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.