- cross-posted to:
- funny@lemmygrad.ml
- cross-posted to:
- funny@lemmygrad.ml
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A lot of people talk about “oh, well, tariffs are a tool that could bring back USA based manufacturing”
…but at every step of the way there have been tariffs on manufacturing inputs, which has the complete opposite effect.
I just feel like that’s being lost in the noise, that the actual obvious outcomes of these tariffs if implemented long-term are 180 degrees from what the admin is claiming they are for.
I actually work at one of these USA based manufacturers, I’ll be out on the floor doing some build support later today. We are basically proceeding as though the tariffs are not going to go into effect, because the alternative is that we just have to shut down operations and furlough everyone for awhile. The business will simply cease to function if everything we source from China costs twice as much. We went through this same shit during Trump 1’s steel tariffs, and it lead to a permanent shrinkage of the business (I was laid off back in 2018 as a result of that, and I’ve actually just recently come back to work at the same company).
Also the elephant in the room is that tariffs without capital controls can’t work. There’s no incentive for capitalists to take massive risks with their capital to start investing in US when they can just move their money to other markets. The US isn’t the linchpin of the global economy that it once was.
You need to make the components to the US too dumbass otherwise you’re just assembling the product in the United States, not actually making it.
But making those components in the US is not profitable, because there are no companies making things in the US that need those components, certainly not on the scale that needs factories for it.
What you have is a classic chicken or the egg situation. It’s not profitable to make the components in the US without the large scale computer end-products being made and it’s also not profitable to build the end-products in the US without the components being manufactured there already.
I touched on this when Germany’s industries disappeared during the european energy crisis caused by Nordstream and Ukraine. The industries physically can’t come back on market forces alone. They weren’t formed with market forces alone in the first place and they had different conditions that led to their formation at the time anyway.
Frankly if I were a capitalist ghoul the only way that makes sense to me to get any of this to happen in a reasonable timescale would be to start national companies for it, then to privatise them later.
Why have national companies when you can subsidize whoever gives you a better cut to pretend they’ll start doing it.
My subsidized manufacturing company bankrupted, I’m gonna need a bailout
Yeah that’s exactly the problem with the subsidy route without any other part of the chain existing. They’re incentivised to take you for a ride for as long as possible.
You need to create the competition conditions before subsidy works.
as tim apple himself points out, not just the means of production is in china now, the knowledge of production is there as well. if they had to pay the same labor costs for chinese workers they’d still make it there supposedly.
The knowledge of production is an integral part of the means of production and they can’t be separated.
The whole post dot com era has been an experiment in doing that and it’s failed spectacularly. If only there was a book about how Capital works that explained this relationship in detail…
Another reason why the tariffs are such a blinder unless the republican party is accelerationist is this, no amount of tariffs was going to bring back industrial means now that china had already gathered most of the capital involved, had the quality to back it up, infrastructure to support it and quantity to expand it
I’m a serious government
Give me money
This is outdated. The dumbass administration already walked back the exemptions.
You know what will bring manufacturing back to America?
Changing the economic outlook every 2 days by spinning a giant wheel.
wtf. these fuckers keep inside trading. they must have made hundreds of billions by now. let me into your pump and dump signal group TRUMP
I think it’s called “Truth Social”
lmao incredible
Is it?
sure it is, the gameshow host president is putting on a show
it’s about the only thing he’s actually competent at
So he’s only competent at being incompetent?
Look, the man does stage-work and he does it well. He can say virtually nothing and still have an audience hanging on his every word. Obvious idiot in all other respects, but’cha gotta acknowledge what little skill he does actually have.
The funny thing is that this skill is very useful for being president. Same reason Reagan was a president too
It ain’t much, but it’s honest work (well not really, but you get the idea lol)
yesThe US is most definitely not assembling/making laptops and never will, the kayfabe or actual fucking belief these people have is amazing and horrifying all at once. Capitalist death spiral into openly deranged fascism is astounding.
It’s quite amusing that the government basically gave a giant hand out to the tech sector (CHIPS act) to move in that direction and the companies spent loads of it on buying their own stock to inflate shareholder value instead of investing it in production. Fictitious money go brrr
Yup the CHIPS act, the massive broadband rollout that has still never been completed, subsidized research. It’s honestly amazing how the tech industry still fails and sucks after being propped up.
You forgot the secret ingredient of pretending
This is incorrect.
If you make the laptop in the US and try and sell the laptop to another country you get the other countries tariff.
I think most of the US side tariffs are currently “turned off” right now as Trump and his friends just completed their insider trading.
America had it’s chance in 2016, and then again in 2024. They decided by majority vote that this was the way they wanted to go. Not electing thus fuckhead in a legitimate and entirely democratic election, twice, would have been the easiest thing in the world to accomplish. Bitching about it now is pointless. This is what they wanted, no, this is what they demanded.
great man theory.txt
Trump is a symptom, not the cause, and moreover the idea that the USian citizenry has any actual input in which candidates are fronted for elections is also wrong. It’s a two-party duopoly, both controlled by Capital.
Sure but you can derive some very dooming judgement from they way they wield that apparent control they were granted.
The duopoli machination is a machination if they get pushed toward the lesser evil and still get fucked. If they pick the obvious evil, does it matter how fake is the alternative?
The US doesn’t have mandatory voting, and voting is winner-take-all at a state level, meaning votes outside swing states do not matter. Further, both candidates are pre-selected by the bourgeoisie, it isn’t about lesser-evilism, it’s theatrics to obfuscate how little power the Working Class actually has.
if they get pushed toward the lesser evil and still get fucked.
Biden also increased tariffs on China. You can point to pretty much any policy that Trump is doing/planning on doing and you will find one of 4 outcomes
- Biden’s admin started the discussion
- Biden’s admin started the implementation
- Trump’s admin started it in his first term, then Biden’s admin did little to nothing to reverse course
- Trump’s admin started it in the first term, then Biden’s admin went further
The case of tariffs is option 4.
That’s my point.
The duopoli machination is a machination if they get pushed toward the lesser evil and still get fucked.
So the duopoly machination is a machination?
Yes.
They show you a terrible option so that the shitty option looks good in comparison.
My point is, the terrible option got somehow picked.
The US industry was doomed way before 2024. The US fighting back against inevitable Chinese economic hegemony was a matter of time, Trump started it in 2016 but Biden maintained many of the policies and furthered some other scaremongering (Uyghur “genocide”, weather balloons, Taiwan, etc).
I gotta say that I didn’t expect the US to shoot itself in the foot this much though, the Trump administration tariffs are WILD
Since were already out here being libs…
They decided by majority vote that this was the way they wanted to go
Trump lost the popular vote in 2016 and only got 49.8% in 2024. Even in the 2016 GOP primary his vote count was 44%. He’s never had a majority of any vote
