The Trump tariffs

I went to check out the 2025 National Trade Estimate Report on "trade barriers" and it's something alright. I already had a bad feeling about the simping for these tarrifs but I can't believe it would be so damning for America in plain language.

Literally hundreds of pages of:

"these people are favoring their own domestic market"

"these people have import controls on software, credit card payment systems and other BS no one in their right mind wants"

"these people have export controls"

"it's too hard to do business there and lawfare doesn't work"

The kicker is that the World Trade Organization, the international body responsible for full globalization of trade, already has rules on everything, including tariffs that all these countries are fairly compliant with.

The document can be summarized as "America's disapproval of minor protectionist policies of other countries despite it's attempts at lawfare through international channels". The funniest thing about it is it's mostly American agricultural slop they're concerned about. Guess who gets those jobs? lol.

Why do I call it slop? This isolated sentence says it all:

However, China has not yet implemented some of its more significant agriculture commitments, such as commitments on agricultural biotechnology and the commitment to conduct a risk assessment relating to the use of ractopamine in cattle and swine.
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Ractopamine, a feed additive, is banned by the EU, China and Russia that is still used in America and it's colonies. Can't make this stuff up.

ustr.gov

USTR Releases 2025 National Trade Estimate Report

WASHINGTON — Today, the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) submitted the 2025 National Trade Estimate (NTE) to President Trump and Congress. The NTE is an annual report detailing foreign trade barriers faced by U.S. exporters and USTR’s efforts to reduce those barriers.
ustr.gov ustr.gov
 
mountainaire said:
The devastation caused by outsourcing entire industries that were once the backbone of America and provided many men with a wage that could support a family far outweighs the damage that any temporary "market crash" could ever cause. Entire swaths of this country were plunged into decades of poverty because of this, and a few greedy people make bank off of it.

We cannot continue to limp along indefinitely with this Potemkin Village economy, where top career fields include HR women that get paid to sit on their fat asses and do nothing for 7 out of 8 hours, and firing up the money printer anytime reality starts to show to keep the illusion alive.

If we don't start actually producing things that have tangible quantifiable value again, much bigger trouble will be on the horizon.
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Reshoring manufacturing is a national security issue first and a balance sheet matter second. The above is an often repeated red herring and not related to loss of real income in the US and the demise of its middle class.

Constantly devalueing assets and currency through fiat-ing money, ponzi schemes throughout financial markets, globalization and division of labour on a continental scale, unbridled mass immigration, shoving women into the workforce through feminism and nowadays self limiting policies like the Green Agenda and DEI are the real culprits. Unless these issues above get tackled the breadwinner model from the 50s isn't coming back. Can't compete with half the third world both at home and abroad in assembling iPhones and sewing textiles.

In general people on the populist right have a rosy and unrealistic picture of working class life. Manufacturing towns are and were sh*t. Working class communities anno 2025 are worse off than service economy oriented neighborhoods. Wages are below service economy jobs, and working class communities in general are depressing and gloomy, riddled with alcoholism and domestic abuse. Human spirit and soul simply isn't made for repetitive assembly line work. Also manufacturing plants and companied got HR managers and LGBT briefings too, that's just policy and orders coming from above.

Nobody here has so far talked about the endgame. What if DJT gets the Changs to submit, deals get renegotiated and reciprocal tariffs (pressure tool) withdrawn then what? Where's the manpower going to come from to man the plants, and how is the US going to compete with the thirdworld manufacturing low tech goods/consumer goods? The Changs got promoted from rice picking serfs to factory dwelling serfs yet 50 years into the Chinese Century still don't do environmental policies, labor rights, quality control and Chang makes 350 USD a month working 12 hours a day 6 days a week sleeping on the job sharing a dorm with 24 others

I have my own ideas on DJTs real play here which in general is assertive and several steps ahead of the competition but I'd like to hear some other input first.
 
LaAguilaNegra said:
Where's the manpower going to come from to man the plants,
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That is antiquated thinking. The legacy manufacturing facilities today that are still in use but built 40 years ago need a lot of manpower to operate them. New factories that will get built over the next 5 - 10 years will be highly automated with AI and robots and will probably only need 15 - 25% of the number of employees of the legacy factories. Even if the USA brought back manufacturing via on-shoring most of those jobs are not coming back maybe only one quarter of those jobs will come back. And the USA currently has a lot of unemployed and under employed people so there is no shortage of people to fill those jobs. There are currently around 7 million officially unemployed people in the USA and another 5 million who are underemployed (e.g. working casual or part-time but want full time work). That is an untapped labour pool of at least 12 million people.

Because these manufacturing plants will be highly automated even if the US does re-industrialize that process might only add 5 - 10 million jobs in the next decade so there is enough of a labour pool. And not to mention the idle labour capacity will grow in the coming 10 years as AI and robotics cause a lot of additional joblessness. I really do not see labour shortages being a problem. If anything the US market has an oversupply of labour currently.
 
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Australia Sucks said:
That is antiquated thinking. The legacy manufacturing facilities today that are still in use but built 40 years ago need a lot of manpower to operate them. New factories that will get built over the next 5 - 10 years will be highly automated with AI and robots and will probably only need 15 - 25% of the number of employees of the legacy factories. Even if the USA brought back manufacturing via on-shoring most of those jobs are not coming back maybe only one quarter of those jobs will come back. And the USA currently has a lot of unemployed and under employed people so there is no shortage of people to fill those jobs. There are currently around 7 million officially unemployed people in the USA and another 5 million who are underemployed (e.g. working casual or part-time but want full time work). That is an untapped labour pool of at least 12 million people.

Because these manufacturing plants will be highly automated even if the US does industrialize that process might only add 5 - 10 million jobs in the next decade so there is enough of a labour pool. And not to mention the idle labour capacity will grow in the coming 10 years as AI and robotics cause a lot of additional joblessness. I really do not see labour shortages being a problem. If anything the US market has an oversupply of labour currently.
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But if the future is automated factories, then tariffs 100% make sense; from the leadership's position, you absolutely want those automated factories to be built in home territory to make yourself self-sufficient, and be able to sell it to others abroad.

Seriously, why do we need foreigners if we have robots? Don't need immigration either. And the jobs created to service the robot factories will be done here, in America, and the excess wealth produced by robots will be taxed here as well.

Tariffs make the most sense no matter how you slice it, but I think they make even more sense if robots are indeed the future. Robotic factories sound like a hen laying golden eggs; why wouldn't you want it??
 
Samseau said:
Robotic factories sound like a hen laying golden eggs; why wouldn't you want it??
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You would want it but the question becomes how do you redistribute the income if people no longer have jobs? Thus it circles back to the question of high VAT taxes or corporate income taxes to fund UBI or other social welfare programs. Current low corporate taxes don't make sense under this new paradigm.
 
Australia Sucks said:
You would want it but the question becomes how do you redistribute the income if people no longer have jobs? Thus it circles back to the question of high VAT taxes or corporate income taxes to fund UBI or other social welfare programs. Current low corporate taxes don't make sense under this new paradigm.
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If the automated factories are here, then first of all there will be that smaller number of new jobs. Maybe only a quarter of the jobs an older factory would have had, but still good paying jobs. Secondly, those factories need suppliers and subcontractors. That generates a lot more employment. The value being created by the factory production adds to the economy, which stimulates more growth.

If new manufacturing representing even 5% of current GDP was reshored in the next few years, it would be a huge boost to the overall economy, making tons of new jobs paying a living wage.
 
Thomas More said:
If new manufacturing representing even 5% of current GDP was reshored in the next few years, it would be a huge boost to the overall economy, making tons of new jobs paying a living wage.
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USA (or any western country) is not China. Due to regulation and bureaucracy it will take 5 - 10 years for those factories to get built. China can build damns, bridges, railways, factories sometimes within the space of 2 or 3 years most countries cannot do that.
 
Thomas More said:
If new manufacturing representing even 5% of current GDP was reshored in the next few years, it would be a huge boost to the overall economy, making tons of new jobs paying a living wage.
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I agree with what you are saying. I am just saying that the additional manufacturing jobs won't offset the job losses occurring in the wider economy due to advances in robotics and automation. Journalists, accountants, statisticians, data entry clerks, etc are being replaced by AI as we speak. The government will eventually have to rejig the tax and welfare systems to redistribute additional income to prevent civil unrest.
 
Australia Sucks said:
I agree with what you are saying. I am just saying that the additional manufacturing jobs won't offset the job losses occurring in the wider economy due to advances in robotics and automation. Journalists, accountants, statisticians, data entry clerks, etc are being replaced by AI as we speak. The government will eventually have to rejig the tax and welfare systems to redistribute additional income to prevent civil unrest.
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Not necessarily. Imagine for example that it costs $1,000 to produce a computer. And automation reduces that cost to $800. Those $200 of savings can be passed on to the consumer. The consumer will then take those $200 he would have spent on the computer, and buy something else, for example some nice handmade shoes.

So while employment decreases in one part of the economy, it could result in increases in other parts. But in order for this to happen, the savings must be passed on to the consumer and not be sucked up by the wealthy company owners.
 
Australia Sucks said:
I agree with what you are saying. I am just saying that the additional manufacturing jobs won't offset the job losses occurring in the wider economy due to advances in robotics and automation. Journalists, accountants, statisticians, data entry clerks, etc are being replaced by AI as we speak. The government will eventually have to rejig the tax and welfare systems to redistribute additional income to prevent civil unrest.
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I don't think we have to redistribute money in the form of a dole or a guaranteed minimum income, paying people to sit around while we tax the people who work.

Even if current jobs become obsolete, there are still things people can do that generate value. There probably needs to be protection and subsidies for some industries, but the goal should be to provide private sector jobs for people, not to create generational welfare recipients or armies of government bureaucrats.
 
Australia Sucks said:
USA (or any western country) is not China. Due to regulation and bureaucracy it will take 5 - 10 years for those factories to get built. China can build damns, bridges, railways, factories sometimes within the space of 2 or 3 years most countries cannot do that.
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There are absolutely states in the union who will green light these factories faster than 5-10 years.
 
The robotics necessary to replace for example textile workers is not there yet! I think it's very optimistic to think that we'll have that level of robotics within mid-century, and I'm sort of a futurist. And when/if we get that, the industry sure as heck won't we serviced by men in overalls. Machines will do almost all the work in such a scenario. Saying anything else is one-dimensional thinking. You're talking about a mass-depopulation scenario, and that is sort of the direction we're moving in also. Just surprising to se that people here who's always been vehemently opposed to such things all of a sudden supporting it! (weird)

Trump is gonna have to backtrack. He can probably sell it as "a deal," and his fans will buy it. But in reality it will be backtracking. The alternative is much worse. The US can risk losing the dollar's reserve currency status, and that is gonna be brutal!
 
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