I’m not seeing anyone discuss this here, so I figured I’d raise an important point: this style of tariffs is crushing for US manufacturing. While a universal tariff with no exceptions incentivizes domestic manufacturing, a selective tariff with specific industry exceptions is absolute poison.
You might think, as the authors of this exemption did, “well then we will exempt computer parts.” Then people will simply import the parts. But if you manufacture those parts in the US, you are suddenly at a massive disadvantage. Your computer parts factory likely runs using a large amount of imported raw materials, imported machines, and imported tooling, and there are no tariff exemptions for those broad categories… so you’re screwed. Oftentimes there is no reasonable domestic substitute. You will go out of business in favor of someone importing the parts, which now happens tariff-free under an exemption. That’s why, generally speaking, tariff exemptions are deadly to domestic manufacturing.
It's the opposite! A universal tariff is a tariff on all inputs that manufacturers need to be competitive. How will Ford or Tesla ever be competitive if all their inputs are 24% more expensive than Toyota's inputs?
Autarky doesn't work. Juche doesn't work. Comparative advantage works, both theoretically and in practice if we study economic history.
Do you really believe in the comparative advantage argument though? Surely it’s only true if comparative advantage is fixed over time.
And surely in order to leverage comparative advantage, an economy would need to know how good they would be at producing every possible good.
There are good reasons to trade, but comparative advantage doesn’t feel like the correct theoretical underpinning to me.
IMO your logic is all wrong. Comparative Advantage ist just applied "opportunity cost" of time. Humans and resources are unique, everyone has their theoretically "optimal" use of time in terms of economic output.
The invisible hand of the market will let you know what aspect of your output is most valuable for others.
The benefit of this invisible hand is that the "economy" as a whole does not need to know how good they are at producing everything. People just need to know if what they are producing now is more valuable than the next best alternative. Everything else will be sorted out with market forces.
In university lectures we were given the famous argument about olive oil from Greece and that it would never make sense to do our own olive oil because we both lack the natural resources (unique soil + sunshine) which allow olive trees to grow easily and we'd also have much better yields growing other things on the fields.
So to me, both opportunity cost and comparative advantage are really basic building blocks of economic understanding and I'm a bit dumbfounded that someone wouldn't understand these concepts.
It is good that you paid attention to economics 101 but we don't live in the 19th century anymore and economic theory has progressed a bit since Ricardo.
We don't have pure free market economies. Neither in China nor in the USA nor anywhere else. The see big monopolistic companies dominating most markets. We see an closer interlink between state and private corporations.
Even just with the currency manipulation that China engages in, things get screwed a lot. Or the special status the US has with the dollar. Real world is more complicated.
But even if we assume free markets, you misunderstood what the previous poster said. The problem with Ricardo's comparative advantages is that is assumes fixed advantages. It is like optimizing for a local optimum. You might be super inefficient in producing X because you have never done it but if you actually invested in learning how to produce X you might discover that you are really good at it and the comparative advantages would go in your favor.
I do still believe that trading with each others can lead to more net wealth in most cases and obviously full autarky is not realistic these days but like anything in economics, it shouldn't be taken as a dogma.
Absolutely agree. It's ridiculous that low wage labor is considered a "comparative advantage". It's an advantage to capital owners perhaps, but certainly not to workers. And like you said, advantages are not static.
In my opinion it's intrinsically valuable to have a diverse regional economy. Culture and economy are fundamentally inseparable, imagine a society where everyone is doing the same thing because of "comparative advantage" making them 10% more efficient than the other country... What poverty!
This aestheticization of factory jobs is something I've noticed to be driving the New Right's worldview. It's not dissimilar to and no less dangerous than the aesthetic fixation on the agrarian economy of Mao and Pol Pot.
Frankly, no, sweatshops are not important to the cultural fabric of a country.
The US has problems with housing affordability, with medical costs, and with service sector costs emerging from Baumol's cost disease, which are all things that will get worse with tariffs, ranging from higher construction costs, to higher pharmaceutical prices, to less service employees making the cost disease worse.
It's also untrue that comparative advantage only benefits capital. Consumers are hurt by higher prices and less job opportunities driving down demand on the labor market. This worldview of a zero sum contest between capital and labor is a populist fiction.
Manufacturing doesn’t have to equate to sweat shops. It’s hard to take your argument seriously when your judgement is undermined by such fallacy.
We have problems with housing affordability because asset values inflate inverse to the devaluation of the dollar. The dollar is deflating because a service economy is not as sustainable as a manufacturing economy. This is particularly pronounced when we all see the labor value of intelligent workers decreasing at a precipitous rate due to AI.
>"Manufacturing doesn’t have to equate to sweat shops. It’s hard to take your argument seriously when your judgement is undermined by such fallacy."
You're right; humans will be as uninvolved as possible in the next domestic sweat shop lines. Astute observation!
Tech bros who are frustrated with their job fantasizing about doing "real work".
An entire generation has grown up without assembly lines so it is easy to mystify it. People in Vietnam don't enjoy making Nikes but it is better than what came before: subsistence farming. But the Vietnamese factory worker trying to send their kids to university too.
Manufacturing employment plummeted in the US after the 90s.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/manemp
Lots of people remember the 80s and 90s being better times with quality manufacturing employment without romanticizing the past. To this day multiples of the “information” sector are employed in US manufacturing.
People remember those days because the Republicans hadn't destroyed trade unions and the pension system yet.
We can agree unions should be stronger, but union jobs in America cannot compete with nonunion much cheaper labor in other countries. If you have free trade and zero Republicans the same thing happens. If the jobs go away the union doesn’t matter. That’s why the unions consistently lobbied against NAFTA, the WTO, etc.
I’m actually not even sure what specific labor law changes you could blame that on. Clinton was running the show in the 90s, and I don’t recall any big union busting under Bush, whatever else might be said of him.
> We can agree unions should be stronger, but union jobs in America cannot compete with nonunion much cheaper labor in other countries.
I mean, they can, if you put up trade barriers or introduce capital controls. It's not a coincidence that after capital controls were removed, basically any manufacturing that could, fled America. And I (and my family) in Ireland were massive, massive beneficiaries of this!
Like, you can definitely make the argument that globalisation has benefited the world overall, while being bad for a bunch of people in the developed countries. And it's not a bad argument.
But unfortunately for all of the people who think globalisation is great, the votes of all the people who disagree count just as much as yours, and it looks like they're willing to vote for anyone who even hints at promising to fix this.
> Clinton was running the show in the 90s,
He introduced NAFTA, which made it profitable for much US manufacturing to move to Canada/Mexico. Bush let China into the WTO (or was that Clinton too?).
thanks for highlighting this. to those unaware the US currently employs 20M people in manufacturing while Information is only 3M.
so yeah even with a 'non-existent' manufacturing sector it has been able to provide more jobs than so called technology industry.
Perhaps this is the inevitable cycle of prosperity? We see this in so many facets now as generations progress - your comment reminds me of antivax social media people who haven't ever seen anyone more sick than a cold or tech bros thinking a trade job would be better since it might magically be "more rewarding" (I'm guilty of this!) with no regard for how much privilege is inherent in sitting at a desk all day and getting paid to think.
Like the stereotypical kid who grew up rich not understanding the value of hard work maybe the inevitable result of easy and safe living is a blind spot so big we're doomed to fall back down as a society and start over again and again.
Sure, anyone not agreeing perfectly with the current system of global trade is part of the "new right"... Another way to look at it: globalisation weakens democratic control over the economy and undermines unions. Is that not a problem in your opinion?
Globalisation Also creates markets for the more advanced goods and services to be sold.
If we are going to wade into the deep waters of international trade, then you can’t look only at america or American workers without getting blind sided constantly.
At the depth you are talking - globalization has created more nations than anything else.
The undermining of democracy came with increased deregulation and increased lobbying and wealth concentration.
That's a strawman. What I was doing was pointing out the appeal to the aesthetics of work and associated buzzwords ("capital"), noting the absence of any actual economy policy that will deliver tangible benefits to existing people. It's the same old populist shtick that we've seen in countless fascist and communist regimes where certain modes of work are fetishized and life is regimented around that prescription by a central authority, in the pursuit of a subjective notion of pure work. The giveaway is the attempted justification of an economic policy in service of a nebulous "cultural" impact.
> It's the same old populist shtick that we've seen in countless fascist and communist regimes where certain modes of work are fetishized and life is regimented around that prescription by a central authority
> Frankly, no, sweatshops are not important to the cultural fabric of a country.
And that's not a strawman?
What role does governmental industrial policy have your in thesis?
IMO industrial policy is the way to mitigate risks of war or extortion vis-a-vis a specific trading partner. Only once this safety criteria is fulfilled, politicians can think about tackling other issues with industrial policy - and unfortunately these further initiatives often fail or have unintended second-order effects (e.g. we want Intel chip factory in Germany).
My understanding is that due to human nature wars mostly start due to religious or extremist views of individuals leading a nation. Such a risk of your trade partner invading you because they don't like your skin color can be hardly formalized in an economic theory (maybe there exists one already, idk).
So role of industrial policy would be to ensure that a certain balance is kept with regards to creating dependencies to other nations, which could be abused in case of war.
Famous negative examples of failed industrial policy for Germany would be the dependence on gas mostly from russia and the dependence on oil mostly from middle east.
Another example would be the agricultural subsidies to ensure all citizens can be fed even when other nations would not export any food. A current example in Germany would be the production of "German steel" using fossil energy instead of production of CO2-neutral swedish steel. As Germany is part of EU, this is a conflicting view: We can't on one side ask for more trade and integration of supply chains between democratic EU countries, but on the other side assume that Sweden will deny steel exports to us when we'd need it.
Producing steel in Germany with fossil energy instead of doing it in Sweden with hydroelectric power is both more expensive and has more negative externalities (CO2 emissions due to use of fossil fuels). Therefore such industrial policy reduces welfare that would otherwise be available for German people.
> And surely in order to leverage comparative advantage, an economy would need to know how good they would be at producing every possible good.
Comparative advantage is an emergent property of trade that occurs naturally, it is the default state of being and can only be undermined by government policy.
You benefit from comparative advantage when you buy bread from the bakery instead of spending 2 hours a day baking your own bread.
Imagine how much poorer you'd be if the government put a large tax on you buying bread to force you to bake it yourself, in the name of self-sufficiency.
That's what's happening with these blanket tariffs, instead of targeting only critical defense manufacturing, Trump also wants t-shirt sweatshops to magically come back to the US despite only 4% unemployment. It's rank foolishness.
The alternative to comparative advantage is that there exist countries where it's economically optimal for them to produce every single possible good with finite resources taking into account the opportunity cost of producing one good over another. Or to put it another way, in a world where comparative advantage doesn't exist, the country in question must have the same economic outcome for any good they produce, and that seems ludicrously implausible to me.
Comparative advantage makes sense, with a national security overlay. That’s where I’ve landed anyway, and is a very simple explanation for all the more complex perspectives out there.
>Do you really believe in the comparative advantage argument though? Surely it’s only true if comparative advantage is fixed over time.
It's mostly not that complicated. Ecuador is better at bananas, the US is better at software so they trade. And similar stuff.
It's even simpler than that. Ecuador doesn't even need to be better than the US at growing bananas, they just need to be better at growing bananas than the US is at developing software relative to their banana growing abilities.
My favorite example is from an economics class quite a few years ago now. Michael Jordon is super efficient at making money playing basketball (told you it was a while ago). But he's also pretty good at mowing his lawn, since he's tall and athletic. But since he's way better at playing basketball, it makes sense for him to focus on basketball and paying some kid to mow his lawn, even though the kid is way less efficient at mowing lawns.
The US is way more advanced than Ecuador, and could presumably develop some hyper efficient banana greenhouse using genetic engineering and AI or whatever. But Ecuador is still pretty good at growing bananas and the US is much better at developing software, so buying bananas from Ecuador and putting the AI greenhouse resources into developing software instead makes way more sense.
> In order to leverage comparative advantage, an economy would need to know how good they would be at producing every possible good.
Maybe I'm not getting what you're saying, but I don't think so. The point of comparative advantage is that even if country A is better at making guns and butter than B, A is better off only making guns or butter and trading to B for the other.
To support your point, consider the long list of assumptions underlying "Comparative Advantage", such as at: https://efinancemanagement.com/international-financial-manag...
A key assumption being: "Factors of production are fully employed in both the countries. ... The theory assumes full employment. However, every economy has an existence of underemployment."
Another key assumption is "The labor cost determines the price of the two commodities. ... The theory only considers labor costs and neglects all non-labor costs involved in the production of the commodities."
One assumption not listed there is an implicit assumption as in much of economics of infinite demand for anything and no law of diminishing-to-negative returns when considering the environmental and psychological costs of consumption.
So, if you have unemployment in the producer country like China (meaning, there is no reason for them to limit their production) along with a significant capital investment in production infrastructure (like in the Shenzhen region for electronics), and you have limited demand in the consumer country like the USA (meaning, only so much can be sold there at any specific time), then the country which can produce stuff more cheaply will just flood the market of the other country for all goods in question -- even if the consumer country could in theory produce one of the goods at higher costs (or lower quality). Of course, there may eventually be macroeconomic issues like balance of trade issues and countries unable to pay for more goods (which the USA has avoided to date because the US dollar is the refactor global currency backed by the USA's global policing role for decades as a defacto empire). But even if labor in the consumer country like the USA is free, given realistically a lot of cost related to equipment and energy (and increasingly AI and robotics) and more nebulous things like supply chain integration and a can-do attitude, the consumer country may not be able to compete on price and quality of finished products from the more materially productive economy.
Tangential, but "Humans Need Not Apply" makes a good argument when they suggest that horses are essentially obsolete in modern industry (in the same way people may be soon). It's not that you sometimes use horses to any great degree in modern manufacturing (whereas before they pulled carts and turned machines) -- it is that for almost any industrial task horses are more trouble than they are worth now in terms of cost and reliability compared to electric motors or diesel engines and so on.
An economic theory like "Comparative Advantage" that entirely emphasizes labor costs is increasingly obsolete if human labor is less and less a major factor of production. The theory assumes a country will always have people doing something productive, but that is like saying we should bring horses back into factories when robots are generally more reliable. If people are not skillful with access to tools and capital and don't have a can-do attitude, then they will just suffer economically (unless protected somehow) No doubt there are special cases where horses are still useful in production or transport like how mules were used recently to get supplies into hurricane damaged North Carolina, but they are rare as long as the modern industrial system and its surrounding infrastructure functions well. Similarly, there may still be human roles in production, but they will continue to diminish. In 2010, I put together some options for dealing with this situation, available here: https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html
> While a universal tariff with no exceptions incentivizes domestic manufacturing
Not really. Efficient manufacturing requires access to a lot of different inputs from all over, from the machines that make things to the raw materials.
Putting tariffs on everything only incentivizes companies to move to a location where they can freely buy what they need and manufacture it for the world.
The US is not the only consumer of most manufactured goods. Making them in a country with cheap labor and no extra import tariffs makes more sense than in a country where everything is under tariffs
Universal import taxes on everything make no sense.
If you want to protect strategic production, you apply selective tariffs to support that local production while ensuring it can ramp up and import what it needs until it becomes self-sufficient.
Most countries, the US included, have used selective tariffs for this purpose. Applying a blanket tax on every type of import just increases inflation, as you can't possibly manufacture everything locally. For many products—especially cheap ones that were outsourced to China—there's no way to produce them cheaply enough for your internal market to absorb all production.
And you can't export them either, because their higher production cost makes them uncompetitive compared to cheaper alternatives from low-cost countries.
The secondary effects of import taxes are wide-ranging: they help when applied selectively and carefully; they don’t when applied capriciously and without thought.
The mere fact that high taxes were slapped on phone imports so "phones could be made in the US," only to backtrack mere days later, demonstrates that this is either the work of an insanely bright economist nobody understands, the scheme of a grifter aiming to benefit personally, or the capriciousness of a borderline dementia patient who cannot act rationally.
Really the way to do it, AFAIK (say, per How Asia Works), is to apply selective subsidies, not tariffs, and to subject the subsidized industries to substantial export discipline. That's what gets you South Korean world-beaters. Autarkic tariffs just get you Indian industry, where consumers have learned that the few goods marked "export quality" are superior.
And, I don't want to be partisan about this stuff, but, that's basically what "Bidenonics" was trying to do, in a small way: Subsidize a few industries like semiconductors and batteries and solar panels, that were deemed strategically important.
Whether the US was ever going to be as serious as South Korea or Japan about this remained to be seen. Frequently the subsidies seem to be handed out and then nothing happens (e.g., "Gigafactory" in Buffalo, NY).
Korea used to have substantial auto tariffs. Every nation with an auto industry does.
Tariffs are/can be effective, you're just not supposed to tariffs everything on a whim.
You are advocating a stronger government when the GOP basically wants to eliminate it...
Would it make sense if you wanted to engage in some insider trading and short everything?
Universal tariffs with no exception don't even incentivize domestic manufacturing when it cuts local manufacturers off from an outside market that's bigger than the domestic one.
My company manufactures equipment in North America, with the most expensive input coming domestically from Ohio. Guess what though? Retaliatory tariffs from the global community means that the most rational course of action is now to move that manufacturing *out of the US* so that we can sell to the global market without penalty.
Sorry Ohio, but Mexico is currently *not* engaged in a trade war with Canada and half the EU so the rational decision for a company who wants to sell in those markets is to divest from the US.
> engaged in a trade war with ... half the EU
That is generally not possible. All EU countries share a common trade policy. Another country can either be in a trade war with the entire EU or with none of the EU.
According to the Wikipedia [0], The EU member states delegate authority to the European Commission to negotiate their external trade relations.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Commercial_Policy_(EU)
Even universal tariffs with no exceptions is a problem.
Many things cross US/Canada/Mexico border in the process being manufactured. And tariffs will stack up.
Many advanced products (tech/chip, etc) are not entirely made in any single place. Some stuff is imported, and some is exported again, and tariffing the world, will also make the world tariff you.
I think this is all around bad. Best case scenario the US has elected a president who decided to burn all political capital, alliances and credibility in search of a slightly better deal.
Doing this sort maximum pressure economic extortion style policies, *might* getter you a slightly better deal. But at what cost?
Can EU countries buy US military equipment, when it turns out that the US will withhold support for equipment we've bought and paid for, in order to pressure a democracy, fighting for its existence, into surrender.
Trump may get a win in the headlines, because everyone thinks he'll go away if he get a win.
> Can EU countries buy US military equipment, when it turns out that the US will withhold support for equipment we've bought and paid for, in order to pressure a democracy, fighting for its existence, into surrender.
Why would anyone buy US military equipment that's either "10%" handicapped on purpose, or remotely disabled whenever the US changes its feelings about the users of said military equipment?
He's already gotten what he wanted from it and bragged about it: so many leaders of different countries calling up and kissing his ass. He's certainly not going to give any of them what they wanted, and now they all have the taste of his ass in their mouths. At least they have something in common with Elon Musk, now.
There's many sayings about diplomacy, though I understand the reality is much more mundane.
One that comes to mind is "a diplomat is a person who can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you actually look forward to the trip" — like all good quotes, attributed to a wide variety of famous people.
Competent governments send arse kissers to those who need pampering, and send blunt to those who need to see bluntness. But (in a competent government) these things are uncorrelated with the actual negotiation position — "speak softly and carry a big stick" etc.
Trump being bellicose to everyone at the same time is a sign of his own incompetence.
I belief his story about dozens of countries calling him about as much as his story of him taking a cognitive test and having every single answer correct. Or his doctors statement that said that there has never been a healthier president than Trump.
Yeah, this is a man who literally says he has the greatest memory in human history but then constantly says he can't remember stuff a day or two later or coincidentally was living under a rock and has no idea what's going on in his cabinet.
Worth looking at the actual deals. The initial talks with Canada and Mexico resulted in reported "deals" and "wins" that were actually just confirmations that the deals negotiated under previous administration are in fact happening.
> Your computer parts factory likely runs using a large amount of imported raw materials, imported machines, and imported tooling, and there are no tariff exemptions for those broad categories… so you’re screwed.
All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display at your local 24/7 news feed for more than eight years, so there’s no point in acting surprised about it. You’ve had plenty of time to lodge any bribe worth the president's time and it’s far too late to start making a fuss about it now. Oh, for heaven’s sake, Americans, President Trump did a crypto scam on his supporters before being sworn in, you know. I’m sorry, but if you can’t be bothered to take an interest in local affairs, that’s your own lookout.
I've no sympathy at all.
> crypto scam on his supporters
It absolutely blow my mind that that was just "Friday", and not the biggest scandal in Western political history.
"It's just Trump being Trump, move on, move on, nothing to see here, no consequences for anyone..."
The speed with which we went from “out-of-context recording of a ‘yeaaaaaah!’ can end your presidential campaign” to “suggesting your supporters shoot your opponent if she wins doesn’t mean you can’t be president… twice” was incredibly quick.
Thought I'd check to see how his memecoin is currently doing. It's exactly as expected.
I wonder how many of his supporters bought at $70 ...
I honestly have a hard time coping with it. No joke. It's revolting, how that wasn't the end. Right after the Hawk Tuah girl was burnt at the stakes for the same stunt, too.
It's not even that it is pure evil and predatory, it's the aesthetics of it... It tainted civilization, at the very least America! It's so, so pathetic and cringe. Unbearably distasteful and undignified. Too much cringe.
The only thing topping this, was the president of the United States selling cars in front of the white house, a few weeks later. I can't.
Man, imagine an alien patrol passing that Tesla (a billionaire's fucking car in space as a beacon of Earth life's legacy, honestly makes wanna puke) and then learning about the state of things here. I feel embarrassed to the core living in this period of time. I'd rather shit my pants on live TV.
I crave the cleansing heat and certainty of thermonuclear warheads. Shoot these fucker with a bullet of frozen sewage and then sterilize this place for we all sinned collectively. Send some tardigrades to Mars and hope for something better, but turn off the lights on Earth.
Tainted.
> It tainted civilization, at the very least America!
I regret to inform you that america is not and has never been a unique snowflake. An important player in the world, sure, but one that has long been obsessed with the notion that it is special in some way, and it's just not true.
Every country is at risk of going batshit crazy, and it's always been disturbing how americans seem the truly believe they are immune, because when that belief gets challenged…
FYI: I am not American. I feel Fremdscham, but the transitive relation is implied in my comment. Politicians in my country are just as corrupt (e.g. Friedrich Merz doing marketing and legislative favors for McDonalds), but for the plurality of our political system, they still have to act decent to some degree. For now.
There is another quality to what's happening in America right now. I can only explain the things Trump did as sadistic demonstrations of power. I bet he actually gets hard knowing half the country will literally eat his shit, that he actually can do anything he wants. It's a theme, it's the grab 'em by the pussy mentality. I mean, let's go back: After winning the election, he showed his gratitude by humiliating (this is important) and exploiting his most loyal followers for everyone to see - and they took it, they danced, they remained at his side, they doubled down.
But whatever enabled his cult, this cancer is growing everywhere. You can't get through to significant portions of the population. Same in Germany. They've become immune to arguments, every opposition is anticipated by their conspiracies. They vote against their economic and social interests, they have detached from common ground. It's not protest, it's all got a fucked up life of its own. Brain worms, social contagion.
I think, if we want to survive this, short-lived social media has to go, and we have to take care of the boomer issue.
I want to be careful about how I frame this, because I don't want to make it sound like Trump or AfD don't have agency and can't be held responsible for their own actions. But if you're curious what it is that enabled both cults, the answer is pretty clear: there's significant popular demand for harsh immigration restrictions, and in much of the West only crazy far-right parties are willing to listen to it. The Danish political establishment successfully defused the far right by moderating heavily on immigration, and I don't think it's too late for other countries to accomplish the same.
No.
Can't speak for the US, but in Germany immigration is not the problem they make it out to be, but one that is propped up as a scapegoat. You presume the people's demand here are based in reasonable distress, when really it's not. Or rather it's not attributed correctly. Stats don't support it, proposed solutions are not able to resolve it. In particular the AfD has no actual answers for anything. Their "politics" is arbitrary outrage and evidently they get sponsored by Russia, favored by platform owners and spin doctors like Musk. German intelligence agencies are investigating Russia's involvement in recent attacks in Germany. The AfD's role is destabilization and it's working.
The topic is not driven by actual exposure. This is clearly evident when you look at voting patterns. In places where you are the most likely to have contact with immigrants right-wing populists are the least successful and vice versa. Compare recent car attacks by islamist and neonazi motivated perpetrators. There is a massive distortion in media coverage.
I absolutely do not accept throwing anyone under the bus just to make the mob happy. Not immigrants, not women, not trans people. Sorry, but it's fucking degenerated and vile to suggest this as acceptable sacrifice. Every human deserves basic rights, due process and life in dignity. Look what they are cheering for in the US at the moment. Disinformation fueled hatred is not something to make compromises with as a civilized person.
The actual, but occult distress all people feel comes from economic erosion and ideological decay. Don't get me wrong, immigration isn't all bueno, but it's blown out of proportion. Rent, financial security, food, prosperity and self-efficacy. No politician is addressing that. We are by far not out of options to address the real issues of the country.
Why are you not advocating for addressing those?
I do advocate for addressing those, and I don't support throwing anyone under the bus. That's why I support moderating on immigration!
I agree with you that the anti-immigration movement doesn't make much sense to me, and I'm pretty confident that restricting immigration won't have the benefits its proponents claim. But the people who support it are genuine, as far as I can tell, and aren't going to just evaporate if rent decreases 10%. You can restrict immigration in a humane and respectful way, or you can follow the US and wait for xenophobic politicians to restrict immigration in an inhumane and disrespectful way; I don't think there's a third option.
> You can restrict immigration in a humane and respectful way
But this won't change anything, if their demand is not reasonable, or founded in truth to begin with. As I said, the AfD is most popular where there are no migrants at all. Lots of them feel their narrative validated when they see a brown person existing, see "Turkish" people living here for generations. The goalpost will always shift. You will never satisfy them, if their demands aren't anchored in reality. Again, this isn't fueled by exposure, but guided media outrage. There is a lot of conspiracy narratives mixed in as well. Talk to them, poke deeper than the concern trolling surface. You will encounter actual loony talk quite soon.
Apart from that, the biggest problems with these ideas are factors outside of Germany's control. E.g. if the origin country won't accept those immigrants back, you can't just air drop them there. Constitution, European law, human rights, Schengen... it's not really possible/worth it to do anything significant. It's all ever going to be for show.
On the contrary, demands that aren't founded in reality are often easier to satisfy, because pure rhetoric can shift the narrative much more easily than it can shift reality. Going back to Denmark again, if you pulled out charts and tried to track the objective quantity of immigration, you'd have a hard time identifying any policy shift. But as you say, immigration restrictionists were never looking at these charts in the first place. What matters politically is that the center-left PM goes around talking about how mass migration can be dangerous and the preservation of Danish culture is valuable.
Honestly, I get the impression your objective is to get a foot in the door for a certain idea, so to speak. Concern trolling ("just" preservation of Danish culture, huh?!), constructing a narrative where legitimizing neonazi parties through compromise is without alternative. You are not even addressing the foreign influence with these movements, the threat of social media reality distortion. Although, you tried to preemptively diffuse political association, I don't believe you are arguing in good faith. My answers are meant for everyone else reading, since I think it's wasted on you.
The CDU ran their election campaign on "anti-immigration" and continues to perform this rhetoric. So far the AfD poll numbers have been climbing, so ... your premise is evidently just wrong. This has been debated to death and I think for the general case, political science agrees that people will choose the original, when moderate parties pander to populist ones.
I am not familiar with the Danish situation. It's a very small country, with little land borders. Germany is large, bordering nine countries. It has a very high population density, large global economic influence, and a very unique history in regard to unification as German Reich, industrialization, revolution, fascist and communist dictatorships, war and division, and contemporary reunification. There is a very, very distinct geographical correlation with AfD voters and the former DDR territory.
Most people here are very fine with Germany's lack of nationalism and flag identity. We never really had a unified cultural or religious identity, since what's considered "Germany" has been quite radically changing in the last 300 years. (I think Rammstein's "Deutschland" does quite a good job expressing this feeling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeQM1c-XCDc)
You are also suspiciously discounting the impact these populist narratives and policies have on the lives of those matching the appearance of the scapegoat targets. Overall the neonazis' demands are not "just" a "sane" immigration policy, but open calls in particular for deportation, even deportation of German citizens. And they are also calling for de facto suppression of women's rights and LGBT lives all together. Oh, and what about the newly found Russia fandom and climate change denial? What's your take here?
Should we give in there as well? And if not, what's the difference?
If you want to win AfD voters, what you fundamentally have to do is present a vision that inspires AfD voters and convinces them to join your side.
Does this mean adopting AfD positions and trying to water them down a bit? Not necessarily, I agree that populist-lite is always going to lose to the original. But it means convincing immigration skeptics, gender traditionalists, perhaps even Russia fans and climate change deniers that they're allowed to be on your side. It's a hard but necessary line to straddle. I struggle with it myself - I spent a while over the weekend trying to find some good flyers to leave on people's Teslas, until I sat down and asked myself why none of the major protest organizers are encouraging this.
And once you start thinking within the realm of strategic moderation, immigration sticks out as an obvious compromise to make. Restricting immigration has few catastrophic downside risks, is easy to roll back if circumstances change (unless you do it in a catastrophic Trumpian way...), and unless your population pyramid is really unhealthy doesn't involve many tradeoffs with other policy areas.
Keep your sympathies, it's a narrow-minded view to assume all Americans wanted this. We didn't. And it's not like we had a real, ethical choice. The runner-up was going to be business as usual with foreign politics, enabling genocides and engaging in proxy wars and regime changes for the control of energy and resources. Many people did not believe either candidate was legitimate or shouldn't be in prison.
You missed the sarcasm, no worries. It's also referencing a scene in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_th...
I caught the initial reference, it's one of my favorite books, it just sounded less and less sarcastic by the end of it, to me it came off as "The Heritage Foundation published Project 2025 for all to see months before you voted in the guy who put it into action". I apologize for assuming incorrectly.
Factories, tooling, machinery, etc. must be amortized over a market and production run. If you're making toilet paper, the cost is relatively low and the market is huge. The TP you make today will still be good TP in a decade. No one toilet paper factory can serve the world, so you'll need many of them in many markets. The inputs can be found within the U.S.. Why not build one in the U.S.?
A factory that produces a specific model of phone is only going to be able to run for a few years before it needs to retool for a newer model. That means a huge investment goes into such a factory on a continual basis. If one factory can serve the entire world demand for that model, why build two?
If you're going to build just one factory, are you going to build it in a market that's walled off behind trade barriers, both for outputs and inputs? Only if that market is significantly bigger than the rest of the world combined. If the rest of the world is bigger, than you build outside the trade barriers and people inside of them will just have to pay more.
Tariff's might bring low-end, high-volume manufacturing back to the U.S.. Chip fabs, phone factories, or anything so high-end/low-volume that it must be amortized over a global market is not going to return to the U.S. because of tariff's. An administration that changes their minds every few hours only makes matters worse. Whether Trump has recognized this and is conceding defeat or he's bowing to pressure from companies like Apple is immaterial. That kind of factory is not coming to the U.S. anytime soon.
I agree with your general point, but I just read the book "Your life is manufactured" by Tim Minshall, in which he describes the production of toilet paper in detail and it's a surprising global industry. Wood pulp with the correct density comes from a few specific places on the globe (Scandinavia and South America apparently).
Those are big markets, but there are a lot of suitable softwoods for pulp production, farmed around the globe. Ideally, you want to use ones with good natural ratios of lignin to cellulose and hemicellulose (that's just to say, the constituents of biomass) to minimize processing and chemistry costs.
People don't want incentivization of American domestic manufacturing. That's where the fundamental disagreement is, after all. People don't have confidence in American products built on US soil by upper middle class Americans. It's going to take long to (re?)build trust to reverse that.
That’s ridiculous, there is plenty of confidence in US manufactured goods, the problem is that US manufacturers have impossible economics for anything that isn’t boutique or super high margin.
Need an impedance controlled 16 layer board for your fancy new military radar? No problem.
Need a basic 2 layer PCB for mass manufacture? No one in the US will make it at the price you need to be competitive.
"No problem"? It's not just that the prices are high; I can hardly get those guys to even answer the phone and give me a quote. I can get that board from China before I've gotten through to a local sales rep. Then when they do finally check their messages they want to fly out, meet me at my office, size up my operation and my budget, have a nice chat over dinner, and spend a few weeks pestering me with phone calls without ever getting down to business.
You are pretty confused about why this is.
When the only market you ever had was high touch high cost low volume production then that is your default business model.
The biggest issue is that Trump is pushing tariffs without first ramping up local manufacturing, the type of manufacturing you are looking for isn't _currently_ being catered for in the US. It may in the future depending on how things pan out, the bet Trump is making is that it can happen, time will tell whether he is true.
I don't think it will generate jobs for local US manufacturing since the only way to compete with low cost of labour markets is to automate more than the low cost of labour country.
Business is reasonably good at filling whatever niche is willing to pay. So far the evidence is that Trump is willing to over commit and then backtrack. Having a negative outlook doesn't help anyone, think positive about your country and shift with the times.
> think positive about your country and shift with the times
You know I tried to think positively about the United States; but darned if they don't keep doing negative things. Like appointing grossly incompetent people to head Federal departments. Like unlawfully and arbitrarily abducting people from the streets. Like extorting universities - ideally centres of free thought - over non-complying ideological positions. Like appearing to wreck the economy; but in ways that might just advantage himself and others in his circle. And the list goes on...
Some of us aren't "shifting with the times" because of an ethical line we won't cross. I grew up in the United States in the 1960's and had the constant drumbeat of "We're the world's melting pot," "We're the most benevolent spreader of democracy," "We're practically the only free country on the planet," "We are a country of laws." beat into us in public school. So it's a little jarring to see the wholesale abandonment of these values at the hands of someone who can barely string together a cogent sentence of more than, say, 4-5 non-repeating words and for whom "negotiating" means "win/lose", instead of "how can we meet our needs _and_ your needs, while creating more value in the process?"
Personally, I tried having a positive outlook; but saw this coming and left the U.S. just ahead of Trump 1.0.
This rant aside, it's incredibly wishful thinking to assume that one can undo in weeks or months, the complex web of international trade that has developed over decades because of the much-vaunted invisible hand of the market.
> think positive about your country
Like insisting the United States is 'rigged, crooked and evil'?
Trump insists the United States is 'rigged, crooked and evil':
https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/trump-in...
>“The Witch Hunt continues, and after 6 years and millions of pages of documents, they’ve got nothing. If I had what Hunter and Joe had, it would be the Electric Chair. Our Country is Rigged, Crooked, and Evil — We must bring it back, and FAST. Next stop, Communism!”
So do you have any shred of evidence he's backtracking on all the racism and misogyny and homophobia and transphobia and cruelty and corruption he overcommitted on?
And it's not just (or even mostly) costs. Nowhere in the world has supply chains anything like the Pearl River Delta. Need the most esoteric component imaginable? There's probably a factory down the road that can supply it, MOQ 1 or millions. It probably has a booth or distributor in Huaqiangbei where you can grab a few hundred today. The US has nothing to compare. US manufacturers can't build those sort of domestic supply chains at any cost.
I'm not sure I believe that, considering Schiit manages to do it for virtually every component of their product line other than wall warts. Are they two layer boards? Nah, I suspect they're 4 layer...but the prices aren't such that you can't survive on domestic manufacture. The prices are just higher than overseas - meaning that your profits are slightly lower, a situation current markets are not willing to accept.
Every time I've looked at local manufacturing, whether machine shops or anything else, the prices are higher than Ali but not unreasonable.
Relocating a factory to the US is expensive both as an investment and in its operation. Thst means you're thinking on a time horizon of decades not years. So if you're the CEO of a corp that is expected to be incentivized to move production to the US you would want to know how long those tariffs are going to last.
And lets face it, even if Trump instigated those tariffs via executive order at day 0 and didn't touch them till the expected end of his office that would not be enough incentive to relocate production. (1) because he could change the tariffs literally at any point (and he did just that) and (2) because any president after could just reverse the executive order immidately.
The erratic way Trump installed, modfied and communicated the tariffs run counter to the communicated purpose. E.g. why of all things excempt computers and electronic devices now from the tariffs? Why put a 10% tariff on goods from dirt-poor countries whose goods you already buy at an rate bordering on exploitation to your own benefit.
The way I see it, either he has no idea what the hell he is doing, or he is doing it for another purpose, e.g. insider trading. And I see myself exceedingly tired of journalists trying to read the tea leaves on a madman.