This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I was at a hibachi place in December and one of the managers was trying to light a candle. The lighter didn't work and he made a joke that it "must be made in China. It'll cost 25% more soon!" A guy at the table said "well you'll just need to buy one made in Pennsylvania!"
I asked him if he knew of any companies that manufactured disposable lighters in Pennsylvania, and he just said "Trump will make it happen!"
The disconnect is crazy.
Here's what I would tell someone that thinks manufacturing is coming back.
Say you're a factory owner and goods are costing too much to import from China. Your trusty Excel sheet tells you that, with the tariffs, you can make your widgets for the same price in America.
But you're a smart capitalist! You know these tariffs are going to end up wildly unpopular and will be rescinded sooner rather than later. In any case, the economy may tank and no one will be able to afford widgets.
Yet another problem is that tariffs will make American widgets toxic on the international market. Canadians are already looking to shed American imports.
Now are you, Mr. Smart Capitalist, going to risk building an American factory and get left holding the bag?
Alternate:
"Know what the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act was?"
To wit, you can send a message by adding a "Trump Tariff Tax" instead of changing your base price, just to clearly articulate to the simpletons that thought this would lower costs
The factory decision is exactly the calculation that will go through hundreds of MBA-educated business leaders.
Disposable lighters are pretty easy to make though, it's just a lot more expensive to do it here (much more than 25% more). Things will just get more expensive, with maybe a handful of items being made here, but the net result will be more expensive stuff and some new, poorly paying jobs. Yay.
In the off chance that domestic producers can make those goods at a price cheaper than overseas_cost+25% guess what they'll charge? The same high price.
BIC probably produces lighters in the US, they have a couple of locations there. It could also be razor blades or ballpoint pens though and the lighters are coming in from Mexico. Or surfboards. Still can't believe they produce surfboards.
Or BIC might exit the US market, the French aren't exactly known to be forgiving or accommodating. If you make their US factories pay 25% on the flints they're importing from another factory elsewhere they might just say fuck it, let's burn this place down, we'll go somewhere where these lighters aren't hit by 25% retaliatory tariffs.
I know you're talking about disposable lighters but the funny thing is that Zippo is from PA. I doubt they still make lighters in PA and also as a company they only survive off nostalgia because their lighters are pretty bad. You can't leave one sitting in a drawer for more than a few days before the fuel dries up.
I bought a knockoff Zippo lighter insert from China and it's so much better because it's sealed and the fluid doesn't evaporate.
That's the thing that the person in the made up story doesn't understand:
Even the majority of "made in america" products are actually "assembled in america". Just like the majority of "chinese knockoffs" are after hours runs at the same factories that make the real thing. Sometimes crappier and sometimes actually better because they sourced better materials from a different factory.
And... that is why we are so fucked. Because there will be the "Well, product A costs more because of tariffs so product B can sell for more too". But also? Product B's profit margins will go down because they are paying for tariffs too. Which gets passed on to the consumer.
I have no way to prove it obviously but nothing in that story was made up.
For what it's worth I do believe your story only because I have family who have used a very similar "Trump is gonna fix it!" line to me and when I asked what he'd fix their response is "everything!"
That 25% magic number
He’s incapable of complex thought. Tariff use is supposed to be nuanced and in line with price differences between American production costs and foreign ones. They are meant to make American products competitive but balanced to limit inflationary side effects. Not done in big dumb across the board numbers like this. He’s fucking stupid.
tariffs are just a tax on the plebs. more money for them to funnel into billionaire pockets.
Those new AI datacenters will get hit hard by that if it goes through. And Elon Musk is still trying to build them. That is a 25% tarrif on every CPU, motherboard, NVME drive, GPU, network switch, and optic.
Unless import duties only apply to chips not soldered into devices in which case all the foreign produced stuff is fine and the American assembled stuff is no longer competative. Oops
You really think Elon is paying tarrifs? Or bills? Or his employees?
For facist exceptions are the point. If you can curry favor you can get exceptions.
They’ll carve out a spot so Muskrat doesn’t lose any of his hundreds of billions.
Anyone who thinks tariffs will do anything at all positive for the American working class is absolutely clueless.
All they do is make prices jump for consumers. It doesn't put domestic goods at an advantage because the domestic producers of those goods increase their prices artificially to achieve parity with import pricing.
So prices go up for the consumer with the extra money going to either:
or
So, Americans will need to pay ~25% extra for cars, medicines and gadgets? Smells like inflation.
On the one hand, fostering local production of these goods is positive for national resilience, and also has a chance to reduce shipping around the world, which is bad for the environment.
On the other hand, good fucking luck, lol.
No way we're making chips stateside with the Department of Education on the chopping block.
So many schools will close and you sure as shit ain't training people who can make top of the line chips with no fucking schools.
They plan to import workers with visas and then hold those visas over their heads to force them to work for peanuts.
I mean, they do this small-scale already.
As the standard of living and pay in the USA quickly tanks and becomes less desirable than where they're from, those people will stop applying for those positions.
They can't force foreigners to sign up for H-1B visas. The whole point is the salary is currently and the USA is currently a desirable place to live. Won't stay that way long. They're literally tearing down all the things that made it desirable to begin with.
Someone commented here yesterday that just as NAFTA allowed manufacturers to export jobs and find reasoning to squeeze blue collar workers, creating a general shift to white-collar work in the U.S., this move is designed to squeeze those higher paying white-collar jobs, so that even more money goes into corporate and investor coffers.
My own addition to that thought is that it seems the natural end product is that the only way to make money once that system has done it’s evil deeds is to have money and be a member of the investor class.
Or, in other words - they aim to do to all of the U.S. what Walmart did to small towns across the U.S.
Without a care in the world, obviously. I think the people wealthy enough to not be impacted by this will thrive on exploitation until the U.S. economy is sucked dry to the point of unsustainability for their grift (or revolution occurs), then, like the parasites they are, will take their grotesque wealth and move onto other economies they can exploit.
I've been saying this for years now. The wealthy here are now international wealthy. They don't care about borders. Musk hops his private jet and goes wherever the fuck he wants whenever he wants and no governments seem to be in his way.
They are done with the high standard of living in the US. They think we're coddled and don't deserve it. They're done trying to bring up international living standards to match America and are all-in on bringing American living standards down to match the rest of the planet.
This is the strip-mining stage of American capitalism. They've turned all the economic tools that they used to subjugate South America (Chile for example), using Milton Friedman's Economic Shock Treatment here at home in the US.
They really don't give a damn, they're done with us. We're being dropped like a jilted lover.
The factory TSMC opened in the USA was mostly staffed with workers from Taiwan, because Americans won't work 996.
It also only makes dies (the functional part of the IC), that still have to be exported to Taiwan for packaging.
When a quarter of the most qualified engineers to make the stuff and a lot of the cheap manual labor are immigrants and you do a campaign against immigrants so they leave, maybe you don't have enough people left to to create local production.
That's covered in "lol"
If that's the goal, you announce tariffs are coming in a few years so that people scale up local production to avoid the higher costs.
In this case, there was like 4 months notice where all of it was undefined, so of course nobody did anything and now we still don't have local production. Now, prices will go up and local producers (if they even build up) will match the new prices instead of keeping them low.
Congrats, worst of both worlds! We still have no local production and prices have gone up! Yay!
We don't manufacture cars in the United States we assemble them. Most of the parts for cars are made outside of the states. Mainly in China.
Shipping over water is actually pretty green, since they have huge ships carrying a bunch of containers with relatively little energy.
Building new factories in the States will create a lot more pollution. Concrete is the opposite of green.
Yeah because drugs aren’t already prohibitively expensive.
Anyone who thinks we're not heading for a deep, deep recession is deluding themselves
And America is taking everyone with them.
How does this help with inflation? He is screwing the people he claims to help.
Tariffs (originally from Arabic: تعريفة) are a tax paid by the consumer. All inputs will be more expensive even for US produced goods.
It doesn’t hurt him and his rich cronies.
He doesn’t care about the people who elected him.
He’s just trying to be a tough guy and flex.
He’s always made others pay the price for his actions, whether it be bankruptcy, stalling them in court, or just outright not paying.
Except for China-made Tesla right?
For better or worse, all Teslas sold in USA are built in Fremont or Austin.
Ghost chips too?
It's like somewhere in the grapevine this dude found out I was doing financially better and right before I am able to afford nice things I've worked toward he's like "lol fuck you in particular"
