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Comment by kevin_b_er | Hacker News Reader

Made in USA electronics goods are now more expensive via tariffs because the equipment and the components are now more expensive. Brilliant.

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Well, more likely the companies making them will just move production elsewhere or go out of business. Components are big part of the cost of your average consumer device, and margins mostly aren't high.

It depends a lot on exactly what kind of production facilities we’re talking about moving. Simple plastic injection mold shops? Sure, maybe. Multi-billion dollar chip fab plants? Not so much.

Right. It is extraordinarily difficult to just pack up a high-tech factory and move it to another country. Actually moving the plant and machines is the easiest part, the hard part is the people. Training people to be experts at high tech jobs takes a lot of time, and even then you're losing the decades of experience and the high concentration of likewise experienced and well-trained suppliers nearby.

Of course we could just move the people here too, but our current immigration policy doesn't seem too fond of that approach either.

I'd say the other hard part is finding manufacturers you can trust. You have to think that you're basically exporting company secrets when you manufacture offshore.

Taiwan fabricates chips. PRC doesn't.

Seems like a good guise for industry leaders to move operations of out the US in a climate where political sentiment is high for keeping it here.

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