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What would happen if high priced items were made in the US or Countries that demand higher pay for labor?

Really?

China is home to low labor practices and quite frankly, lower quality work and materials.

Is it beyond reasonability to assume that paying larger wages will result in a higher quality item?

There is a chance the higher wages may require a drop in material quality..but that would not make sense, because the higher cost of the item, would necessitate a better quality and longer use.

In fact the higher price would mean the practice of holding back features for the next release might cease, as the cost would reduce the habit of consumers upgrading a properly functioning item just to have the latest.

That would reduce waste.

It is a fact that most people have little use for a top of class electronics. It is just a status symbol!


All the dopes who like to act like their one liners are equal to a proper discussion, please go elsewhere.


Leave the thread bare rather than polute it with your moronic filth.

Thanks.

Those willing to have a fair open minded discussion, feel free.

I know that's alot to ask....but hoping

In reply to Ayenmol

some good points.

germany makes or used to make high end products whilst paying good wages

China does produce products for a broad range of people- some cheap items and some quality stuff

there is a market for both if you dont believe that there is pollution from the disposal of electronics

i believe US manufactures can and should make high end products and pay workers well with paid vacations, sick leave etc.

why should a CEO make 1000 times (or whatever is the going rate these days) the amount the average workers is paid in addition to huge benefits not given to workers?

In reply to Ayenmol

Until big stagers stop living off the back of the proletariat, mi say war!!

In reply to sudden

That ship has sailed off into the sunset El Capitan.

There are phones selling for less than 100 bucks that look exactly like Samsung top ofthe line phones.

How is that possible? They are loaded with memory...8 and 12gb ram....loaded with storage....256 and even 512gb versions that run a few dozen dollars more.

Now, are the materials up to snuff? Definitely not as good quality as the top rands.

But what really makes them unusable compared to Samsungs and Iphones are the programs, operating systems!

It's like buying a Samsung memory module for your computer or cheaping out with a Chinese brand....there are some losses, but they will work fine. If they work....

So why do these phones work so much better with just a limited quality gap in internals?

And why so much more expensive?

These items that are bought today are highly I flated anyway! Just that all the money goes to the Corporations.

5hat keeps their trade value high and poor or just barely above average consumers drink down that system with the hope of buying in to that dream.

In reply to sudden

Nice points sudden.

When companies started moving to China, all you heard about is the working conditions.

Since the rich has bought deeply into the news Networks and worked hand in hand with corporations, that has been swept under the rug.

Couple that with China policies that make it near impossible to find and report on the internal conditions of the working public there.....and you have bliss for the greedy.

China has billions of people....yet they are kept poor while a few make the money in what is a dictatorship....or close to it...socialist whatever...yet the top few get wildly rich like their counterparts of capitalist and democratic lands.

Yet the 300 million people in the US and the 100 plus in the UK and the less than 500 mil in Europe are depended on to support the wealthy few of China....

Just doesn't make sense.

In reply to Ayenmol

Maybe the price can remain the same and the company can be less greedy and survive with lower profits. Just saying!
All these companies are motivated by the expected profits Wall Street demands!

A few mo the ago....maybe a year....60 Minutes interviewed Alessandro Michele, the creative director of Gucci.

The thing that made an impression on me is how that company has kepttheir quality high while paying their craftsmen well and keeping their manufacturing local yet still remaining a top player and still growing .

The economic and Business gurus claim this sort of model is unsustainable ...but many companies in Italy etc continue to do it very well...with great wages for their people and health care etc available....

This corporate model that has swept the World is what's unsustainable.

It requires that Countries keep their labor cheap and their citizens poor to enrich a few and enslave materially, a consumer base.

In reply to Ayenmol

china has a mixed economic system

it is mostly socialist whilst allowing entrepreneurship to flourish

where business leaders become greedy or work against the perceived social order they are reeled in and sometimes jailed

china has strategically moved from a feudal and then a purely communist system in a few years by doing what every other countries have done

they stole other countries' products and build on them either cheaper or better

capitalism chase profits so US companies ran to China and China did what it had to- used that to improve itself

and now we are here

china controls a large portion of the world's manufacturing output

China and the BRICS are about 60% (i stand to be corrected) of the world's pop

US is about 4% and insignificant as far as manufacturing is concerned

Marx wrote about the flaws in capitalism

you should have a read for better understanding

In reply to StumpCam

Exactly.

Which is why I have a great distaste for the Stock market.

Whoever came up with this module and then tied common citizens retirement to it wasa diabolical genius.

But the fact that people co tinue to look to it rather than thi k of ways to change it or remove it's toes to their future is beyond d crazy.

Another way the rich steal from the less fortunate.

In reply to Ayenmol

Apple spent decades building its supply chain in China. To shift all of its production to America is a herculean task. Experts have estimated that manufacturing an iPhone in America could see the purchasing cost skyrocket to $3,500 from $1,100.

Walmart exploited the same system by gutting American manufacturing and shifted its supply chain to China. Walmart stores are full of customers.

Companies like these now caught in a trade war they never planned for.

The big question is what will consumers do at the checkout line. In a global market they will source the cheaper product no matter where it is coming from.

In reply to sudden

Thereareflaws in every system.

You think China can sustain this module? No.

I do not want to delve into the Politics of it...but just the fact that you can decide who makes the money and who does not is quite immoral.

But it is good to see many understand what is going on....and it is why I may not support Politics and Politicians, but economically, I see the benefit of what the US is doing with tariffs.

Particularly their approach to China.

All Cou tries should try to be as selfsustaining as possible.

China has alot right there too.

But they also are a bad influence for greedy capitalist and it is interesting to seethatchallenged....even if it is being done in a foolish manner by someone who also has some weird agenda.

In reply to Ayenmol

That's because you're a moron.

In reply to Ayenmol

tariffs have been around for a long time

a lot of books have been written about tariffs

simply put tariffs are import taxes paid by the consumer

the consumer is often and overwhelmingly the poor

so tariffs are a tax mostly on them

tariffs have never worked because they cause others countries to implement retaliatory tariffs

and then there is a trade war which negatively impacts spending and the economy

that is why economists attribute one of the major causes of the great depression or for prolonging it, to the Smoot Hawley 1930's tariffs

coming out of the great depression was the greatest growth of US wealth producing the so called middle class

and guess how it came about?

the FDR govt didnt borrow

the rich were taxed heavily

their wealth wasnt taken away

they werent jailed

but in order not to raise taxes on the common citizen the rich paid a high portion of taxes from their capital gains

In reply to sudden

Dude, China only became what it is today because: (1) on a political level Nixon wanted to undermine the USSR by opening up trade and commerce with China; (2) American corporations salivated at the prospects of exploiting cheap unregulated labour to widen their profit margins; (3) Reagan and the Neo-cons further encouraged the mass exodus of American manufacturing to China in the 80's and 90's and completely gutted manufacturing unions in the process.

The Soviet Union collapsed. China prospered. And now we are here.

In reply to SnoopDog

Trump told his MAGA supporters someone else would pay the tariffs, not them, and they are stupid enough to believed him.

In reply to SnoopDog

ok i suppose it was only a one way strategy

i suppose Chinese leadership didnt have a plan

i suppose it was all by accident or the doings of the west

if you believe that i have a MAGA tariff for sale

keep on underestimating the chinese

In reply to XFactor

You can say Ayenmol's name. Don't be shy Bro.

In reply to XFactor

Man....enough with that....we all know what tariffs are. Enough with that we are talking cause and effect...not political talking points.

In reply to sudden

Settle down buttercup.

Of course the Chinese gov't had a plan to implement mass labour manufacturing of consumer goods for the West.

They were given the opportunity by the greed Western capitalist and they took it. And now that they have become an economic super power those same greedy Western capitalists are crying foul.

And please tell yuh stupid friend Ayenmol that trade deficits and trade tariffs are two completely separate things and one does not have to do with the other.

In reply to Ayenmol

Who is the person implementing trade tariffs?

In reply to SnoopDog

I think he dreams of sitting in front of the TV all day, drinking coffee and watching Fox News like the rest of MAGA.

In reply to sudden

China is brilliant. People everywhere are brilliant. In fact i think it is their power structure and ability to pivot according to the direction the leader deems best is what the current US leadership is after....

Let me comment briefly on a couple things you have brought up here and elsewhere.

The issue of tariffs and the second WW.

I believe the internet and age of I formation and access makes much of the issues that brought about that cause and effect mute.

I really do.

Do we know what the tariffs will accomplish....not if it is worldwide....which I always felt was fodder for cover and a personal strategic blow.

I think they thought if they make it Universal it would mask the true objectives.....which was foolish....it was always about the low labor cost Countries and they were not fooled.

In reply to Ayenmol

The $1800 iphone made overseas will then cost US taxpayers probably close to $3500+ per phone if built here by US based workers who want vacation, higher pay every 6 months, benefits, etc, etc. Is that a sustainable model for "higher quality" electronic devices?

In reply to XFactor

The Dotard has gone from 80's real estate scammer, to reality TV star, to convicted felon President of the Dumfcukingistan, to the darling of Christians of all denominations and fundamentalist outlook.

On the point of the poor paying for tariffs.....

I don't think that is accurate. Everyone pays for tariffs.

Last time it was made a weapon it is reported that the consumer paid much of it ...,but there were certain industries where the companies absorbed it and yes, China got hurt....it seared their growth.

Not all needs come from abroad in th3 US....and the machine that really targets the poor money is of little necessity.

Fact is much of the poor reach out for items they have no business owning because it is kept dangling within reach....

In reply to DukeStreet

Their $5000 Apple Vision Pro VR head set has been a complete sales flop.

Because....drum rolll.....FIVE FCUKING THOUSAND FOR AN ELECTRONIC DEVICE IN THIS DAY AND AGE?!?!?

In reply to DukeStreet

Me personally....I say yes!

And I don't think it will mandate that cost.....unless the greedy companies want to continue making the same profits.

I said earlier, probably 60-70% of people who buy these electronics ave NO need for tnem.....none.

You don't need an iPhone i5 or galaxy s24 to watch cat videos make a phone call or send text.

In reply to Ayenmol

therein lies the problem

nobody knows

so whilst history doesnt repeat it certainly shadows itself

so in the absence of not knowing for sure we rely on history for frame of reference

the masses in the US are restless

they feel under appreciated and neglected

Trump capitalised on that

there is a need for change

America cannot sustain itself by cutting taxes on the rich and taxing the poor

the maths is not there

in the past it has borrowed to do so

but at some point the debt will get too big to be manageable

it is at that inflection point now

Trump advisers know this

but they are at a lost as to what to do

the tariff fiasco appears like a desperate effort to do something and hope that it works

the thing is that the US is a declining superpower economically and militarily and the world knows this

so whilst some countries will kowtow, others are wary and some will fight back economically

In reply to sudden

If you guys want to know what the Dotard's tariffs with achieve look no further to the tariffs imposed by his idol during the 30's.

In reply to sudden

Good points....but you cannot be hostages to the past while your future is becoming more and more dire.

The US has been eroding drastically due to Corporations use of near slave labor to manufacture goods and make massive profits.

Mankind lived before this and will live without it.

The largest disparity that has grown, is that the rich companies are richer than ever.

The middle class has eroded and the poor has grown and the chasm between even the middle class and rich is of Grand Canyon proportions.

This module has benefited on
Y one set of people.

Again I want someone to point out all the phones and galaxies poor people need!

Food clothing and shelter....when people concentrate on that...rather than getting the next gadget, that will help them and hurt the greedy corporations.

If tariffs result in the inability to afford u necessary junk....even that will be a benefit.

In reply to Ayenmol

in a country where consumerism is an art form and a never ending reliable tool of the capitalists, that may be highly unlikely

in addition, it is not just junk, it is basic necessities that become unaffordable.

if you followed what i wrote above, tariffs could lead to lack of investor confidence.

lack of investor confidence could lead to no new businesses or no investment in ongoing businesses which leads to layoffs

then a further tanking of the stock market

and recession or worse depression

most americans are a paycheck from bankruptcy

which means soup kitchens as in the great depression

except now many have guns and are prepared to use them

see where i am going?

In reply to sudden

Which country will buy/import these expensive US made goods with a high value US currency?

Would love to know that one.

In reply to SnoopDog

the 51st state

Another benefit of higher prices is the impact on laziness.

When someone on welfare can own the latest gadget, that makes them less likely to do more.

That is not an attack on those in need but those gaming the system.

Cuba....they continue to to work with the old vehicles that they have.

It takes hard work to do this. It takes getting off your behind and learning to work on your vehicle if you want to drive around.

Someone mentioned the Apple goggle thingy.....Why haven't they taken off? Because the people who have the time to make it a valued purchase can't afford it.

The guy living paycheck to paycheck. Who spends every hour outside of work on some device playing games.

The only people these days tinkering with things are the men with tons of disposable cash....and women. Poor people just throw stuff away and get another.

When the tech savvy were able to work on their old electronics and bring them bac to life, the companies found a way to neuter that.

One of the only things you can work on and upgrade is your home computer....look how that has been dying in favor of items that can't be tinkered with....

Why?

In reply to SnoopDog

Isn't that the point?

Buy LOCAL.

People like you just cant see beyond the Globalisation of everything.....Make your own.....Buy what you make and make what you buy!

In reply to Ayenmol

So the US will trade with itself?

Name me one developed country on earth which trades with itself?

In reply to sudden

That's right. A state that doesn't exist will trade with Dumbfcukistan.

Or perhaps the penguins of Antarctica will come to their senses and trade with them?

In reply to Ayenmol

People like me went to school and got an education instead of being mal-educated morons like you.

So riddle me this stupid. There is a region around the planet known as the coffee belt. Coffee of any note or quality cannot grow anywhere else because of the climatic conditions which exists in the coffee belt. The US is not in the coffee belt.

How will the US grow and produce the beans to make American made coffee?

And it was because of trade and commerce "globalization" which allows smaller countries to prosper but which the Dotard sees as unfair because he wants a way to tax the middle class to pay for tax cuts to billionaires.

In reply to SnoopDog

There will always be trade....The issue arises when you are trading more than you are making....if i need to explain this to you then, your academics failed you.

But as i suspect for most....you are so dependent on the current system you never stop to think if it is necessary or beneficial.

You can't not make anything and get rich....unless you are a lifetime gambler.

A good economy is made up of a supply of goods and services....you can't have services without goods....eventually the goods supplier will "hold all the Cards".

In reply to Ayenmol

Which country will buy/import expensive US made goods with an high US dollar?

If you can't wrap you head around conundrum then you are like 99% of the Dotard's voters - ignorant, stupid, and easily fooled by a career con man.

The 14 Reasons Why these Tariffs Will Not Bring Manufacturing Back They’re not high enough
A tariff is a tax on an imported product. For example, when Apple imports an iPhone that was made in China it declares to the United States government what it paid to make that product overseas. Let’s say it’s $100. When there is a 54% tariff, Apple pays $100 to the manufacturer in China and $54 to the US government when importing. In this simplified example, an iPhone used to cost Apple $100, but it now costs $154. For every dollar Apple spends, Apple needs to make profit. So Apple sells iPhones to stores for double what it pays for them. And stores sell iPhones to consumers like you and me for double what it pays for them, as well.

Before the tariffs, prices looked like this:
Apple bought iPhones it designed for $100
Apple sold iPhones for $200 to stores
Stores sold iPhones to you and me for $400

After the tariffs, prices look like this:
Apple bought iPhones for $154 ($100 + $54 in import taxes)
Apple sells those iPhones for $308 (double what it paid)
Stores sell those iPhones to you and me for $616 (double what they paid)

Now that you know what a tariff is, let me tell to you why they aren’t high enough to bring manufacturing back to the United States.

In short, manufacturing in the United States is so expensive and our supply chain (we’ll explain that next) is so bad that making that iPhone in the United States without that 54% tariff, would still cost more than in China with 54% tariff. Since it still costs less to make the iPhone in China, both Apple and consumers would prefer it be made there, so it will, and not in the USA.
America’s industrial supply chain for many products is weak.

Think of a supply chain as a company’s ability to get the components it needs to build a finished product. Suppose you wanted to build and sell wooden furniture. You’re going to need wood, nails, glue, etc. Otherwise you can’t do it. If you want to build an iPhone you need to procure a glass screen, shaped metal, and numerous internal electronic components.

Now you might be thinking, “what do you mean America has a weak supply chain?” I’ve built furniture, I’ve assembled a computer. I can get everything I want at Home Depot and at Amazon.

That’s because America has an amazing consumer supply chain, one of the best, if not the best in the world, but this is totally different from having an industrial supply chain.

When you’re operating a furniture factory, you need an industrial quantity of wood, more wood than any Home Depot near you has in store. And you need it fast and cheap. It turns out that the United States has a good supply chain for wood, which is why, despite higher wages, we export chopsticks to China. We have abundant cheap wood in the forests of the Northern United States. But if you decided to move that chopstick factory to desert Saudi Arabia, you would not succeed, because their supply chain for wood is poor; there simply aren’t any trees for 1,000s of miles.

When it comes to the iPhone, all the factories which make the needed components are in Asia, which is one reason why, even with a 54% tariff, it’s cheaper to assemble that iPhone in China than in the United States. It’s cheaper and faster to get those components from nearby factories in Asia than it is to get them from the US, which, because said factories no longer exist here, has to buy these components from Asia anyways.

Supply chains sound complicated, but aren’t. If you can’t get the components you need at a reasonable price and timeline to build a finished product, it doesn’t matter what the tariffs are, you have to import it, because you can’t build it locally.

We don’t know how to make it

Apple knows how to build an iPhone, but may not know how to make the individual components. It may seem trivial to make that glass that separates your finger from the electronic engineering that powers your ability to access the internet, but it’s difficult.

The world buys semiconductors from Taiwan, not just because its relatively expensive (but more expensive than China) labor and excellent supply chain, but because they know how to make the best semiconductors in the world. Even with infinite money, we cannot duplicate that, because we lack the knowhow.

A 54% tariff does not solve that problem. We still need to buy semiconductors from Taiwan, which is perhaps why the administration put in an exception for semiconductors, because we need them and because we can’t make them without their help.

This is a problem which applies to more than just semiconductors. We have forgotten how to make products people wrongly consider to be basic, too.

My company makes educational toys from plastic called Brain Flakes. To make Brain Flakes, you melt plastic and force it into shaped metal molds. Were we to import the machines and molds needed to do this, it would work for a little while, but as soon as one of those molds broke, we’d be in trouble, because there are almost no moldmakers left in the United States. The people who knew how to build and repair molds have either passed away or are long retired. In the event of a problem, we’d have to order a new mold from China or send ours back, shutting down production for months.

People trivialize the complexity and difficulty of manufacturing when it’s really hard. And if we don’t know how to make something, it doesn’t matter what the tariff is. It won’t get made in America.

The effective cost of labor in the United States is higher than it looks

Most people think that the reason why we make products in China instead of the United States is cheaper labor. That’s true, but it’s not the whole story. Frankly, the whole story is hard to read. People are not machines, they are not numbers on a spreadsheet or inputs into a manufacturing cost formula. I respect everyone who works hard and the people I have worked with over the years, and I want Americans to live better, happier lives.

Chinese manufacturing labor isn’t just cheaper. It’s better.

In China, there are no people who are too fat to work. The workers don’t storm off midshift, never to return to their job. You don’t have people who insist on being paid in cash so that they can keep their disability payments, while they do acrobatics on the factory floor that the non-disabled workers cannot do.

Chinese workers much less likely to physically attack each other and their manager. They don’t take 30 minute bathroom breaks on company time. They don’t often quit because their out-of-state mother of their children discovered their new job and now receives 60% of their wages as child support. They don’t disappear because they’ve gone on meth benders. And they don’t fall asleep on a box midshift because their pay from yesterday got converted into pills.

And they can do their times tables. To manufacture, you need to be able to consistently and accurately multiply 7 times 9 and read in English, and a disturbingly large portion of the American workforce cannot do that.

Chinese workers work longer hours more happily and they’re physically faster with their hands; they can do things that American labor can’t. It’s years of accumulated skill, but it’s also a culture that is oriented around hard work and education that the United States no longer has.

Sadly, what I describe above are not theoretical situations. These are things that I have experienced or seen with my own eyes. It’s fixable, but the American workforce needs great improvement in order to compete with the world’s, even with tariffs.

So yes, Chinese wages are lower, but there many countries with wages lower than China’s. It’s the work ethic, knowhow, commitment, combined with top notch infrastructure, that makes China the most powerful manufacturing country in the world today.

We don’t have the infrastructure to manufacture

The inputs to manufacturing are not just materials, labor, and knowhow. You need infrastructure like electricity and good roads for transportation, too.

Since the year 2000, US electricity generation per person has been flat. In China, over the same time period, it has increased 400%. China generates over twice as much electricity person today as the United States. Why?

Manufacturing.

To run the machines which make the products we use, you need electricity, a lot of it. We already have electricity instability in this country. Without the construction of huge amounts of new energy infrastructure, like nuclear power plants, we cannot meaningfully increase our manufacturing output.

And it would put huge stress on our roads and create lots more dangerous traffic. When we import finished goods from foreign countries, a truck delivers them from the port or the airport to distribution centers, stores, and where we live and work.

When you start manufacturing, every single component, from factory to factory, needs to be moved, increasing the number of trucks on the road many times.

Paving more roads, modernizing our seaports, improving our airports, speeding up our train terminals, and building power plants in the costliest nation in the world to build is a huge undertaking that people are not appreciating when they say “well, we’ll just make it in America”.
Made in America will take time.

We placed a $50,000 order with our supplier overseas before the election in November 2024. At the time of ordering, there were no import taxes on the goods. By the time it arrived, a 20% tariff had been applied and we had a surprise bill for $10,000. It can easily take 180 days for many products to go from order, to on your doorstep and this tariff policy seems not to understand that.

It takes at least, in the most favorable of jurisdictions, 2 years (if you can get the permits) to build a factory in the United States. I know because I’ve done it. From there, it can take 6 months to a year for it to become efficient. It can take months for products to come off the assembly lines. All this ignores all the infrastructure that will need to be built (new roads, new power plants, etc.) to service the new factory.

By the time “made in America” has begun, we will be electing a new president.
Uncertainty and complexity around the tariffs

To start manufacturing in the United States, a company needs to make a large investment. They will need to buy new machinery and if no existing building is suitable, they will need to construct a new building. These things cost money, a lot, in fact. And significantly more in the USA, than they do in other countries. In exchange for this risk, there must be some reward. If that reward is uncertain, no one will do it.

Within the past month, the president put a 25% tariff on Mexico, and then got rid of it, only to apply it again, and then get rid of it a second time. Then, last week, he was expected to apply new tariffs to Mexico, but didn’t.

If you’re building a new factory in the United States, your investment will alternate between maybe it will work, and catastrophic loss according to which way the tariffs and the wind blows. No one is building factories right now, and no one is renting them, because there is no certainty that any of these tariffs will last. How do I know? I built a factory in Austin, Texas in an industrial area. I cut its rent 40% two weeks ago and I can’t get a lick of interest from industrial renters.

The tariffs have frozen business activity because no one wants to take a big risk dependent on a policy that may change next week.

Even further, the tariffs are confusing, poorly communicated, and complex. Today, if you want to import something from China, you need to add the original import duty, plus a 20% “fentanyl tariff”, plus a 34% “reciprocal tariff”, and an additional 25% “Venezuelan oil” tariff, should it be determined that China is buying Venezualan oil. The problem is there is no list of countries which are importing Venezuelan oil provided by the White House, so you don’t know if you do or don’t need to add that 25% and you also don’t know when any of these tariffs will go into effect because of unclear language.

As such, you can’t calculate your costs, either with certainty or accuracy, therefore, not only do you not build a factory in the United States, you cease all business activity, the type of thing that can cause a recession, if not worse.

For the past month, as someone who runs a business in this industry, I have spent a huge portion of my time just trying to keep up with the constant changes, instead of running my business.

Most Americans are going to hate manufacturing

Americans want less crime, good schools for their kids, and inexpensive healthcare.

They don’t want to be sewing shirts.

The people most excited about this new tariff policy tend to be those who’ve never actually made anything, because if you have, you’d know how hard the work is.

When I first went to China as a naive 24 year old, I told my supplier I was going to “work a day in his factory!” I lasted 4 hours. It was freezing cold, middle of winter, I had to crouch on a small stool, hunched over, assembling little parts with my fingers at 1/4 the speed of the women next to me. My back hurt, my fingers hurt. It was horrible. That’s a lot of manufacturing.

And enjoy the blackouts, the dangerous trucks on the road, the additional pollution, etc. Be careful what you wish for America. Doing office work and selling ideas and assets is a lot easier than making actual things.
The labor does not exist to make good products

There are over a billion people in China making stuff. As of right now there are 12 million people looking for work in the United States (4% unemployment). Ignoring for a moment the comparative inefficiency of labor and the billions of people making products outside of China, where are the people that are going to do these jobs? Do you simply say “make America great again” 3 times and they will appear with the skills needed to do the work?

And where are the managers to manage these people? One of the reasons why manufacturing has declined in the United States is a brain drain towards sectors that make more money. Are people who make money on the stock market, in real estate, in venture capital, and in startups going to start sewing shirts? It’s completely and totally unrealistic to assume that people will move from superficially high productivity sectors driven by US Dollar strength to products that are low on the value chain.

The United States is trying to bring back the jobs that China doesn’t even want. They have policies to reduce low value manufacturing, yet we are applying tariffs to bring it back. It’s incomprehensible.

Automation will not save us.

Most people think that the reason why American manufacturing is not competitive is labor costs. Most people think this can be solved by automation.

They’re wrong.

First, China, on a yearly basis installs 7x as many industrial robots as we do in the United States. Second, Chinese robots are cheaper. Third, most of today’s manufacturing done by people cannot be automated. If it could, it would have already been done so, by China, which, again, has increasingly high labor costs relative to the rest of the world.

The robots you see on social media doing backflips are, today, mostly for show and unreliable off camera. They are not useful in industrial environments where, if a humanoid robot can do it, an industrial machine which is specialized in the task can do it even better. For example, instead of having a humanoid robot doing a repetitive task such as carrying a boxes from one station to another, you can simply set up a cheaper, faster conveyor belt.

Said another way, the printer in your office, is cheaper and more efficient than both a human and a humanoid robot with a pen, hand drawing each letter.

It’s unlikely that American ingenuity will be able to counter the flood of Chinese industrial robots which is coming. The first commercially electrical vehicle was designed and built in the United States, but today China is dominating electric vehicle manufacturing across the world. Industrial robots will likely be the same story.

Robots and overseas factory workers don’t file lawsuits, but Americans do

I probably should not have written this article. Not only will I be attacked for being unpatriotic, but what I have written here makes me susceptible to employment lawsuits. For the record, I don’t use a person’s origin to determine whether or not they will do good work. I just look at the person and what they’re capable of. Doing otherwise is bad business because there are talented people everywhere.

America has an extremely litigious business environment, both in terms of regulation and employment lawsuits. Excessive regulation and an inefficient court system will stifle those with the courage to make in this country.
Enforcement of the tariffs will be uneven and manipulated

Imagine two companies which import goods into the United States. One is based in China, while the other is based in the United States. They both lie about the value of their goods so that they have to pay less tariffs.

What happens to the China company? Perhaps they lose a shipment when it’s seized by the US government for cheating, but they won’t pay additional fines because they’re in China, where they’re impervious to the US legal system.

What happens to the USA company? Owners go to prison.

Who do you think is going to cheat more on tariffs, the China or the US company?

Exactly.

So, in other words, paradoxically, the policies which are designed to help Americans, will hurt them more than the competition these policies are designed to punish.

The tariff policies are structured in the wrong way

Why didn’t the jobs come back in 2018 when we initiated our last trade war? We applied tariffs, why didn’t it work?

Instead of making America great, we made Vietnam great.

When the United States applied tariffs to China, it shifted huge amounts of manufacturing to Vietnam, which did not have tariffs applied to it. Vietnam, which has a labor force that is a lot more like China’s than the United States’, was able to use its proximity to China for its supply chain and over the past 7 or so years, slowly developed its own. With Vietnamese wages even lower than Chinese wages, instead of the jobs coming to the United States, they just went to Vietnam instead.

We’re about to make the same mistake again, in a different way.

Let’s go back to that last example, the China based and the US based companies which were importing goods into the United States. That US based importer could’ve been a manufacturer. Instead of finished iPhones, perhaps they were importing the glass screens because those could not be found in the USA, for final assembly.

Our government applied tariffs to finished goods and components equally.

I’ll say that again. They applied the same tax to the components that you need to make things in America that they did to finished goods that were made outside of America.

Manufacturing works on a lag. To make and sell in America, first you must get the raw materials and components. These tariffs will bankrupt manufacturers before it multiplies them because they need to pay tariffs on the import components that they assemble into finished products.

And it gets worse.

They put tariffs on machines. So if you want to start a factory in the United States, all the machinery you need which is not made here, is now significantly more expensive. You may have heard that there is a chronic shortage of transformers needed for power transmission in the United States. Tariffed that too.

It gets even worse.

There is no duty drawback for exporting. In the past, even in the United States, if you imported something and then exported it, the tariff you paid on the import would be refunded to you. They got rid of that so we’re not even incentivizing exports to the countries that we are trying to achieve trade parity with.

Tariffs are applied to the costs of the goods. The way we’ve structured these tariffs, factories in China which import into the United States will pay lower tariffs than American importers, because the Chinese factory will be able to declare the value of the goods at their cost, while the American importer will pay the cost the factory charges them, which is of course higher than the factory’s cost.

Worse still.

With a few exceptions like steel and semiconductors, the tariffs were applied to all products, ranging from things that we will never realistically make like our high labor Tigerhart stuffed animals to things that don’t even grow in the continental USA, like coffee.

Call me crazy, but if we’re going to make products in America, we could use some really cheap coffee, but no, they tariffed it! Our educational engineering toy Brain Flakes, also got tariffed. How is the next generation supposed to build a manufacturing powerhouse if it cannot afford products that will develop its engineering ability? It’s like our goal was to make education and raising children more expensive.

Not only did we put tariffs on the things that would help us make this transformation, we didn’t put higher tariffs on things that hurt us like processed food which makes us tired and fat or fentanyl precursors which kill us.

The stated goal of many of our tariffs was to stop the import of fentanyl. 2 milligrams of fentanyl will kill an adult. A grain of rice is 65 milligrams. How do you stop that stuff from coming in? It’s basically microscopic.

Maybe we could do what every other country has done and focus on the demand, instead of the supply, ideally starting with the fentanyl den near my house which keeps my children indoors or in our backyard instead of playing in the neighborhood.

It’s frustrating to see our great country take on an unrealistic goal like transforming our economy, when so many basic problems should be fixed first.
Michael Jordan sucked at baseball

America is the greatest economic power of all time. We’ve got the most talented people in the world and we have a multi-century legacy of achieving what so many other countries could not.

Michael Jordan is arguably the greatest basketball player of all time, perhaps even the greatest athlete of all time.

He played baseball in his youth. What happened when he switched from basketball to baseball? He went from being an MVP champion to being a middling player in the minor leagues. 2 years later, he was back to playing basketball.

And that’s exactly what’s going to happen to us.
My prediction for what will happen with the tariffs
This is probably the worst economic policy I’ve ever seen. Maybe it’s just an opening negotiating position. Maybe it’s designed to crash the economy, lower interest rates, and then refinance the debt. I don’t know.

But if you take it at face value, there is no way that this policy will bring manufacturing back to the United States and “make America wealthy again”. Again, if anything, it’ll do the opposite; it’ll make us much poorer.

Many are saying that this tariff policy is the “end of globalization”. I don’t think so.

Unless this policy is quickly changed, this is the end of America’s participation in globalization. If we had enacted these policies in 2017 or 2018, they stood a much stronger chance of being successful. That was before Covid. China was much weaker economically and militarily then. They’ve been preparing 8 years for this moment and they are ready.

China trades much less with the United States as a percent of its total exports today than it did 8 years ago, and as such is much less susceptible to punishing tariffs from the United States today than it was back then.

Chinese made cars, particularly electric vehicles, are taking the world by storm, without the United States. Go to Mexico to Thailand to Germany and you will see Chinese made electric vehicles on the streets. And they’re good, sometimes even better than US made cars, and not just on a per dollar basis, but simply better quality.

That is what is going to happen to the United States. Globalization will continue without us if these policies continue unchanged.

That said, I think the tariffs will be changed. There’s no way we continue to place a 46% tariff on Vietnam when 8 years ago we nudged American companies to put all their production there. Most likely, this policy will continue another round of the same type of investment; rather than replacing made in China with made in the USA, we’ll replace it with made in Vietnam, Mexico, etc.

Finally, in the process of doing this, regardless of whether or not we reverse the policies, we will have a recession. There isn’t time to build US factories, nor is it realistic or likely to occur, and American importers don’t have the money to pay for the goods they import.

People are predicting inflation in the cost of goods, but we can just as easily have deflation from economic turmoil.

The policy is a disaster, how could it be done better? And what’s the point of this anyways?

The 3 reasons why we want to actually bring manufacturing back

1. It makes our country stronger. If a foreign country can cut off your supply of essentials such as food, semiconductors, or antibiotics you’re beholden to that country. The United States must have large flexible capacity in these areas.

2. It makes it easier to innovate. When the factory floor is down the hall, instead of 30 hours of travel away, it’s easier to make improvements and invent. We need to have manufacturing of high value goods, like drones, robots, and military equipment that are necessary for our economic future and safety. It will be difficult for us to apply artificial intelligence to manufacturing if we’re not doing it here.

3. People can simplistically be divided into three buckets: those of verbal intelligence, those of mathematical intelligence, and those of spatial intelligence. Without a vibrant manufacturing industry, those with the latter type of intelligence cannot fulfill their potential. This is one reason why so many men drop out, smoke weed, and play video games; they aren’t built for office jobs and would excel at manufacturing, but those jobs either don’t exist or pay poorly.

How to actually bring manufacturing back

Every country that has gone on a brilliant run of manufacturing first established the right conditions and then proceeded slowly.

We’re doing the opposite right now, proceeding fast with the wrong conditions.

First, the United States must fix basic problems which reduce the effectiveness of our labor. For example, everyone needs to be able to graduate with the ability to do basic mathematics. American healthcare is way too expensive and it needs to be fixed if the United States wants to be competitive with global labor. I’m not saying healthcare should be socialized or switched to a completely private system, but whatever we’re doing now clearly is not working, and it needs to be fixed.

We need to make Americans healthy again. Many people are too obese to work. Crime and drugs. It needs to stop.

And to sew, we must first repair the social fabric.

From Covid lockdowns to the millions of people who streamed over our border, efforts must be made to repair society. Manufacturing and economic transformations are hard, particularly the way in which we’re doing it. Patriotism and unity are required to tolerate hardship, and we seem to be at all-time lows for those right now.

Let’s focus on America’s strengths in high end manufacturing, agriculture, and innovation instead of applying tariffs to all countries and products blindly. We should be taxing automated drones for agriculture at 300% to encourage their manufacture here, instead of applying the same blanket tariff of 54% to that that we apply to t-shirts.

The changes in the policies needed are obvious. Tax finished products higher than components. Let exporters refund their import duties. Enforce the tariffs against foreign companies more strenuously than we do against US importers.

If American companies want to sell in China, they must incorporate their, register capital, and name a person to be a legal representative. To sell in Europe, we must register for their tax system and nominate a legal representative. For Europeans and Chinese to sell in the United States, none of this is needed, nor do federal taxes need to be paid.

We can level the playing field without causing massive harm to our economy by adopting policies like these which cause foreign companies to pay the taxes domestic ones pay.

And if we want to apply tariffs, do it slowly. Instead of saying that products will be tariffed at 100% tomorrow, say they’ll be 25% next year, 50% after that, 75% after that, and 100% in year four. And then make it a law instead of a presidential decree so that there is certainty so people feel comfortable taking the risks necessary to make in America.

Sadly, a lot of the knowhow to make products is outside of this country. Grant manufacturing visas, not for labor, but for knowhow. Make it easy for foreign countries to teach us how they do waht they do best.
Conclusion and final thoughts.

I care about this country and the people in it. I hope we change our mind on this policy before it’s too late. Because if we don’t, it might break the country. And, really, this country needs to be fixed.

In reply to Comrade Commie

What in the actual fcuk?

Dude. Welcome back.

Now please learn to parse out all that babble you wrote above into separate posts.

In reply to SnoopDog

Snoop said the same thing in 5 sentences

In reply to Commie

No chance to read all that now....But i appreciate the detailed breakdown and attempt to educate.

In reply to sudden

"Brevity is the essence of wit and wisdom".

But another thing I neglected to remind your friends Aynemol, and Comrade Commie, is that to this day the Dotard (and his legion of halfwit simpleton voters) still believes that tariffs are paid by the exporting countries and not the domestic buyers/importers.

I'm starting to believe that there really is no cure for dotardism.

In reply to sudden

America used to have the supply chain....In fact they darn near invented the current supply chain....It has already been mentioned. China became what they are due to using the Political World against each other.

The funding for and brains behind the supply chain still originate in the developed Nations.

But as Commie said, they still not high enough....why you think the US is so quick to go higher and higher with China.....China is the one bluffing. They know at some point they will have to capitulate. The US does not only want the manufacturing back i the US. Am guessing they also want it out of the bottomless labor force that is China.

In reply to Ayenmol

I would dearly love to see a factory full of minimum wage earning fat ass Americans making Gucci wallets destined for the streets of Hong Kong the next day.

In reply to Ayenmol

all empires must die

US is a declining empire

there is no coming back

the best way out is to strategise and negotiate a graceful exit

as i said before China and the BRICS represent 60% of the world's pop

now that is a bottomless pit

In reply to SnoopDog

You are still stuck imagining the US as the supplier that China is....step back, take a breath and come again....Was the US ever the trade czar that China is?

I SAY NO. The issue is that the US and all developed Countries, can't be sourcing all their high money items from low labor origins at the expense of their own labor force.

The only ones who benefit from that module are the rich corporations.

No matter the setup, someone will benefit.....the who is what is important....so do we need to discuss who should benefit most from lucrative business?

Look at Sports for that...

In reply to sudden

The Dotard and his billionaire pals will carve out what's left of the carcass. That's what the next 4 years is about.

As for bottomless pits. The real bottomless pit is the bottomless pit of gullibility of dotardnation to fall for and believe anything which comes out of the Dotard's mouth. Why exploit cheap foreign labour when you can exploit dotard nation's stupidity to your heart's content?

In reply to SnoopDog

China and Brics may represent 60% of the population, but they do not represent 60% of the Wealth or more importantly, 60% of the consumption.

In reply to Ayenmol

yes it was

after the 2nd european civil war, never bombed or invaded, the USA as the only industralised country left standing, manufactured and sold products all over the world until the 1970s

In reply to Ayenmol

Sudden addressed this. This is not a fact. You get what you pay for out of China.



They won't because SCOTUS decided companies are people, billionaires want to be trillionaires and if an iPhone cost what it would people would not be camping out in a long line every September for one.

In reply to Commie

I can attest to everything in that article! I worked in manufacturing for 20yrs, before a career change after I discovered that no way American can compete with China. What took us months to manufacture, the Chinese did in less than two weeks.

In reply to nick2020

Did you by chance read Comrade Commie's PHD dissertation on Dotard economics?

In reply to sudden

The US does very well providing high level services in the medicine, education and technology.

The problem occurs when you have a bunch of coal miners listening to a liar who is convincing them he is going to bring back coal.

A country could easily thrive leaving all the factory jobs to other country while making a ton of money on high level services.

In reply to SnoopDog

I did not. I will look now.

In reply to nick2020

You'll need about a week.

In reply to nick2020

And that the exporting countries, and not the domestic US buyers/importers, are the ones who pay the tariffs.

Some industries are gone forever, no tariff will resurrect them, garment manufacturing, metal fabrication, small household electronics are some of the areas that come to mind, this shift has been taking place from the early eighties and won't be undone in a presidential term. There are several reasons for the shift and those can be debated but won't be reversed anytime soon. It is sort of how sugar and banana production was moved from the Caribbean.

In reply to Ayenmol

Do you realize you not only started a post with unnecessary insults then stated contradictory positions? I am close to ppl who work in different countries with Chinese companies electronics. One person's company had to switch supplier because of sanction on the original supplier. He related how the new supplier offered up to22 samples of a particular piece with a price scale and quality range.So, you get what you pay for as greedy American companies go for price over quality. It has not much to do with Chinese only being able to produce quality products

In reply to camos

The problem is that the Dotard has now misled the entirety of dotardnation into believing that trade deficits are bad and that tariffs are the way to reduce trade deficits.

When in reality the whole tariff nonsense started by the dotard is about taxing the middle class to pay for tax cuts to billionaires, and using the tariffs as a tool to manipulate the stock market to further enrich himself and all his billionaire friends.

To the only manufacturing area that US dominates is military hardware, I would say in every other goods category, you can name non-US company with a better built product, Caterpillar is also a world class manufacturer.

In reply to SnoopDog

Ditto.

In reply to Ayenmol
I've just started reading through. It is not correct to say "they (The Chinese) are kept poor" For the last 30yrs or so China has had the fastest growing middle class with hundreds of millions escaping out of poverty. Yes, their standard of living is lower than America's but millions who couldn't buy a bicycle now ride motorbikes or drive cars

In reply to Brerzerk

Most Americans would be shocked to see the very high standard of living of the middle class in China.

In many ways, China is light years ahead of us in the West.

..... Trump's ability to sell a narrative, even one that is full of contradictions, is more appealing than his policies. Consider his audacious pledges to his MAGA base: a border wall financed by Mexico and tariffs that would not burden the average taxpayer. Even though these claims were blatantly ridiculous from the beginning, his supporters enthusiastically accepted them. They fell for the illusion, whether out of loyalty, naivete, or outright defiance.

The United States should be examining where the true opportunities are rather than trying to revive an industry that has undergone significant change. Welders, electricians, and plumbers, for instance, are in high demand. These are high-paying positions that fill a vital need in the nation, with salaries sometimes surpassing six figures. However, these occupations are frequently disregarded in political discourse because they do not fit with the narrative of "bringing manufacturing back."

It is important to review the historical background of China's ascent to prominence in manufacturing. This change was hastened by the Reagan administration and the neoliberal policies of the 1980s and 1990s, which destroyed unions and left American workers defenceless. The irony is obvious. The same corporate avarice that drove job outsourcing is now complaining about China's ascent to prominence in the global economy. However, what were they expecting? Playing the long game, China took advantage of opportunities that Western capitalists threw at them. That same group of capitalists is complaining now that they have achieved success.

Ultimately, the oversimplification of a very complicated issue is the issue, not just Trump or his tariffs. Manufacturing will not return quickly, if at all. The political climate will have changed once more by the time "Made in America" is a reality, and a new administration will be facing the same difficulties. The United States will still have to deal with the fallout from decades of misguided policies and priorities.

Trying to go back in time is not the way that American labour will develop in the future. It involves investing in areas where the nation can genuinely flourish and adjusting to the realities of a global economy. Nothing can bring back manufacturing as we know it, not even tariffs or rhetoric. It is time to concentrate on creating a sustainable and forward-thinking economy rather than pursuing a sentimental ideal.

Sarge

[b]In reply to sgtdjones[/b

well said

In reply to SnoopDog

I read it and I'm happy I did. But maaan, MY EYES HURT!!!

In reply to SnoopDog

I see why. I will put the coffee on and take my time.

In reply to nick2020

For a moment I thought Commie had metamorphosed into POINT.

What's up with Pointy anyway? Haven't seen him post on here in a long time.

In reply to Priapus

Lol

You know, interestingly the drop in Treasury prices is NOT due to any type of selling by foreign governments. The selling is the result of forced liquidation of margin accounts in the 'basis trade'. Let me explain that.

In normal times, the futures price of a 10 year Treasury bond is higher than the current or 'spot' price of that bond. For example, today the June future is 111, while the spot price is 102. So, if you own a T-bond, you can sell the future at 111, and deliver the bond you paid 102 for to satisfy that future, and pocket the difference. (I note this spread is quite high, historically, reflecting the massive uncertainty in the market right now) These figures of "111" and "102" are percentage points above the bond's nominal "100" value. In the financial world, the percentage points are called 'basis points', and this trade of owning the bond and selling the future is called the 'basis trade'.

So you're a rich guy who wants even more, so you take your gains in stock, and use them as collateral to buy (on margin) bonds and sell the futures. It's like another 10% yield! And everything goes great until your stocks go into the toilet.

Since you bought everything on margin, and are, as we politely say, 'leveraged to the tits', you now have to start selling to meet your margin calls. When you sell your bond, you have to buy back your future as well, so you are adding supply to the bond market (increasing rates) and increasing the futures price (influencing future rates higher) at the same time. This is what has been happening over the last few weeks, not co-ordinated selling by other countries.

Yesterday's pause was to allow assorted billionaires a chance to get out and restructure before their forced liquidations crashed the entire market. Do not forget for one moment that the top 1% own 37% of ALL the assets in America, and a significantly higher percentage of financial assets, including stocks. Most of us, I'm sure, are in the "who cares?" camp, but letting them fall would really bring down the entire financial establishment, and I don't think even Trump wants that.

In reply to SnoopDog

This entire tariff war is part of a broader strategy to contain and imprison China in a trading "sandbox" of America's own design, and utterly impoverish it:

1. The US plans to contain China's economic market share and trade flows to a narrow band of countries, ideally just China itself.

2. It intends to do this by intimidating the rest of the world into toeing the American line - that was the purpose of first subjecting the entire world to tariffs, then providing some relief for a limited 90-day period. The psychological impact is to pass this message to the RoW: "This is how it feels like when we hurt you with tariffs. Do you want to go through that again?". It's a powerful technique and appears to have resulted in most of the victims caving in to Trumps demands for per-country negotiations.

3. Trump's plan will then be to force each country into an exclusive trading agreement which will include clauses on how much trade (if any) it can conduct with China. This is the mechanism by which the U.S hopes will gradually (quickly) isolate China from the global trading system.

4. The U.S will apply tactics of intimidation against each of these countries up to and including threats of war, colour revolutions, bribery and blackmail of key officials and if necessary, assassination of stubborn leadership.

5. Most if not all of the West will cave quickly to these demands, then the tiny, dependent states like the pacific islands and some US-aligned South American states. African countries like Kenya and Tanzania, U.S sock-puppets will follow willingly.

6. As these countries quickly fall in line with the U.S demands, China will rapidly lose its investments in projects and currently ongoing ventures in those countries, finding itself slowly driven out of the markets of former partners.

7. Ostensibly, the U.S wants to become the center of global manufacturing, replacing China - or if not the actual center, then the control over the center of manufacturing (e.g, by controlling trade flows through the global shipping lanes).
The U.S will therefore seek to consolidate its control of the worlds key trade "chokepoints" (Red Sea, Hormuz, Panama Canal, Cape of Good Hope, Malacca, the Arctic etc. ...), while concurrently seeking to drive manufacturing out of China to it's own proxies or back to mainland U.S or Mexico.

8. Once China is contained, it will be forced to become a consumer economy: Captive Consumers for American controlled products, just like every American-dominated colony.

9. At the same time, the U.S will seek to hollow out China's technological base: By destroying it's market share, moving manufacturing outside of China, banning American and EU companies from doing business with China, it will attempt to stem the flow of I.P to China and stifle technological development there. Part of this strategy is hollowing out of Taiwan's chip-sector, which the U.S is currently trying to achieve carefully by moving Taiwan's Chip Fabs to the US before executing the controlled demolition of Taiwan.

Well, that's the plan. Whether it will succeed or not depends on how many states will bend over willingly rather than face up to the Superpower and wether China and Russia are willing to sit on their hands and do nothing.

The problem is, knowing the way the world works, China (and Russia) won't show much of a desire to defend vulnerable states against the U.S onslaught. Those countries will therefore have no incentive to rally around China to form a defensive trade network for mutual benefit.

They know that when the US Navy comes knocking, China and Russia won't have their backs, so better cave in early.

The one way out of this mess is the way neither China nor Russia have the nerve to adopt:

Going on the offensive and instigating conflicts among American allies and making sure the U.S is too busy dealing with manufactured crises to be a problem to the other superpowers. The U.S has been given much too much time to plan, develop creative schemes for causing problems to the globe, it's been given the luxury of taking the offensive initiative for too Long.

In reply to SnoopDog

Mass transit for sure

In reply to Commie

all things are possible but that is highly improbable

too many moving parts

China can't be stopped, you may slow the pace, but they are at a point of self-sustaining development.

In reply to sudden

Do not underestimate a hegemon working with a clock.

In reply to Commie

Man, steeups! Thought you would have told us that Uncle Sam was about buy small island bananas

In reply to StumpCam

This is one of the most dangerous times in history.

In reply to Comrade Commie

You have a very active imagination.

Will revisit a few post later.

But economics is not my fortay. I have not read nearly enough on the matter. So am not saying am right on point.

I do not believe though that the US should throw up it's hands in defeat over manufacturing.

I believe all countries should attempt to keep their manufacturing....even if they are not leading, they should have enough to keep a strong middle class.

China is not the leader simply because it is the only place capable....it is so solely due to the Labor issue.

Convince me otherwise.

No country should be able to export so freely while monitoring imports like a hawk.

Also appreciate the attempt to stay on point and make some valid points by all who chose to contribute.

For the first time no one is blaming the Jews for this mess, but don't be surprised if this will soon be a talking point.

In reply to Commie

If that was the plan Trump et al seem to lack some basic execution skills cuz you can't be doing that while exposing to the world all your vulnerabilities back home and attempting to install a king while literally suspending law and order while playing revenge politics and robbing people blind. A chaotic environment and unstable base is not the environment to pull that off.

In reply to Commie

It is . And it will get even more dangerous and perilous if America's greatest fear, BRICS
become a reality.
Such a reality will mean parking the US $ as The reserve country thereby eroding US's power
in all things.
The conflict with China now could lead to the BRICS reality. China,Russia,Brazil,India and
South Africa do not need anything from America .China is probably equal to or more advanced in AI
and Technology than the USA and is fast catching up militarily and SPACE exploits.
Brazil is already China's bread basket where food imports.

It is something I am watching closely as USA's plan to reduce China's growing power will not meet with
success. That ship sailed a long time.

I am reminded of a story my late Friend and colleague Tony Becca told me in 1973. At that time,through Kissinger/Nixon, China was
brought in the 'real world and to showpiece their country they indulged in' Ping Pong' diplomacy using the sport as vehicle to
invite and host people from all over.
Becca,an avid TT advocate, was part of the Jamaica delegation. On a visit to a Chinese store to purchase gifts,the clerks were
all using an Abacus to calculate money . He inquired of this oddity, seeing that abacus was long 'dead' even in primary school
in Jamaica. The response he got from a Chinese official is that they were not yet ready for any computer advancement as their
population and need for keeping their people employed and occupied was Primary.

But he added , when they are they are ready, they will advance swiftly.

At that time,Becca told me he could not cross the street at Tiannen Square as more than half a million bicycles were on the move
and the parade was quite endless. and all were dressed the same, green khaki.

China has done more than wonders.They are not a people to under rate or scoff at. They invented fireworks millenia before USA was even thought
of. Don't trust them. There are no more dangerous adversary than the Chinese. They talk less but they DO.

Trump better be aware. Could be war of some kind around the corner.

In reply to carl0002

The Penguins of Antarctica have already capitulated to the Dotard and his new world order.

In reply to carl0002

You make the classic mistake of concentrating on the front man. Same mistake was made with Biden, same with Trump.

There are think tanks and policy hawks who practice continuity with tweaks here and there.

For example now that uber China hawk Peter Navarro holds sway so the China approach is being accelerated. But don’t for one second think this is some Trumpian initiative.

Thucydides Trap is an inevitable collision of powers when one hegemon recognizes its imminent displacement. War is the usual conclusion.

In reply to SnoopDog

If Commie is correct it won't take 90 days before the Dotard at it again with his tariff bs and what will the market do on this occasion. Ignore him?

In reply to Ayenmol

As a country grows it has to give up basic industries and adapt new ones, you are not going to support a growing middleclass with stagnated industry and technology.

In reply to Commie

You see its not me under estimating the front man perhaps you should ask the think tanks if they account for the monkey wrench that the Dotard can throw in their well made plans for his own selfish gain, that cause them to be tweaking like a cocaine addict.

USA is a declining superpower

the age of the lion / eagle is over

this is the age of Aquarius

a time for the rise of the dragon

but as with all dying empires it will not go down without a fight

it ought to negotiate a graceful exit with some pride in tact

a type of peaceful accommodation with the rest of the world

a direct war will further degrade them

the USA has not won a major war since the 2nd european civil war and it was Russia that actually won that

the oligarchs in the US will try something economically but that too will fail

tis written

In reply to sudden

Who says you wrong ?

In reply to Commie

Mr Commie Dollar getting drilled, market crashed yesterday even while we were here talking, bond market getting hammered. Now Commie in such a climate, how the US pull off that fairy tale you spun. US no longer have allies, Investment being pulled from US at an alarming rate, and would China sit by having a ticking time bomb in its hand watching the US decimate its manufacture base and do nothing? If its going to lose anyway wouldn't they just set it off. If trade between US and China slows because of tariffs or for whatever reason what is the purpose of the Chinese holding all those bonds, especially when trust in the US is at an all time low.

It seems that plan if true is full of nothing but arrogance given US agitating everything in that equation to make it work.

In reply to carl0002

What Trump is trying to do has only two outcomes. Trump quits his tariff nonsense, and we get back to some kind normalcy, or the world economy grinds to a standstill. We will see a shift in global trade alliances with China leading the way. China has been investing heavily in technology, renewable energy and infrastructure. They too are looking to strengthen their domestic industries and reduce their reliance on US exports.

Bringing back manufacturing to the US requires automation, construction of new facilities, and billions in investments, with an amortisation period of decades more to recoup investment. Not happening.

In reply to carl0002

Comrade Commie is spending waaaayyyy too much time in those far left conspiracy theory nutjob websites.

In reply to XFactor

even if Trump cancels all the tariffs the USA is still fuked

who will trust this administration?

In reply to sudden

The Penguins of Antarctica....

In reply to SnoopDog

Far left???

That is project 2025 on steroids level, neocon $hit and I don't think you will find that stuff in far left forums'

In reply to carl0002

The US is an empire in decline. It is still the world's premier military power, which bodes ill for the workers of countries targeted by this declining empire. It is sure to lash out.

In reply to Commie

Look, it's Commie!

Good to see you.

In reply to carl0002

Commie was saying the same about Russia (military power) until it met Ukraine.
Terminator is missing ...

In reply to Commie

This is a fascinating article—I read it in part through the lens of the rise and fall of the manufacturing sector in Jamaica!

Keep up the good work; you are the real G!

In reply to WI_cricfan



Too soon to talk!

In reply to XDFIX

Trump caving like unsupported excavation!

In reply to camos

Only a fool would not pivot in the turbulence of external forces - Trump may be drunk, but he ain't no joke! - I think a Yardie song says Tom drunk, but Tom nuh, fool, not sure!

The culture of skilled labor, seeded by the medieval guilds and fully developed by the Industrial Revolution, was what made the West unstoppable for over two centuries. The RoW, while being colonized, enslaved, and generally ruthlessly screwed, at first didn't realize what the white man's advantage was; they erroneously thought it was the clever wheeling-dealing or having a more modern military.

Japan was the first to catch on; the Meiji statesmen at first tried to emulate the Western political system, with a parliament and everything, and financial institutions, because that's what the Western propaganda said were the roots of their success. But eventually they realized it was industry, and started to modernize their own. It took them several generations, not to build the factories, but to develop a proper working class, with the right ethics: the culture of skilled laborers. But the Japanese eventually got it right, and even exceeded the standards of the West, which was already floundering under the weight of its parasites all that time.

South Korea was next; then eventually China, which has just arrived. Iran and then India are not quite there yet, but getting very close. I know some really good engineers, they order a lot of modules and parts from subsuppliers around the world. Twenty years ago Chinese products had a well deserved reputation of being cheap and shoddy. Ten years ago, the bad rep was still there, but the products were mostly solid, if not stellar. Now they make parts and equipment better than the Germans, not to even mention the US; quite on par with Japanese products. Twenty years; a full generation.

But the whole process, from the start, took more; two or three generations; same as in Japan. First to build up the infrastructure, and teaching cadres for technical education. Then to turn out the first, raw cohort of industrial workers, while at the same time developing the know-how, mostly by copying others and learning by painful trial-and-error. Finally, to build the attitudes and the culture of skilled labor, which is what made the difference between the "Chinese crap" of twenty-years ago, and their cutting-edge tech of today.

The United States, and the rest of the West including Germany, meanwhile destroyed their culture of skilled labor, for profit. The destruction is complete; just as we mistrusted Chinese products recently, now we are coming to realize that German industrial products are shoddy, and not to be trusted. And Germany is the best of the lot, they still retain some old-timers who know what they are doing. American companies fired the lot of them, demolished the facilities, and salted the ground.

All manufacturing in the West is just coasting now; producing minor variations of products that were designed by previous generation's designers, on legacy production lines that have been running for decades. That is why they were so utterly unable to accelerate ammunition production. The old production lines, at Rheinmetall and elsewhere, are still limping along, but establishing new ones is not feasible---no one knows how to build them, or get them running properly. Other industries are in the same bind, churning out the same-old widgets---as financialists disdainfully refer to industrial products---using trivially upgraded legacy designs and production lines. The only real innovation comes from abroad, mostly in the form of faster chip designs.

That is why Trump's ambition of reviving American industry with nothing but financial leverage is a pipe dream. There is no know-how anymore, no cadre of industrial workers, and the culture of skilled labor that made the West has been canceled and erased. By most estimates it would take one generation to start churning out crude, failure-prone lemons, and yet another generation to bring industry to world standards. Not the kind of timeframe Mr. Deal-artist is used to be working in.

A case in point is the ongoing attempt to transplant chip manufacturing from Taiwan to the US. The factories have largely been built, at exorbitant expense, and only because Taiwanese engineers were on hand to supervise the construction. But there are no engineers and no tech-aware managers in the US to run these factories, so Taiwanese cadres were transplanted---essentially by making them an offer they couldn't refuse---to manage these factories. But the production is still no-go, because in all the third of a billion of Americans, there is not enough skilled workers capable of working in these production lines, despite the promise of exorbitant pay. Now they are at the stage of importing slaves---er, I meant coerced-volunteer production line workers---also from Taiwan, to work in these "American" chip factories. Money is being poured in by the bucketful, but I will wager a guess: once they get the production running, the chips coming out will be so substandard, that nobody will be buying them. For years.

And that is the absolute best the US can do, with all the government and finance leverage you can get, and workforce imported wholesale. In less strategic fields the situation will be much worse. And it will be made much worse yet by the impending reverse brain drain: all the foreigners doing science and STEM education in the US, all the Chinese, Russians, Indians, Persians, and Germans whose foreign names figure on most engineering textbooks and on most STEM research papers, will soon pack up and go home, because they were here only for the living conditions---and living conditions in the US are going to hell in a basket.

There are practically no top-level American-born STEM researchers left, and the few adequate exceptions have been recruited to work on classified military projects, where foreigners are barred. And we can judge their level of know-how by observing how these projects are spectacularly failing, from the F-35 boondoggle to the hypersonics development clusterfuck, to the pratfall of Boeing orbital vehicles.

In reply to Commie

That is a really eye opening and reasonable take.

I saw a video of Tim Cook who said that the reason China was flourishing in Industry was due to their skolled labor force.

I agree that this seems to be a huge issue in the US.

I know where i lived, with Amazon moving in, there was a boom in new residents.

Many Californians also move to the area, many investing in renovating homes for sale and rentals.

One guy bought the house across the street and was in the process of renovating.

He could not believe how difficult it was to find skilled workers.

Many builders lament the difficulty in finding workers for the construction Industry.

The issue is as you articulated. Blue collar workers are looked down upon while the dressed up guy going to an office to stare at a computer all day is glorified.

Not to mention the profiteering enterprise.

Too many Harvards and not enough MIT for the layman

Watch the bond market - China could do real damage!

In reply to Commie

Another good read!

In reply to XDFIX

China's options are limited in the bond market, they can only stop buying new issues, they can't sell those they owned, because that would mean taking a loss.

In reply to camos

Too many internet experts!:lol

this right here is one of the best lines ever

In reply to camos

Every central bank is adjusting their allocation of US treasuries as risk premiums have increased, and yes, yields have not yet risen to parity. There are about $30 trillion treasuries floating around. Japan holds about 1.06 trillion of U.S. treasury bonds and China has just under $800 billion from 1.3 billion 10 years ago. China is obviously de-dollarizing.

The US need China and Japan to be buying those bonds to fund the debt. China and Japan are not backing down on this trade war anytime soon. I’m not an expert on this subject matter, but it seems to me that Chana and Japan can sink the US dollar at any time. They have cards to play.

Soooo....

It's been what two weeks or less?

Already:

1) Nvidia has decided to open 2/3 factories in the US worth trillions. Semi-conductors and Ai grade GPU's, the intended output.

2) China is scrambling big time to make deals with other Countries....US not that improtant some said, China won't feel it.

ii) They are taking steps to choke of supplies needed in manufacturing....not just to the US but Worldwide. The threat is not real? Why such drastic steps then?

3) My orders from Shein and Temu are shipping directly from the US and not from China.....So they are forced to use their local stockpile......they had a local stockpile....they have been preserving a local stockpile while the shipping loopholes existed, knowing it would end eventually.

No impact? Little impact? When is the last time you saw China so rattled?

In reply to ponderiver

Isn't it strange ...he is a dumb fck...

But he has the lawyers and legal firms kissing his arse...

Interesting, isn't it, a dumb fck outwitting a crooked bunch of officers of the court?

Pro bono representation.

In reply to Ayenmol

But wasn't Apple supposed to be moving its phone manufacturing back to the USA? Please tell me when that is happening.

Trump initially said, “iPhones will be made here! It's not negotiable.”

A few days later, he stated, “I've removed the tariff on iPhones and it won’t be manufactured in the US anymore."

"This has nothing to do with the millions Apple deposited in my Swiss Bank account. It’s all a negotiation.”

In reply to camos

Yuh joking, right? When a country goes to war, a loss of lives is expected! So again, China could damage the bond market; will it? Only time will tell!

In reply to XFactor

Listen man....The topic is regarding the tariffs and their effect in totality on the US manufacturing industry.

This is not some partisan Trump is King nonsense.

I do not care about wishful party lines.

Am talking about, and everyone so far, has been discussing the actual steps taken and how they see it affecting the economy.

Better or worse.

Take your personal politics elsewhere please.

In reply to Ayenmol

In reply to Ayenmol

[/quote

manufacturing is an activity not an industry, to be technical.

In reply to camos
Tell that to them...

Sooo....

China has appointed a new trade envoy?

Lots of rhetoric coming out of China....

Anyone read the words of the deputy commissioner of China's NBS?

Pretty much verifying what I have been saying about the US tightening it's consumerist belt.

Also....to those stating America.....or any large Nation .... can survive on service industries exclusively, some of the rhetoric seems pretty damning on that front.

Not just China....but all of the opinion and reporting I have been reading seems to be that it is a detriment to rely on other Countries for your manufacturing.

Well, well.

In reply to Ayenmol

Or, maybe it is a benefit to rely on other countries to increase your profit margins!

Oh well!

Very interesting read.... and video..

Here....

And here...


Interesting excerpts:

If this man is working 14 hours that's $3.85 an hr.

Now I am not sure if all the workers work that long. But common sense, and the context leads me to believe that's the case.

I understand that i5s a different standard of living there. But that is still peanuts!

While Americans.....and the World, pay big money for many of the products.

Where does the profit go?

Terrible. Just terrible. I feel for the people over there.

1.4 billion people....lawd.

In reply to StumpCam

Benefit to whom?

I know after such long threads, it is difficult to catch up...but this has already been discussed and is the basis of the thread.

The few are getting rich from the low labor cost in China. At least for everyday goods....while the people in the Countries receiving these goods are paying good money for these products based on service industries and so called White collar jobs which are as disposable as ever.

And they too are leaving in droves or facing the threat of replacement by robotics and AI.

This is my point. Countries need a solid manufacturing local industry with wages to build the middle class.

Such should be the back bone of their economy....not service industries based on manufacturing from outside sources.

Ano5her intseresting article. Check the comments also. Great points and I share some of these sentiments.

Another one....

WTO has spoken....where are all the internet economist now?

In reply to Ayenmol

While the simplest explanation is normally the case it’s not always the case…

I don’t quite agree with you on this… I would rather have a little more capability/capacity than I currently needs. Most software upgrade require a hell of a lot more memory and a lot more computing power than contemporary versions, case in point, Microsoft office now needs in excess of 4GB, so does windows 11, and these are just necessary upgrades when manufacturers stop supporting earlier versions. and if you get into multitasking, that's another kettle of fish.

i always believe its better to have and dont have the need, than to have the need and don't have the capability. if you can afford it

In reply to Ayenmol

And now Boeing is caught in the crossfire.

Boeing Jet Returns to US From China as Trade War Bites