Pooter

Not sure if I'm missing something or this is just self-contradictory: so we had a tech boom coinciding with offshoring but we can re-shore everything and it will go amazing and be affordable? What am I missing here? What parts of the supply chain do we get to re-claim for our own, saddle with environmental regulations, and then magically have it be affordable?

I think he muddles two ideas in this article, one good and one bad. Idea 1: it's important to maintain some domestic manufacturing capacity for national security purposes. Definitely a good argument. We don't want to be reliant on Chinese supply chains to build our military hardware and critical national defense infrastructure. Idea 2: We need to claw back manufacturing from overseas to provide jobs for the American people. This one is complete nonsense. This argument presumes we have a big unemployment problem in the form of a huge pool of factory-qualified people who are out of work, just waiting for a new steel plant in Pittsburgh or Detroit to be opened up. The article consistently references these cheap polluters overseas are "costing us jobs" so one would expect that as manufacturing declined in the US, so has American employment. The only problem is, that's not true. Since the US manufacturing jobs peak in 1979, manufacturing in the US has steadily declined as we've transitioned to a more tech-centric, service-based economy. But jobs have not declined, they've grown massively in absolute numbers and unemployment rates are actually better now than they were at peak manufacturing periods. Unemployment today is 4.2%. Unemployment in 1979 was 6%. Unemployment now is also lower than it was every single year from 1970 to 1998. Source: https://www.investopedia.com/historical-us-unemployment-rate-by-year-7495494 Unemployment fluctuates for a wide variety of reasons, but I was genuinely surprised to find it's actually better now than the heavily romanticized eras of peak American manufacturing. The truth is, moving manufacturing overseas has not robbed the American people of jobs, it just changed the kinds of jobs people have. The other funny wrinkle in this argument is that when we were at peak manufacturing in the US, we didn't have all of the environmental regulations in place we do today. Our own industrial revolution was famously pollution-heavy, so I'm not convinced you get to have it both ways. I think the equation goes something like this: -robust domestic manufacturing -feel good about yourself environmentally -affordable goods Choose two.

Trump admin every minute of every day: The right, when you point it out: "what are you some kind of trade expert"

My reading is just fine. Your argument is falling apart as the administration abandons it in real time..

Well that was quick.. tariffs paused now. All part of some genius plan I’m sure. I’m confused, 5 minutes ago weren’t tariffs here to stay, non negotiable, and we all needed to be patient as trump rebuilt the American economic bargain for the every-man? Finally we have someone trying something “different.” oh wait no never mind we got spooked and reversed our entire global trade policy after 4 DAYS. More mental gymnastics incoming in 3.. 2.. 1..

I keep hearing this line - "the world took advantage of us" "we are getting hosed by the whole world in trade" Who, exactly is hosing us? Is it South Korea who imports our goods at near as makes no difference 0% effective tariff rate? Is it Australia with whom we have a significant trade surplus? I was reliably informed that if you have a trade deficit with someone that must mean they're hosing you. So are we hosing Australia? Must be somehow.. And if so why are we slapping additional tariffs on them? Dude just take a step back and call a spade a spade here. None of this makes any f-ing sense. It's a nice graph though. The rich indeed are getting richer at a faster rate than the people with less money. That's exactly how compound interest works. Even for regular folks, it takes approximately the same amount of time to accumulate your first $100k as it does to go from $100k to $1M. Isn't it crazy how math works?! That's also exactly what I would expect growth curves to look like when comparing the 0.1% to the rest of the population. Turns out if youre in the 0.1% you're probably pretty freaking good at allocating money and making more of it. To pin wealth inequality in the US on "globalization" and the "myth of free trade" is definitely a new one. But ultimately the real issue here is your implication that trump's deranged and incoherent tariff plan is going to somehow rectify this wealth problem. What evidence do you have for that? Because so far all I've seen are normie financial dummies panic selling, while the savvy billionaires short the market and use their connections and insider info to capitalize on the insane volatility. The tariffs are also effectively a wildly regressive tax. When you jack up the price of normal goods across the board it's going to hurt regular people far far more, because us normal folks need the same amount of food and toilet paper as billionaires do.

That's the point of the analogy.. the problems are unrelated, and the proposed solution makes no sense. The sink leak is not related to the self induced house fire. So yes, in a way you're right.. there is nothing about our current problems that should make people want to torpedo the economy with blanket tariffs on the whole world. They are entirely unrelated.

This is like saying you have leaky sink in your house, and then decide to burn your house down. "See, my house is burning down! I knew there was a problem!" Yeah but you didn't diagnose the problem correctly or apply an appropriate corrective action, and ended up hurting yourself more.

This was literally the goal of the CHIPS act with respect to semiconductor manufacturing. We realized we needed to be less reliant on Taiwan-manufactured chips for advanced military hardware so we wanted to bring some of that capacity back to the US. Problem is the act was passed almost 3 years ago and the chip plants are still under construction. Turns out.. building a megafactory for the world's most advanced microchips takes a while and is a big gamble by companies sinking billions into manufacturing infrastructure, so they need some market stability and predictability from the administration. They had that from 2022-2025. But if trump's argument is he wants to bring back manufacturing across a variety of sectors, you should be able to see that we can't have the leader of the free world inventing new reasons for tariffs off the cuff and flip-flopping on international trade policy on an hourly basis and expect any company to take any level of risk building up their infrastructure. It's simply unrealistic. FWIW I don't actually disagree with some protectionist trade policies surrounding crucial defense capabilities. But I don't think clawing back T-shirt manufacturing from Vietnam or tariffing Madagascar for bananas fits that description. Oh and by the way Trump openly shat on the chips act less than a month ago so take that for what you will. source: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/10/technology/trump-chips-act.html

This is the key assumption undergirding trump's entire tariff plan, and apparently also bill oreilly's argument. The only problem is for the most part it is completely false. The vast majority of countries are not "hosing" us in trade. China and a few others actually have predatory trade practices, but dozens of countries we have now pissed off were pretty solid allies that simply have a trade deficit with us. Many had free trade agreements with us and near zero tariff levels. And one more time for the folks in the back: A trade deficit is not a ripoff. But that is exactly what trump's tariffs were calculated from. Just as one example, we already had a free trade agreement with South Korea--a hugely important ally. Their effective tariff rate on imported US goods was 0.002%. But trump's make-believe math says they're tariffing us 50% based on his nonsense deficit formula, so now we're dunking on a close ally that has crucial chip technology and was (until now) very strongly aligned against China. We are literally punching ourselves in the dick and then doing mental gymnastics to try to frame it as a win. You guys can rail on the neocons and the globalist elites and whatever other boogeymen all you want, but I know one thing and it's this: until 5 minutes ago, stock market performance was the ultimate bellwether for a president's economic policies in right wing circles. But now that trump has tanked the market, suddenly a lot of people are doing 180 pivot and demanding patience while he enacts some 50-year grand plan to revitalize american manufacturing. GMAFB. The dude is an illiterate clown who thinks "trade deficit" means we are literally losing money to these countries as if we aren't getting goods and services in return. Deficit = bad word. Must fix bad word. It's as simple as that.

Maybe we would know the reason behind the tariffs if the admin would pick one from their ever-growing laundry list of disjointed grievances and good idea fairies.. Tariffs are solely negotiating tool to get Canada and Mexico to crack down on border policy.. oh wait no it’s actually a negotiating tool to get other countries to reduce their tariffs on us.. oh wait no actually those countries don’t even have tariffs on us in many cases, it’s to remedy trade deficits which are a ripoff somehow.. oh wait no it’s actually that tariffs are a good thing and will literally make us rich.. oh wait no it’s actually to nerf trade so we bring back manufacturing.. oh wait no it’s actually to deliberately crash the economy to refinance our debt at a lower interest rate..

What's the issue exactly? @SurelySerious has been a contributor here for as long as I can remember and is clearly not a spammer. The posts are all on topic, and the only response you've been able to put together is downvoting all of them, which is even less value added than the admittedly large amount of twitter copypasta. If you disagree, maybe put together a coherent defense of this tariff clown show and a real conversation can be had. Until then, remember this isn't reddit so we don't go whining to the mods when someone has opinions we don't like.

Art of the deal. Thank goodness we have such a shrewd negotiator at the helm. In other news.. the rest of the indo pacific including two of our strongest allies in the region Japan and Korea have vowed to strengthen economic ties with China. https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/south-korea-china-japan-agree-promote-regional-trade-trump-tariffs-loom-2025-03-30/ Sick. But at least our shitty t-shirt prices won’t go up.

No. But you can change course without going full retard. If you want to attack the debt you cut spending in a meaningful way like they were *kindof* trying to do with the doge stuff.. and leave trade policy tf alone. We are not getting ripped off by Vietnam because we have a trade deficit with them. We are a rich country. They are a poor country. They make stuff for super cheap. We then buy that stuff for super cheap and have more money left over for other things. It is a win-win. Trump is under this insane misimpression that voluntary trade is a zero-sum game where there has to be a winner and a loser. And somehow since the word "deficit" sounds bad, we are the loser?? As others have pointed out, you have a trade deficit with your local grocery store, or your dry cleaner, or literally every service you pay for ever. So are you being ripped off when you voluntarily engage in a market transaction to buy something that someone else made? Not to mention we're tariffing countries who we have a trade surplus with... please make it make sense I think tariffs are almost always stupid, but I would be slightly more willing to take this ride if it seemed like there was any semblance of a coherent plan. The reason the market is tanking is because there is no plan and we've been in a constant state of will-he-won't-he for the the last two months. If we actually want to "bring manufacturing back to the US" businesses need some stability and predictability before they go sink millions and billions into new domestic production capacity. But they can't do that when the president is flip-flopping on his own policies and creating random new carve outs and exemptions on an hourly basis. Because who knows, trump could use these tariffs to get some concessions from a few countries and then dump the policy entirely in a few months.. well inside the turn circle of setting up a new production line. In summary: -you can address the debt without dumpstering world trade -trade deficits are not us being ripped off -blanket tariffs are bad and dumb -the market wants stability, not constant whiplash -if there is a plan, fucking communicate it