The Trump administration’s 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 Trump’s insistence, they can’t balance out his tariff hikes across the supply chain.
“Some manufacturers who had plans to open factories in the country say the new duties are only adding to the significant obstacles they already faced,” Bloomberg reported Friday.
That’s because the supply chain to produce those goods in the United States simply isn’t there, requiring companies to import raw materials and factory equipment—which Trump’s tariffs have made unaffordable—from abroad.
Only one of those is actually something that would cost money. The rest either don’t cost money (how does ending birthright citizenship require revenue increases?), or they’re plans to reduce revenue.
One doesn’t typically count a plan for reducing revenue as the reason for increasing revenue.
Again, the government doesn’t need to match spending with revenue. When you control the money supply you can just spend what you need. There’s an impact to doing so to much, but that probably won’t come to a head for a few years.
It’s not a grand scheme. It’s surface level opportunism.
Governments can spend at a deficit, but there’s a limit to how much debt they can accumulate. Other countries have found that out. US was in a special position in the economy as the largest economy, a strong position in international trade and a lot of dollar investment or dollar based trading. We could get away it’s more, but at some point it still hits a limit and falls apart.
We’re already at a point where debt payments are one of the biggest pieces of the federal budget, blocking out better uses for that money. We keep stealing from the future and eventually we’ll get there to find everything gone.
And that’s before you have an incompetent leader destroying all that dollar influence, everything that made that special economic situation possible. We’re fucking around with that special economic position and will come out of this subject to the same deficit limits as any other country. Well find out our accumulated debt is beyond prudence for a “normal” economy and we’re no longer special enough to ignore that
We were in a counterintuitive position where spending more money for things like infrastructure and chips act was ok because of our special economic situation plus it’s an investment in the future that should have paid off. Whereas the orange fools approach to spending less money just risks our special economic situation that lets us get away with fucking around, plus points to a future of despair: it turns into losing more money in the future
Yup, that was the “can’t do it too much” part. :)
Any of it would be relevant if I thought trump or the Republican party cared about those consequences.