Stalin
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Apr 4, 2008
- Messages
- 3,952
the foolishness of frump's voodoo economics is here displayed :
"...People are saying “the tariffs didn’t work,” but it’s like dude, what does that mean? Do you think Trump thought that simply adding these lunatic taxes was going to make factories spontaneously spring up in America?
There are so many different problems with the “factories will spontaneously start popping up everywhere and give Americans really great jobs” theory.
To list just a few of those problems:
comrade stalin
"...People are saying “the tariffs didn’t work,” but it’s like dude, what does that mean? Do you think Trump thought that simply adding these lunatic taxes was going to make factories spontaneously spring up in America?
There are so many different problems with the “factories will spontaneously start popping up everywhere and give Americans really great jobs” theory.
To list just a few of those problems:
- No one is going to build a factory in the US based on the promises of Donald Trump when he is switching everything back and forth constantly. Furthermore, even if they had faith in Trump sticking to what he says (which no one has), because of the way our system works, in 2028 a different administration could abolish the tariffs, making your factory in the US worthless.
- The regulatory environment doesn’t exist in the US to make factories viable. One of the primary reasons it made sense to move everything to China was that China did not have all of these regulations. They also have lower taxes and so on. The only reason anyone would ever make a factory in the US is if literally every other country was effectively banned from exporting to the US. Otherwise, even if you had faith that the tariffs would last, you would wait to see whichever country didn’t have brutal tariffs, and build the factory there. That is: unless you permanently applied crippling tariffs to every country on earth, it would never make sense to build a factory in the US.
- The US does not have a workforce educated on working in factories or a manager class capable of building them. The manufacturing was exported to China before the invention of the iPhone and most modern computer parts. It was the Chinese who figured out how to build and operate these factories to make electronics. And we must be talking about electronic factories. We can’t be talking about like, textile factories. There is no possible way making t-shirts and sneakers in the US would make sense economically.
- The supply chains do not exist. This one thing in itself makes the whole concept impossible on its face. China has deals with countries all over the world to import everything necessary for making all the things they make. China also has the ability to redirect these resources to other locations. (When in Trump’s first term he tariffed/sanctioned China, China just moved factories to Southeast Asia, and it took just a matter of months. They control the flow of the supply chains, so it was nothing to redirect raw resources to Vietnam or Thailand or wherever. They also of course had the ability to build the factories and train the workers.)
- If things were made in the US, they would cost a lot more. Even if you overhauled the entire regulatory framework, which Trump has never even talked about doing, the increased labor costs, the increased taxes, and so on would make things way more expensive. The claim is that people would be paid more and therefore capable of affording more expensive products, but think that through: you’re talking about a complete overhaul of the entire US economy, basically restructuring it from the ground up. This isn’t something that happens on its own. When all of a sudden consumer electronics are 2-3 times the price, people working in most jobs have not gotten the wage increases to pay for that premium. (In theory, you would combine the reshoring with removing the immigrants, but Trump is doing nothing on that front either, as we will touch on later.)
- Automation makes “high-paying factory jobs” a spook. This is maybe the most important point. When the jobs were moved to China in the 1990s, it meant that money was not put into automating these factories, because China had cheap labor. As China has gotten rich, and labor has gotten more expensive, they have begun developing the technologies to automate factories.
comrade stalin
