper-tantrum, market-manipulation tariffs are not going to do that. America isn’

It’s reasonable to want to bring back american manufacturing. But the random, temper-tantrum, market-manipulation tariffs are not going to do that. America isn’t going to all of a sudden produce tonnes and tonnes of xmas decorations every year just because of a 50% tariff on all chinese goods that may or may not be around in 6 months. All that’s going to happen is xmas decorations are going to be more expensive. An actual plan would be targeting specific industries where america has the ability to scale up, and having congress pass tariffs that slowly ramp up over time to allow a smooth transition.

epolanski 2mo ago
> It’s reasonable to want to bring back american manufacturing. Capitalism produces where it is convenient to do so. And no politician can change it. You can try to protect very few critical sectors, but not whole "manufacturing" which by the way keeps rising in US since ever. What politicians want to sell is the "good old times of well paying manufacturing jobs". Robots have long come for those.
- close04 2mo ago
  Capitalism is great as long as it works just for you. When others learn to play the game and even outrun you, it’s time to put the finger on the scales. Essence of the free market.
  - epolanski 2mo ago
    There isn't much you can do about it, you can't have the cake and eat it too. If you want to protect your whole "manufacturing", you also need to make peace with the idea that consumer and industrial prices will balloon. You can only compete, choose your battles, but you can't live in a world that does not exist.
    - smallmancontrov 2mo ago
      No, bringing the price of 50" 4k TVs down to $300 does not make up for lost jobs. That's an easy choice, which is why it was never presented to the American worker but rather foisted upon us by shareholders in pursuit of profit and a government content to look the other way.
      - Hammershaft 2mo ago
        Advanced manufacturing requires cheap global inputs. Before tariffs, unemployments was ~3.5% and real wages were rising, and part of why wages have been rising is because the cost of goods like TVs have been falling.
        smallmancontrov 2mo ago
        Just because the dumbest president in American History can't do industrial policy doesn't mean that industrial policy can't or shouldn't be done.
      - epolanski 2mo ago
        1. For the n-th time: manufacturing jobs are being lost to automation. Globally, not just in America. This is true in Asia as well. Manufacturing is facing the same fate of agriculture: machines and robots will keep displacing people. Nothing is going to stop it. 2. There is no such world where we'll choose to do things less efficiently to artificially save few jobs. And it's not about your TV being 100$ more expensive, it is about everything you touch and see being considerably more expensive, with a cascade effect on the businesses that need the equipment. 3. Average Joe in US is as much a shareholder as some imaginary person you have in mind. And a company's duty is towards shareholders first, workers second.
        triceratops 2mo ago
        Everything you said is objectively true, except for one thing. > a company's duty is towards shareholders first, workers second. This is just like, an opinion, man. There's no reason a company has to be like that. It just benefits company management to act like it's an objective truth because their pay is stock-based.
- kennywinker 2mo ago
  > Capitalism produces where it is convenient to do so. Laughably untrue. Is it most convenient to produce semiconductors in taiwan? No. Decades of taiwanese industrial policy produced that outcome. Capitalism takes advantage of current conditions, but those conditions aren't inherent or natural, they're the result of history and specific choices by specific people.
throwaw12 2mo ago
I don't think proposed plan with tariffs will be effective, because once scaled up and generating enough revenue, MBA will come and outsource everything, to make more money
- edgyquant 2mo ago
  Not if you make it extremely costly with tax policy and tariffs.
smallmancontrov 2mo ago
An actual plan would look like the IIJA, IRA, CHIPS Act -- what Biden was doing, but act larger scale. The problem with globalization is not that free trade failed to create a surplus, it's that 150% of the surplus went to capital and -50% went to labor, which can and should be fixed with tax and spend. Instead, of course, we didn't tax capital and we spent the money on stupid wars. That said, good industrial policy includes tariffs too, but Democrats knew this! Biden wasn't allergic to tariffs! The 100% EV tariff (and EV subsidies and battery subsidies) happened during his administration. Aside from the fact that giving Elon everything he wanted was a massive political miscalculation, it was good industrial policy, we just needed more of it in order to affect the macro. That's the tragedy of it -- Democrats in office understood the macro picture and worked diligently and intelligently to fix it, the spurned labor interests in the MAGA movement understood what had hurt them and correctly rejected it, but the former didn't know how to message to the latter so a demagogue swooped in and here we are. The gonzo free-trade rhetoric of the Clinton era should never have happened, second best time to get rid of it was 10 years ago before Trump I, third best time was a few years ago before Trump II, but the fourth best time is now.
- jandrewrogers 2mo ago
  An important point is that "capital" is essentially just another way of saying "investment". Investment is what creates opportunities and demand for labor. Strong demand for labor increases wages e.g. construction wages going through the roof because of data center investment. If you disincentivize investment, economic surplus tends to shift toward rent-seeking behavior which creates relatively little labor demand. Many economies in Europe are poster children for this phenomenon. Ideally you want an economy that strongly incentives investment over rent-seeking.
  - smallmancontrov 2mo ago
    Absolutely not! The word "investment" according to most definitions in most economics classes would encompass the activity of merging together all of the companies in a sector for mega rent extraction. They would even call that a successful investment! If you want investment to create jobs, you must ensure it is going somewhere with a track record for job creation. Historically, the export sector did a good job of employing people per unit investment while the asset sector did not. In general the point is that you have to check. There are circumstances in which tilting tax, labor, trade etc policy towards capital is actually good for everyone, in which trickle-down economics actually does work, but they are rare and specific, typically apply to developing economies, and are not nearly as universal as they are portrayed in the typical American econ class. Here's how you judge: look at interest rates. Real rates, not nominal rates. The price to rent money. Is it high? Then the economy knows how to productively deploy a marginal dollar of capital, as evidenced by people willing to pay to do it. Is it low? Then the economy has no idea how to deploy the marginal dollar of capital, as evidenced by its willingness to let you try for dirt cheap. In the latter case, proposals to shift tax, labor, and trade policy towards capital are simply propaganda put forward by the wealthy for purely self-serving reasons.
arwhatever 2mo ago
Maybe even use the tariff proceeds to provide incentives to those very same domestic industries? (I am not an economist.)
- mindslight 2mo ago
  If that were seriously on the table, we could have just used the proceeds from having the world reserve currency to do that. Instead, their open plan for that national asset is to squander it. In general, stop trying to steelman the looters. Sometimes a con artist is really just a con artist.
  - edgyquant 2mo ago
    From what I understand having the dollar be our main export is a reason why we haven’t had real industrial policy. We export dollars so we have to buy from overseas.
    - mindslight 2mo ago
      You're missing the other choices that link those two things. Being able to export dollars lets the government create new dollars out of thin air, which can be traded for real goods and services - a great deal by any measure. But the political mantra of the last thirty years has been a fake "fiscal responsibility" where the government has been stopped from spending that new money for most deliberate purposes, especially on a large scale (eg subsidizing domestic manufacturing in strategic industries). Yet instead of the natural price deflation that true fiscal responsibility would have brought, economists have declared that our currency still needs to inflate. And so the Fed still creates just as many new dollars, but instead gives them away to banks in the form of low interest loans (fueling the ever growing asset bubble, essentially a handout to asset holders). The combination of all of these are what has decimated our industrial base.
  - arwhatever 2mo ago
    | In general, stop trying to steelman the looters. Sometimes a con artist is really just a con artist. Re-read my comment in the context of the message to which it replied.
pjc50 2mo ago
The insane thing about this discussion is that America does still manufacture a huge amount of products that are used all over the world, and the people that make them are paid salaries that are the envy of the world! Many of the people working in this industry are posting on this site! It's just that because those products don't come in boxes anymore but are distributed over the Internet people think they don't count?
- smallmancontrov 2mo ago
  The balance of trade accounts for "export of computer services," because of course it does, and the account is in deficit in spite of these, because of course it is. The insane thing is that you tried to offer this "insight" without even bothering to check!
  - pjc50 2mo ago
    My point is that people are over focusing on manufacturing of physical goods while ignoring all the other aspects of the balance of payments, or indeed the internal US economy. (Also, if you're trying to reduce imports, that messes up the balance of payments of your trade partners who get mad, and if you do it obnoxiously enough then other countries start substituting away your exports)
  - scott_weber 2mo ago
    My read of "manufacture a huge amount of products" was that it's not even about software. America is still the world's second largest manufacturing economy, and per capita produces more than China! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing Most of this manufacturing is just not consumer facing.
- like_any_other 2mo ago
  > America does still manufacture a huge amount of products US industrial (absolute, not per capita) production hasn't grown since 2007: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/INDPRO https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/INDPRO But the population has increased by 13.5%: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States#Population_by_year_(includes_estimates) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta... It's one hell of a gamble to rely so much on software "products", while anything that software actually runs on is made in Asia. Building up a software industry will be a lot easier than it was to grow the industrial and tech ecosystem. And that ecosystem will give sweetheart deals to homegrown software, while extorting yours. Sorry, did I say "will"? I meant it's already doing so: Apple CEO Tim Cook "secretly" signed an agreement worth more than $275 billion with Chinese officials, promising that Apple would help to develop China's economy and technological capabilities - https://www.macrumors.com/2021/12/07/apple-ceo-tim-cook-secret-deal-with-china/ https://www.macrumors.com/2021/12/07/apple-ceo-tim-cook-secr...
xenadu02 2mo ago
It isn't just about that. You need industrial policy. And not just stuff like the CHIPS act. In China a small outfit can get financing and open a factory anywhere. You can't do that in the USA. You are too small for the lenders or investors who do such things to care yet too risky for traditional financial institutions to risk anything on you. If I want to buy a couple of CNC machines and start making a product in my garage I have to hope I have enough room on credit cards to do it because I cannot get the money from anyone. Doesn't matter if I have a good idea. Doesn't even matter if I have some initial customers/orders. If the government is going to piss away money then at least piss it away on that sort of economic activity. If you can present a coherent business plan or product design then lend people the capital secured by the equipment and/or IP with generous repayment terms. Set progressive milestones to unlock additional financing... for example give a gov backed credit account at SendCutSend. When you have an engineer's report on the prototype to turn in you unlock financing to order your first CNC machines. Develop a pipeline. A script to follow. Something a person can follow to get big enough to become a real business. Grant time to pivot if necessary. If that doesn't work then ultimately the government takes possession of the equipment. Make it clear so long as you return everything in good working order then in X years you're eligible to re-enter the program. Then hand that equipment over to the next person in line.
- arjie 2mo ago
  Wait. I remember reading about this. Doesn’t SBA 7a cover your use case? I’m sure there’s an SBA loan category for you. It’s backed by the machine. Recently they changed the valuation of things or something.
  - xenadu02 2mo ago
    SBA loans are just regular loans from a bank, except with government backing. You need a high credit score (680 at least) to even have a hope and 10% cash to put down if not more. Unless you can prove experience managing a business forget it. You have to demonstrate other outside income (hope your spouse works a good job) or enough cash in the bank to cover living expenses for a year or more. If the business is going to be a new venture you have to put together financial projections that demonstrate how you are going to start making money and it had better be quickly. You will not get 2 years to ramp up. And if you fail to meet projections they can call in the loan. Oh and by the way: you must sign an agreement to take unlimited personal liability for the loan. So if the business fails they get to take away your savings, retirement, even your house. In fact if you don't have significant assets they will put a lien on your house as part of the loan closing! In China if you want to start a factory in an area the national government lists as desirable the state-owned bank will almost shove money into your hands. Repayment timelines are extremely generous. You mostly don't take on personal liability - instead they focus on the assets, land rights, etc. That is if the business starts to fail you will own machinery, a lease on the land, and/or a factory building so they are content to secure the loan against those things. When the state bank underwrites your loan in China they only care that your project is technically viable and you have some kind of plan. They assume you will find a way to be profitable and worst case they can take the factory away from you and give it to someone else. As long as your plan makes sense - if your plan says you're going to make robot arms but your plan doesn't mention buying any CNC machines or hiring any electrical engineers you will have difficulties. And if you want to build a factory to make lathes expect serious pushback - the Chinese government considers that sector to be "over-capacity" so they are reluctant to finance new factories for such things. Not that it matters because unlike the USA if you aren't a Chinese citizen then you can piss right off because you aren't going to be approved for anything and you aren't allowed to own property anyway. Not that any court would ever side with you in any case either. The entire philosophy is different and I'm saying we should adopt the Chinese philosophy. Instead of letting risk-adverse private banks make the decision the government should make the decision. And instead of focusing on credit score and making you sign an unlimited personal liability contract - do the opposite and secure the loan against the actual factory, machinery, and assets. Build a network of such so if a business fails you can turn around and offer it to the next suitable applicant who can bootstrap their business instead of selling everything for pennies on the dollar at auction.
e40 2mo ago
Yeah, tarrifs are a step in a plan to bring back manufacturing. The last step. I don’t remember where I saw the breakdown of how to do it. It was detailed by an expert, the kind that this administration wants to do with, lest said expert disagree with POTUS and hurt his feelings.

epolanski 2mo ago

> It’s reasonable to want to bring back american manufacturing. Capitalism produces where it is convenient to do so. And no politician can change it. You can try to protect very few critical sectors, but not whole "manufacturing" which by the way keeps rising in US since ever. What politicians want to sell is the "good old times of well paying manufacturing jobs". Robots have long come for those.

close04 2mo ago
Capitalism is great as long as it works just for you. When others learn to play the game and even outrun you, it’s time to put the finger on the scales. Essence of the free market.
- epolanski 2mo ago
  There isn't much you can do about it, you can't have the cake and eat it too. If you want to protect your whole "manufacturing", you also need to make peace with the idea that consumer and industrial prices will balloon. You can only compete, choose your battles, but you can't live in a world that does not exist.
  - smallmancontrov 2mo ago
    No, bringing the price of 50" 4k TVs down to $300 does not make up for lost jobs. That's an easy choice, which is why it was never presented to the American worker but rather foisted upon us by shareholders in pursuit of profit and a government content to look the other way.
    - Hammershaft 2mo ago
      Advanced manufacturing requires cheap global inputs. Before tariffs, unemployments was ~3.5% and real wages were rising, and part of why wages have been rising is because the cost of goods like TVs have been falling.
      - smallmancontrov 2mo ago
        Just because the dumbest president in American History can't do industrial policy doesn't mean that industrial policy can't or shouldn't be done.
    - epolanski 2mo ago
      1. For the n-th time: manufacturing jobs are being lost to automation. Globally, not just in America. This is true in Asia as well. Manufacturing is facing the same fate of agriculture: machines and robots will keep displacing people. Nothing is going to stop it. 2. There is no such world where we'll choose to do things less efficiently to artificially save few jobs. And it's not about your TV being 100$ more expensive, it is about everything you touch and see being considerably more expensive, with a cascade effect on the businesses that need the equipment. 3. Average Joe in US is as much a shareholder as some imaginary person you have in mind. And a company's duty is towards shareholders first, workers second.
      - triceratops 2mo ago
        Everything you said is objectively true, except for one thing. > a company's duty is towards shareholders first, workers second. This is just like, an opinion, man. There's no reason a company has to be like that. It just benefits company management to act like it's an objective truth because their pay is stock-based.
kennywinker 2mo ago
> Capitalism produces where it is convenient to do so. Laughably untrue. Is it most convenient to produce semiconductors in taiwan? No. Decades of taiwanese industrial policy produced that outcome. Capitalism takes advantage of current conditions, but those conditions aren't inherent or natural, they're the result of history and specific choices by specific people.

throwaw12 2mo ago

I don't think proposed plan with tariffs will be effective, because once scaled up and generating enough revenue, MBA will come and outsource everything, to make more money

edgyquant 2mo ago
Not if you make it extremely costly with tax policy and tariffs.

smallmancontrov 2mo ago

An actual plan would look like the IIJA, IRA, CHIPS Act -- what Biden was doing, but act larger scale. The problem with globalization is not that free trade failed to create a surplus, it's that 150% of the surplus went to capital and -50% went to labor, which can and should be fixed with tax and spend. Instead, of course, we didn't tax capital and we spent the money on stupid wars. That said, good industrial policy includes tariffs too, but Democrats knew this! Biden wasn't allergic to tariffs! The 100% EV tariff (and EV subsidies and battery subsidies) happened during his administration. Aside from the fact that giving Elon everything he wanted was a massive political miscalculation, it was good industrial policy, we just needed more of it in order to affect the macro. That's the tragedy of it -- Democrats in office understood the macro picture and worked diligently and intelligently to fix it, the spurned labor interests in the MAGA movement understood what had hurt them and correctly rejected it, but the former didn't know how to message to the latter so a demagogue swooped in and here we are. The gonzo free-trade rhetoric of the Clinton era should never have happened, second best time to get rid of it was 10 years ago before Trump I, third best time was a few years ago before Trump II, but the fourth best time is now.

jandrewrogers 2mo ago
An important point is that "capital" is essentially just another way of saying "investment". Investment is what creates opportunities and demand for labor. Strong demand for labor increases wages e.g. construction wages going through the roof because of data center investment. If you disincentivize investment, economic surplus tends to shift toward rent-seeking behavior which creates relatively little labor demand. Many economies in Europe are poster children for this phenomenon. Ideally you want an economy that strongly incentives investment over rent-seeking.
- smallmancontrov 2mo ago
  Absolutely not! The word "investment" according to most definitions in most economics classes would encompass the activity of merging together all of the companies in a sector for mega rent extraction. They would even call that a successful investment! If you want investment to create jobs, you must ensure it is going somewhere with a track record for job creation. Historically, the export sector did a good job of employing people per unit investment while the asset sector did not. In general the point is that you have to check. There are circumstances in which tilting tax, labor, trade etc policy towards capital is actually good for everyone, in which trickle-down economics actually does work, but they are rare and specific, typically apply to developing economies, and are not nearly as universal as they are portrayed in the typical American econ class. Here's how you judge: look at interest rates. Real rates, not nominal rates. The price to rent money. Is it high? Then the economy knows how to productively deploy a marginal dollar of capital, as evidenced by people willing to pay to do it. Is it low? Then the economy has no idea how to deploy the marginal dollar of capital, as evidenced by its willingness to let you try for dirt cheap. In the latter case, proposals to shift tax, labor, and trade policy towards capital are simply propaganda put forward by the wealthy for purely self-serving reasons.

arwhatever 2mo ago

Maybe even use the tariff proceeds to provide incentives to those very same domestic industries? (I am not an economist.)

mindslight 2mo ago
If that were seriously on the table, we could have just used the proceeds from having the world reserve currency to do that. Instead, their open plan for that national asset is to squander it. In general, stop trying to steelman the looters. Sometimes a con artist is really just a con artist.
- edgyquant 2mo ago
  From what I understand having the dollar be our main export is a reason why we haven’t had real industrial policy. We export dollars so we have to buy from overseas.
  - mindslight 2mo ago
    You're missing the other choices that link those two things. Being able to export dollars lets the government create new dollars out of thin air, which can be traded for real goods and services - a great deal by any measure. But the political mantra of the last thirty years has been a fake "fiscal responsibility" where the government has been stopped from spending that new money for most deliberate purposes, especially on a large scale (eg subsidizing domestic manufacturing in strategic industries). Yet instead of the natural price deflation that true fiscal responsibility would have brought, economists have declared that our currency still needs to inflate. And so the Fed still creates just as many new dollars, but instead gives them away to banks in the form of low interest loans (fueling the ever growing asset bubble, essentially a handout to asset holders). The combination of all of these are what has decimated our industrial base.
- arwhatever 2mo ago
  | In general, stop trying to steelman the looters. Sometimes a con artist is really just a con artist. Re-read my comment in the context of the message to which it replied.

pjc50 2mo ago

The insane thing about this discussion is that America does still manufacture a huge amount of products that are used all over the world, and the people that make them are paid salaries that are the envy of the world! Many of the people working in this industry are posting on this site! It's just that because those products don't come in boxes anymore but are distributed over the Internet people think they don't count?

smallmancontrov 2mo ago
The balance of trade accounts for "export of computer services," because of course it does, and the account is in deficit in spite of these, because of course it is. The insane thing is that you tried to offer this "insight" without even bothering to check!
- pjc50 2mo ago
  My point is that people are over focusing on manufacturing of physical goods while ignoring all the other aspects of the balance of payments, or indeed the internal US economy. (Also, if you're trying to reduce imports, that messes up the balance of payments of your trade partners who get mad, and if you do it obnoxiously enough then other countries start substituting away your exports)
- scott_weber 2mo ago
  My read of "manufacture a huge amount of products" was that it's not even about software. America is still the world's second largest manufacturing economy, and per capita produces more than China! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing Most of this manufacturing is just not consumer facing.
like_any_other 2mo ago
> America does still manufacture a huge amount of products US industrial (absolute, not per capita) production hasn't grown since 2007: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/INDPRO https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/INDPRO But the population has increased by 13.5%: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States#Population_by_year_(includes_estimates) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta... It's one hell of a gamble to rely so much on software "products", while anything that software actually runs on is made in Asia. Building up a software industry will be a lot easier than it was to grow the industrial and tech ecosystem. And that ecosystem will give sweetheart deals to homegrown software, while extorting yours. Sorry, did I say "will"? I meant it's already doing so: Apple CEO Tim Cook "secretly" signed an agreement worth more than $275 billion with Chinese officials, promising that Apple would help to develop China's economy and technological capabilities - https://www.macrumors.com/2021/12/07/apple-ceo-tim-cook-secret-deal-with-china/ https://www.macrumors.com/2021/12/07/apple-ceo-tim-cook-secr...

xenadu02 2mo ago

It isn't just about that. You need industrial policy. And not just stuff like the CHIPS act. In China a small outfit can get financing and open a factory anywhere. You can't do that in the USA. You are too small for the lenders or investors who do such things to care yet too risky for traditional financial institutions to risk anything on you. If I want to buy a couple of CNC machines and start making a product in my garage I have to hope I have enough room on credit cards to do it because I cannot get the money from anyone. Doesn't matter if I have a good idea. Doesn't even matter if I have some initial customers/orders. If the government is going to piss away money then at least piss it away on that sort of economic activity. If you can present a coherent business plan or product design then lend people the capital secured by the equipment and/or IP with generous repayment terms. Set progressive milestones to unlock additional financing... for example give a gov backed credit account at SendCutSend. When you have an engineer's report on the prototype to turn in you unlock financing to order your first CNC machines. Develop a pipeline. A script to follow. Something a person can follow to get big enough to become a real business. Grant time to pivot if necessary. If that doesn't work then ultimately the government takes possession of the equipment. Make it clear so long as you return everything in good working order then in X years you're eligible to re-enter the program. Then hand that equipment over to the next person in line.

arjie 2mo ago
Wait. I remember reading about this. Doesn’t SBA 7a cover your use case? I’m sure there’s an SBA loan category for you. It’s backed by the machine. Recently they changed the valuation of things or something.
- xenadu02 2mo ago
  SBA loans are just regular loans from a bank, except with government backing. You need a high credit score (680 at least) to even have a hope and 10% cash to put down if not more. Unless you can prove experience managing a business forget it. You have to demonstrate other outside income (hope your spouse works a good job) or enough cash in the bank to cover living expenses for a year or more. If the business is going to be a new venture you have to put together financial projections that demonstrate how you are going to start making money and it had better be quickly. You will not get 2 years to ramp up. And if you fail to meet projections they can call in the loan. Oh and by the way: you must sign an agreement to take unlimited personal liability for the loan. So if the business fails they get to take away your savings, retirement, even your house. In fact if you don't have significant assets they will put a lien on your house as part of the loan closing! In China if you want to start a factory in an area the national government lists as desirable the state-owned bank will almost shove money into your hands. Repayment timelines are extremely generous. You mostly don't take on personal liability - instead they focus on the assets, land rights, etc. That is if the business starts to fail you will own machinery, a lease on the land, and/or a factory building so they are content to secure the loan against those things. When the state bank underwrites your loan in China they only care that your project is technically viable and you have some kind of plan. They assume you will find a way to be profitable and worst case they can take the factory away from you and give it to someone else. As long as your plan makes sense - if your plan says you're going to make robot arms but your plan doesn't mention buying any CNC machines or hiring any electrical engineers you will have difficulties. And if you want to build a factory to make lathes expect serious pushback - the Chinese government considers that sector to be "over-capacity" so they are reluctant to finance new factories for such things. Not that it matters because unlike the USA if you aren't a Chinese citizen then you can piss right off because you aren't going to be approved for anything and you aren't allowed to own property anyway. Not that any court would ever side with you in any case either. The entire philosophy is different and I'm saying we should adopt the Chinese philosophy. Instead of letting risk-adverse private banks make the decision the government should make the decision. And instead of focusing on credit score and making you sign an unlimited personal liability contract - do the opposite and secure the loan against the actual factory, machinery, and assets. Build a network of such so if a business fails you can turn around and offer it to the next suitable applicant who can bootstrap their business instead of selling everything for pennies on the dollar at auction.

e40 2mo ago

Yeah, tarrifs are a step in a plan to bring back manufacturing. The last step. I don’t remember where I saw the breakdown of how to do it. It was detailed by an expert, the kind that this administration wants to do with, lest said expert disagree with POTUS and hurt his feelings.