The Trump administrationās tariff scheme appears less and less likely to bring manufacturing jobs back to U.S. shores.
Businesses across the country are crunching the numbers and realizing that, despite Donald Trumpās insistence, they canāt balance out his tariff hikes across the supply chain.
āSome manufacturers who had plans to open factories in the country say the new duties are only adding to the significant obstacles they already faced,ā Bloomberg reported Friday.
Thatās because the supply chain to produce those goods in the United States simply isnāt there, requiring companies to import raw materials and factory equipmentāwhich Trumpās tariffs have made unaffordableāfrom abroad.
What made those jobs available was economic opportunity, investment, building a greater whole over time. You donāt win a game of checkers by knocking over the board or a race to the bottom to become the next third world poverty labor. You win with a focussed strategy to push one checker to the other side and ākingā it.
Biden was taking the right approach with the chips act , infrastructure spending, and renewable energy investments. Maybe it wasnāt flashy or loud or immediate, but would have actually built a dominant position in new technologies, including us supply chain and lots of us jobs. The biggest flaw was we needed to stick to the plan for a decade or two, but thatās what you gotta do.
And what made those jobs unavailable was saying that we could now simply import all that they made from Asia instead.
Youāre missing the point. That didnāt happen overnight. We gradually built supply chains in Asia to our own detriment over decades.
Sure there needs to be some sort of market or policy change if we want it to be economically plausible to bring more of it back, but then it will take decades to build out.
And there wonāt be millions of unionized blue collar jobs as it will be all automated. Automation has done more to erode those jobs than outsourcing, and that genie is not going back in the bottle.
From an historical perspective it very much did happen overnight, in the 70s they were there, in the 90s they were gone