Posted by Anon84 4/4/2025
We have an opportunity here to rebuild the industrial capability and walk ourselves a bit further up the cost structure now with the help of having access to chinese output and what we are doing instead is pretty foolish.
That talk of what we pay vs what we would pay is being used in your argument to point out the pain of losing access to a cheap chinese product when it's more useful for antitrust discussion of where market power is being abused and instead just pointing out the direct pain of a china walking away situation in my opinion.
That sounds like a good reason to favor local manufacturing.
> On the other hand, ramping up production that has been offshored is not that easy, and is a lot more expensive initially.
And that sounds like a good reason to do it now and not wait for a crisis when the consequences would be worse.
It depends on the nature of that particular good's production.
Some industries are incredibly supply-chain and labor-intensive.
Others are capital-intensive.
Others may be knowledge-intensive.
A country should seek to compete in industries it has the most core competencies in.
While US policymakers were following that advice, China did the opposite. They decided what they wanted to compete in and built the core competencies they needed to do so.
Pharma along with semiconductors is still exempted.
The biggest hit this has is on textiles and apparel as those were industries that have almost no NAFTA/USMCA presence anymore.
Electronics will be a mixed bag as most US origin electronics assembly was already returning to Mexico due to Zero COVID in China (20-23) and Vietnam (20-21), or moving to India (26% tariff) and Malaysia (20% tariff)
Most medicaments in the US are sourced from EU (Ireland, Germany, Netherlands), EFTA (Switzerland as you rightfully noted as well as Denmark), and India
Our farmers in Utah lobby so hard for water, then use it to grow alfalfa which they sell to China because they can sell it there for more money than it can be sold locally. It boils my circuits that they ask for our precious water -- to which they have historically had an obvious right, growing our food -- and then basically ship it overseas. Keep the crops at least sold in the US, and hopefully to other Utahns who have a hard time buying alfalfa because China inflates the price. 80% of our water goes to farmers here. I'm glad of it when they grow wheat and sell it to us, but not when it gets exported. These tariffs will hopefully help with that.
There’s a lot of effects, but one very visible one in Utah is the fact that the Great Salt Lake is drying out, because too much water is being diverted from its tributaries. Now there’s dust getting stirred up from the exposed lake bed that’s chock full of heavy metals, which is less than ideal next to a fairly big city.
How does it not short circuit and the farmers just sell locally for the price of the goods from China?
To sell more alfalfa in America you'd need more farms to raise more cattle (the main use for alfalfa), which would put even more strain on the American water supplies. That would produce more meat, which you could sell to China, but it would be more expensive than the Chinese homegrown beef, which they'd buy more of.
At least in the parents posters mind that less farm exports leads to less water usage. Hence bankrupt farmers solves things like aquifers going empty and lakes draining leavings environmental disasters.
Now, how it actually works out in the end may be different, but the concept doesn't seem completely broken at first appearance.
I would presume that this is true, in the sense that the overall economic footprint of what these bankrupted consumers eat will be smaller.
The caloric difference will be insignificant. But instead of having it come from meat, and especially cattle, have it come from vegetables and poultry.
No one needs to eat red meat every day.
Why the personal attack?
The top level comment didn't claim that it would solve the water problem, but that it would solve some apparent problem with Utahns but being able to buy alfalfa. Now another commentor is saying that it'll solve the water problem by putting farmers out of business. Is there a local unmet need for alfalfa?
So, just to be clear here: you want Utah farmers to foot the bill for the trade war? If they are forced to sell locally for less, they're the ones losing money. Utahns end up poorer in this scenario.
Obviously in a trade war, everyone ends up poorer. It's just simple math. It's absolutely dumbfounding the extent to which people have simply decided to ignore an honest truth simply because of the lies of one political cult.
When you come to the realization that you can't drink money, this comes as good news.
If you want better water regulation in the Utah desert, the solution is better water regulation in the Utah desert and not a huge tax on trade.
OP was just trying to make lemonade from the lemons we are served.
Chinese don’t get to protest or voice dissent and Americans can’t be bothered to
Americans would understand that tough times are because their fellow Americans elected an idiot.
It will be a crisis for both countries, but it will unite one and divide another. I think everyone will lose but America is likely to lose harder, bigly even.
Traditionally, countries get pretty unhappy with their own leadership when the economy gets bad...
There's not a lot of room for nuanced political attribution at population scale.
But you can be sure that in the USA, this will all stop in 2 years with the midterms, and be reversed in 4 with the presidential elections. No one other than Trump’s fan base likes this even now, imagine in a few months when people start feeling the terrible repercussions.
Anyone saying they are sure about what is happening in the next 2-4 years in the USA is delusional.
1. Identity a problem
2. Blame $group of people for the issue and rally citizens to you
3. Oust previous administration/rulers with rallied citizens
And then to stay in power
1. Create or identity a problem
2. Blame $group of people for the problem
3. Rally citizens to ostracize the new group of ppl
4. Back to 1
The issues never need to be resolved, as long as the citizens blame someone and feel empowered to lash out against someone (the people getting blamed).
No one can be sure of anything, but the specific years you picked happen to have possibly two of the least electable candidates on the ballot.
Biden was not even a particularly good candidate in 2020, but he was able to win. I think that’s indicative of how low the bar is.
Really, I don't like Trump, I think he is a buffoon, but Democrats are so tiresome, calling wolf every time they don't get what they want. I know toddlers with more self restrain.
The specific text in the 22nd Amendment states: "No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once"
Key word is "ELECTED," (the loophole) but this is up for debate as the intent of the amendment. Deeper dive here: https://www.factcheck.org/2025/04/legal-scholars-dispute-con...
Winning > rule of law
Which I blame solely on conservative talk radio's lack of morals, and inspiring the same in their listenership.
Besides, corporations are actually better equipped to deal with sudden expenses then small businesses. Corporations will suffer the lest and possibly will pay for exceptions for themselves in white house. Smaller businesses wont be able to do the same.
The tariffs aren't some carefully-devised scheme to work out how to reshore manufacturing to the US; they're a slapdash scheme based on such idiotic economics that people had to do a double-take because the President of the United States and his cabinet couldn't possibly be that stupid. And once that sinks in, it becomes extremely counterproductive to the ostensible aims.
Why should anyone bother reshoring anything to the US? You might escape 30% tariffs on your product, but only for 30% tariffs on the inputs to your product. And living in the US means your long-term plans are always at risk of the toddler-in-chief throwing another tantrum because, as we've already seen, a deal he makes yesterday can become the worst deal in the world that is proof of how much the US is getting cheated tomorrow.
EU needs to start taxing heavily any services provided here by the USA. Having the USA moron in Chief pretending that the comercial balance is solely made of physical goods to create an Excel sheet warrants a nice lesson.
Their services are provided by companies/branches in the EU not the US.
When you buy a EC2/S3 bucket from AWS you get invoiced by Amazon Luxembourg, not Amazon Washington. When you buy a Microsoft, Google, PayPal, Meta or Apple service, you'll be buying from a company registered in Ireland or Netherlands. And most of them also have datacenters in the EU for their EU customers.
So how do you tax them more than other companies in the EU? Make The Great EUSSR Firewall?
They are beholden to the US government in many ways, and relying on the services beholden to a hostile foreign nation should be considered a risk.
Honestly not sure what they'll do about tech, but it's not gonna be pretty.
Trade wars are bad for everyone, but we are where we are I guess.
Congress stepping in to exclude Canada and Mexico and the NAFTA exemption cushions the blow significantly.
Most of Latin America being placed at the lower end of the announcement means manufacturers who used to be competitive until China Shock set around 2014-16 can be cost competitive again.
Other large markets like India, UK, and Vietnam are negotiating as well and India expects as Bilateral Trade Agreement to be closed by Aug-Oct.
Those that can will be cutting spending, which will ripple across the rest of the economy.
There's no sign that negotiation is even possible, never mind likely.
One tell is that tariffs have been applied to the Heard and McDonald Islands, which are inhabited by penguins and produce no imports or exports.
These are not the actions of a rational administration.
What do you think the death toll will be? A majority of households not surviving would put it over 160 million.
$4k per capita (not household) loss would put the US in 2022 territory [1].
So kind of you to volunteer that the poorest among us have nothing and should be happy about it.
You admit this is a $4k hit that Congress didn’t pass. Guess after all your talk here, you don’t actually believe in the Constitution or separation of powers just “I should be able to do what I want with power.”
$4k no biggie, right? From my experience, it just means when things wear out, they don’t get replaced. So shoes for kids get stretched to last longer. Car maintenance gets skipped. (You can judge a bad president by the number of broken-down cars on the side of the road.). It’s food not bought, medical/dental care skipped, rent coming up short.
The real death toll won’t be a one-time body count. It’ll be slow and quiet: worse health, more homelessness, more suicides. And for what? So we can LARP like we’re rebuilding American industry without giving businesses the capital, labor, or time to do it?
This isn’t strategy. It’s cruelty pretending to be policy.
The median American household has an income of around $78,000 [0]. They can survive the blowback. The Trump admin on the other hand will not.
As a Sullivan, Raimondo, and IRA supporting Dem, it's a win-win for me. Harsher policies against China have been enacted which will not be rolled back (just like how the Biden admin let Trump 1 era tariffs remain) and it will cause a severe blow as midterm fundraising season has started. The NY by-election for Stefanik's seat itself proved that the tariffs and DOGE have made plenty of purple to light red seats vulnerabile.
I wrote some thoughts about this recently [1]
[0] - https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/SEX255223
Income distribution: https://www.statista.com/statistics/203183/percentage-distri...
Then later they will make fun of the people that have missing teeth because they chose food for their kids over dental work and call those people trash.
What are the expenses of the median American household?
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2024/11/19/bank-of-america-nearly-h...
- Wasn’t this the administration that campaigned on lowering costs of goods? Now, not even a half-year in, the narrative is “Sorry, deal with it, while we chaotically disrupt global markets.” - The administration is apparently intent on a strategy that builds the U.S. manufacturing base. That’s not a one-year horizon, if ever.
It's gonna take a lot longer, and cost Americans a lot more money for "supply chains to react" and move manufacturing to the US.
Just like before the tariffs, the US is still too expensive.
On the other hand, it has killed cost-competitiveness for Chinese exports directly from China or via transshipment from Vietnam.
The tariff regime has now made Latin America (Brazil, Colombia), Turkiye, Philippines, parts of the EU (Poland, Czechia, Romania), and India cost competitive. And NAFTA/USMCA exemptions still remain and this was something Congress pushed back HARD on to ensure.
Even if it did, who cares? It wouldn't make anything less expensive or better and unemployment was already basically as close to zero as it will ever get. If wages go up that would just increase inflation more.
I can't figure out what they even imagined this was going to accomplish.
The downfall of Democracy in America and the alienation of all our allies? That is clearly their goal here...
Even if it did, is it even desirable?
Countries that actually tried to keep manufacturing beyond its usefulness typically punch beneath their weight, such as the case of Germany.
The US lost manufacturing because it was heavily automated and those jobs don't pay really well. They are great for poor countries, because working in a factory sweatshop is better than plowing fields in rural areas, but advanced economies eventually grow beyond that.
The US, being the most advanced economy in the world, transitioned a long time ago into a finance and service economy. It's kind of fascinating (viewing from the outside) that it want to revert to a more rudimentary economy, and there are people applauding that.
Can you explain to me how Germany is punching below their weight?
Like, I personally think that having manufacturing in multiple places is good for resiliency reasons at the very least.
> The US lost manufacturing because it was heavily automated and those jobs don't pay really well. They are great for poor countries, because working in a factory sweatshop is better than plowing fields in rural areas, but advanced economies eventually grow beyond that.
This is a complete myth. The US lost manufacturing because capital controls were removed, and capital went looking for new margins. Like, all of Microsoft's English customer service and technical documentation were in Ireland in the 90's. Is that because Irish people have comparative advantage in these fields? No, it's because wages were super super low compared to the US. We used to have a bunch of clothing factories too, because we were cheap.
Fundamentally, stuff actually needs to be made if you want a modern society. You can outsource that to cheaper countries/Asia for a while, but it's not gonna end well. Like, a large proportion of the population are not cut out to be tech or finance professionals, and if you outsource all the factories that they could have worked at, then they'll get really depressed and angry and vote for Brexit/Trump/Le Pen/AfD.
And given that most of the rich west are democracies, you can't just pretend these people don't exist.
I know the senate voted this through. But it still has to pass the house doesn't it? I doubt it will even get to be voted on with Mike Johnson as speaker.
There’s no way they’d get that in the house.
Can you explain the magical supply chain adjustment that will lower prices after a year?
Zuckerberg explicitly stated this in his Rogan interview.
Pretty funny how that turned out. American tech is going to be on a carousel of ass kickings. The fines and punitive measures are going to be coming at a torrential clip, and of course the US economy is going to be in for an extremely rough few years, and tech is the first thing that sees budget cuts. Quite aside from the entire industry being gut punched by the stupidest tariff regime in human history.
Art of the Deal
Reminder that Trump had no part in writing the book:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_the_Deal
More seriously, this 2018 article from Indiana University negotiations professor David Honig has (re-)popped in recent months:
> Distributive bargaining always has a winner and a loser. It happens when there is a fixed quantity of something and two sides are fighting over how it gets distributed. Think of it as a pie and you’re fighting over who gets how many pieces. In Trump’s world, the bargaining was for a building, or for construction work, or subcontractors. He perceives a successful bargain as one in which there is a winner and a loser, so if he pays less than the seller wants, he wins. The more he saves the more he wins.
> The other type of bargaining is called integrative bargaining. In integrative bargaining the two sides don’t have a complete conflict of interest, and it is possible to reach mutually beneficial agreements. Think of it, not a single pie to be divided by two hungry people, but as a baker and a caterer negotiating over how many pies will be baked at what prices, and the nature of their ongoing relationship after this one gig is over.
[…]
> One of the risks of distributive bargaining is bad will. In a one-time distributive bargain, e.g. negotiating with the cabinet maker in your casino about whether you’re going to pay his whole bill or demand a discount, you don’t have to worry about your ongoing credibility or the next deal. If you do that to the cabinet maker, you can bet he won’t agree to do the cabinets in your next casino, and you’re going to have to find another cabinet maker.
> There isn’t another Canada.
[…]
> Trump has the same weakness politically. For every winner there must be a loser. And that’s just not how politics works, not over the long run.
* https://medium.com/@davidhonig_67081/distributive-bargaining...
* https://blogs.iu.edu/keep/distributive-negotiation-vs-integr...
* https://www.pon.harvard.edu/daily/negotiation-skills-daily/n...
Biden was uninspiring but ultimately did okay on a few things. The things that screwed him were inflation - some of which was Trump's fault - and his mental state, which can happen to anyone at that age. The inflation followed Harris in her run, as people were fondly remembering 2017-2019 and the era of lower prices. They thought putting Trump back in office would reverse the trend.
Well, now he's drastically kicking prices up left and right with no end in sight. It's not even macroeconomic factors doing this like it was with COVID; it's purely the strokes of his pen.
The bottom line is the ultimate thing that matters in American politics, as it is everywhere. The talk about democracy, institutions, rights, etc. are all window dressing. "It's the economy, stupid", and it's getting noticeably worse.
Of course, I could also be totally wrong like everything else has been for the last 10 years when it comes to predicting the downfall of that tyrant.
You can contrast it with what red states would do if Obama had a third term.
It's clear that Trump demanded tariffs, tried to do it once early, and got cold feet. What happened with Lutnick et. al. is Court Politics. They saw an opening to improve their own status by selling a creative lie that would allow Trump to do what he wants. So he bought the lie and picked new favorites.
But it remains a lie. No one serious thinks that this is a good idea.
Also: refinance the debt?! First, no, that's not how federal bonds work. They're a contract and you pay the interest it says on the note. But even if you had a magic money pool around to do buybacks or whatever... most of the outstanding debt is in 30 year notes at like 3%! How low do you think they're going to get the Fed to go?
https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/us-treasury-plays-cat-mou...
So the question becomes "can we get better rates for bonds?". And clearly the answer is hell no, because nothing in this mess makes US debt look more attractive to foreign investors. We're moving in the opposite direction from the way the cult expects things to go.
These aren't people who care about the national debt. Trump has not only stated, but bragged publicly, that he does what he can to pay as little in tax as possible. He's had an appeal in front of the IRS for probably over a decade now for writing down the value of a business loss (the casino in Atlantic City, IIRC) that he received monetary gain from.
That's not what you do when you see a financial issue as a threat to the nation you supposedly love. They are too short-sighted to have a strategy.
If there's a depression or major recession, I don't think the government bailout would be the main concern. Civil unrest would be. I'm in my early 30s and I've seen four major financial crises (2002, 2008, 2020, and now 2025) in my lifetime. I'm doing alright because I come from a place of privilege. There are literally millions of people my age who aren't going to be doing alright in the situation you describe, and there's a good chance they would see that as the death knell of their hopes and dreams, all because of the shareholder and political classes in this country.
It just feels like a colossal own-goal that will weaken America on the global scale. Americans will suffer in a recession. And it was by choice that this administration put us here.
Is there any recourse?
Nope. The avalanche has begun, it's too late for the pebbles to regret their vote.
The vast majority of us are just minor pebbles in trump’s grand experiment, just trying to find a quiet place to avoid all the noise and nightmares.
The SV mantra of “Move fast and break things” is not something that you really should apply to entire economic systems.
Someone will probably profit but it’s not going to be the average American citizen ( or citizen of any other country)
Apparently, they have a plan.
AFAICT, the plan is based on the US being "the last man standing" after WWII and turning its wartime manufacturing base into the machine which rebuilt the world but, nonetheless, they have a plan.
So rejoice in the Glorious Leader's wisdom and know he feels your economic pain and hardship. We must all make sacrifices to Make America Great Again.
Good thing JP Morgan's predictions were never wrong /s
Edit: to those who downvoted, do you have any arguments to contradict my statement and would you put your money into JP's predictions? Go ahead, I'll wait.
The best thing everyone can do is maintain low tariffs and try and strike free trade deals with each other. But the consequeces of Trumps Trade war are going to be disasterous for smaller developing nations and their economies. We'll see more poverty, more political instability, civil wars, coups and other unpleaseant activities.
The USA will probably get higher inflation while the rest of the world sees lower inflation if not deflation.
We'll have to find a way of getting through this window of misfortune to the other side, where I suspect we'll all be poorer and less free.
I hope one day USA wakes up and realize the solution is wealth tax to these billionaires
From the article, “The model in Norway is that everyone should contribute relevant to ability and therefore those that have a greater ability to pay taxes, should pay a little more.” This seems more than fair, particularly while failing tax systems are leading to unprecedented levels of inequality.
That only works if everyone everywhere does it all at the same time, so they've nowhere to move to/hide.