All of this chaos has actually slowed down our US manufacturing buildout. We'd like to build US factories, but we're having to slow them because of the uncertainty. A foreign factory only has the uncertainty on the US import/export, while a US factory has uncertainty on all imports/exports.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/C307RC1Q027SBEA
US Factory build out investment increased from $80B/year to $240B/year under Biden.
Trump's economic policy has managed to undo $30B of that so far, and the trend is accelerating.
> People are also having to intervene in once-automated tasks. Thousands of orders that used to auto-flow directly to the warehouse floor for same-day shipping now often miscalculate tariff costs.
Charge a blanket tariff fee like Mouser.
> Charge a blanket tariff fee like Mouser.
The importer still needs to pay the correct tariff.
Also, according to the article, a big part of the problem for is that Digi-Key does substantial business selling imported parts to non-US buyers. It’s fantastic for the US that this business can exist (money flows into the US and actual good jobs are created), but the tariff system makes is difficult to run this part of the business and there’s a lot of pressure to move those jobs and the revenue to a different country that doesn’t have this problem.
Just once I managed to get to some kind of manager who told me point blank "we won't sell this part to startups."
We created a service that blocks people from buying various parts using a ton of different complex business rules (one simple rule we had was we straight up didn't sell ANYTHING to the middle east for a while).
Startups were another business we didn't sell to simply because of the sheer amount of fake companies we got trying to work around our rules engine.
Alot of the rules for our service was mandated from the FBI. That was a fun call to reveive from them.
None of those benefits of a price hike go to American workers. They get low wage factory jobs, not old school pension jobs, and all their stuff goes up in price?
Laughable. I doubt Americans won’t even pay 5% more to get stuff made in the USA.
More subtle is that every dollar saved in buying components from China is more money for all of the forementioned.
For the same reason when small local businesses charge you a 3% service fee to use credit; they're not giving up that money because you wouldn't have been charged it otherwise.
The parent's point also applies to the companies buying product. Every dollar they spend on tariff line items is another dollar they're not sending back into the economy via expansion and wages.
For china, the supreme court ruling was effectively a 5% reduction in tariffs. The situation remains dumb.
https://www.china-briefing.com/news/us-china-tariff-rates-20... (Url says 2025 but has been updated continuously)
It was cool to see them grow into a real competitor for the big distributors.
