[curun1r]

What’s obnoxious about them isn’t tariffs conceptually, it’s the implementation.

There’s an argument that some sort of tariffs are actually necessary. The world is changing and the US has become reliant on countries who increasingly have divergent interests from the US. Additionally, some countries have aging populations that will make them more and more unreliable places to manufacture stuff in the next couple decades. It’s entirely reasonable to believe that it’s pretty critical for the US to begin the process of re-industrializing as soon as possible and tariffs are a crucial lever to make that happen.

But…how you do that matters. Re-industrialization is a process that will take decades and the businesses doing that need to be fairly sure of the government’s policy for most of that period. If Trump had built a broad consensus with Democrats for the tariff policy so that businesses could have understood that a future Democratic president or congressional majority would continue the tariff policy, then businesses would be able to plan accordingly and begin the massive capital outlays that come with re-shoring manufacturing. And the tariffs would strategically exclude certain items like the steel that would be necessary to build factories. And, lastly, you wouldn’t pick now to go on a deportation spree when a sizable chunk of the nations construction workers are undocumented immigrants, since all those factories will need to be built by someone and there aren’t enough Americans to do it.

But instead of the sane and well-reasoned way to do it, we’ve got Trump’s shoot-from-the-hip chaos version. The tariff policy changes weekly, so businesses can’t predict it, let alone rely on it in the way they would need to to spend the collective trillions of dollars on manufacturing infrastructure that need to be spent. And he’s antagonizing Democrats to such and extent that any future Democratic administration will drop the tariffs on day one. The result of which is that businesses, understandably, are hunkering down until he’s out of office. Instead of spurring the massive investment we need, his policies have chilled spending on manufacturing. The only thing we’re really building at the moment are data centers.

So there’s this narrative that tariffs are awful now that’s really the result of someone incompetently deploying them. Some sort of tariff policy would actually be a necessary medicine for the country to help heal the damage from an over reliance on a globalized system that is going to crumble in the coming decades. It won’t be easy, but the earlier the country starts to address it, the better the outcome will be. But it needs to be done intentionally, in a bi-partisan way and through acts of Congress, not in a scattershot fashion where Congress is a bystander and a single deranged lunatic pulls tariff percentages out of ass whenever the mood strikes him.

[bubbadog77]

Excellent points! But at the end of the day, Trump's tariffs seem more like an ego-driven money-grab rather than a sincere move to motivate re-shoring of manufacturing. I really suspect the whole manufacturing renaissance the administration cites as the key reason for this policy is really a ruse.

[pirate787]

Plenty of Americans are ready and able to do the work if the conditions and wages are at the market rate. We're addicted to abusing the illegal immigrant underclass. Returning undocumented people to their homes is the moral issue of our time; Trump is ending a system of neo-slavery.

[throwworhtthrow]

Trump denigrates immigrants daily and stuffs them in squalid camps or prisons. Wouldn't you say that undermines the idea that he's actually acting on a moral obligation to protect immigrants from exploitative labor?

See also his brief hesitation only when his farming and hospitality CEO buddies ask him to leave some illegals for their business needs.

[maxerickson]

What's the market rate?