Great question. This is punishing anyone but those in the highest bracket. Unbelievably stupid that people are losing thousands (or more) dollars because of one single orange chucklefuck. The other middle finger goes to Congress for sitting on their thumbs in a closed bathroom stall.
I'm sure I'll be getting my American-grown-from-America coffee any day now.
"Who is more foolish? The fool or the fool who follows him?" Obi Wan Kenobi
TLDR, the last time the USA did this, it took decades and a world war to devastate almost everyone else to undo the damage and rebuild trust in the USA as a trading partner.
But this administration is already using tariffs as a negotiating tool, a cudgel. "If country X does Y, maybe the administration will cut them a break."
That means, as an investor, there is simply no certainty that makes it safe enough to invest in domestic US infrastructure. What if I build a factory and then the tariff evaporates?
Raw materials are sometimes only available in some regions too, though this is a weaker argument because sometimes that is just because labor and complying with dumping regulations are cheaper in poorer countries.
And again with generationally low 4% unemployment and promises/attempts at mass deportations, who exactly are supposed to be staffing all these factories that are going to sprout up here?
Maybe the plan is fire enough people & make Americans poor enough they'll accept $3/hr?
A tariff as a negotiating tactic wouldn’t be worth much if it was known to be temporary.
Legislators are supposed to review this and revoke it (and impeach him for abuse of powers), but Republicans are capitulating, ergo nothing can be done until someone with standing sues and it reaches the Supreme Court.
Then we have to assume they will rule it is unconstitutional, despite half of them being installed by him, and that he will listen to them.
https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/how-congress-delegates-i...
I'd recommend some reading. Congress delegated a massive amount of discretion to the Executive over the years on this particular topic.
What we should be doing is not bringing back manufacturing of such cheap things. Instead, we should manufacture things other countries cannot easily manufacture, such as Nvidia chips, Boeing airplanes, GE jet engines, heavy machinery such as from Caterpillar, medical equipment including robotic surgery machines, immunotherapy and other advanced treatments, gene editing and other biotech products, implantable medical devices, DNA sequencing, nanotech, satellites and aerospace tech, telecom equipment and so on. We can charge a premium price for these products because other countries cannot easily copy us.
Let other countries manufacture cheap things like toys and t-shirts. We'll buy their products low and sell our products high.
Now, a fair question to ask here is, what makes us uniquely qualified to manufacture such high-tech products and sell them to other countries for premium prices? The answer is our universities. Our universities attract the smartest students from around the world. And they stay here after getting their masters and PhDs. The answer is also immigration. We are able to attract the best and the brightest scientists and engineers from around the world.
Trump's mistake is spraying tariffs across everything without carefully evaluating what type of manufacturing we want to bring back to the US, and of course, disappearing immigrant university students under various pretexts.
