markovs_gun

I think you’re getting hung up on the idea that since the stated goal of the tariffs is to bring back American manufacturing, people who are against them must be against bringing back American manufacturing. That is not the case. Most people are pretty on board with that idea on its own. The issue is that tariffs don’t really do that and they sure as hell don’t do that given how they’ve been implemented. Here’s a case study - my company currently makes a product in the US and buys one of the feed materials from China. Due to tariffs, we have started buying the feed materials from Indonesia instead, and due to the retaliatory tariffs from China, we have started making the product in India instead of the US. So as a direct result of the tariffs, we have moved manufacturing outside of the US and haven’t bought any additional US products. The tariffs have reduced American manufacturing in this case in a very real way with no additional benefit whatsoever.

The Trump tariffs are especially stupid as economic policy. Being against them has nothing to do with being against bringing back manufacturing or even with being against trade protectionism. Imagine if you went to a dentist for a toothache and he brings out a hammer and says okay well we’re going to take out all your teeth. That’s a bad dentist right? A good dentist will suggest action targeted at the bad tooth to try to fix what’s wrong with it instead of just destroying everything because there’s a problem. Trump is doing the economic equivalent of the bad dentist.

This displays a really poor understanding of how modern manufacturing works. It is simply not possible to build everything in America even if you want to. The factories just don’t exist to build PCBs from scratch here. If the factories existed and the issue was simply cost, then yeah maybe a tariff might work, but for most products that’s not where we’re at, and it takes years to build factories. In that time you’re essentially throwing a bomb into the entire economy to try to force people to make those factories without using parts made elsewhere, and to make matters worse, you’re making everyone do it all at the same time. It’s pure stupidity plain and simple.

I work at a large US chemical company that is facing a lot of turmoil from these tariffs. You know what we’re doing right now? Moving manufacturing out of the US to avoid retaliatory tariffs from other countries. That’s right- we’re taking a look at all of our manufacturing processes and seeing what we can quickly move overseas and out of the United States because there just isn’t any other way to survive the tariffs. Trump’s tariffs are not merely killing American jobs when it comes to companies that import goods from China, it’s killing them on the export side as well because everyone else is understandably retaliating against us. The idea that Trump’s tariffs have any possible way to help anyone is pure delusion.

This sort of thing is the reason Congress is supposed to be the branch that handles taxes. There are a lot of factors to consider and different constituents are impacted differently. The president isn’t supposed to be able to levvy taxes in the first place because one person can just be an idiot who doesn’t understand modern economies and decide to wreck the economy with taxes.

Ask your relatives and coworkers about it. Just because you haven’t heard of it doesn’t mean it’s not a big thing.

Good. These dumbasses mostly voted for this, and they’re getting their reward.