An actual plan would be targeting specific industries where america has the ability to scale up, and having congress pass tariffs that slowly ramp up over time to allow a smooth transition.
An actual plan would be targeting specific industries where america has the ability to scale up, and having congress pass tariffs that slowly ramp up over time to allow a smooth transition.
It's just that because those products don't come in boxes anymore but are distributed over the Internet people think they don't count?
(Also, if you're trying to reduce imports, that messes up the balance of payments of your trade partners who get mad, and if you do it obnoxiously enough then other countries start substituting away your exports)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing
Most of this manufacturing is just not consumer facing.
US industrial (absolute, not per capita) production hasn't grown since 2007: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/INDPRO
But the population has increased by 13.5%: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta...
It's one hell of a gamble to rely so much on software "products", while anything that software actually runs on is made in Asia. Building up a software industry will be a lot easier than it was to grow the industrial and tech ecosystem. And that ecosystem will give sweetheart deals to homegrown software, while extorting yours. Sorry, did I say "will"? I meant it's already doing so:
Apple CEO Tim Cook "secretly" signed an agreement worth more than $275 billion with Chinese officials, promising that Apple would help to develop China's economy and technological capabilities - https://www.macrumors.com/2021/12/07/apple-ceo-tim-cook-secr...
In China a small outfit can get financing and open a factory anywhere.
You can't do that in the USA. You are too small for the lenders or investors who do such things to care yet too risky for traditional financial institutions to risk anything on you.
If I want to buy a couple of CNC machines and start making a product in my garage I have to hope I have enough room on credit cards to do it because I cannot get the money from anyone. Doesn't matter if I have a good idea. Doesn't even matter if I have some initial customers/orders.
If the government is going to piss away money then at least piss it away on that sort of economic activity. If you can present a coherent business plan or product design then lend people the capital secured by the equipment and/or IP with generous repayment terms. Set progressive milestones to unlock additional financing... for example give a gov backed credit account at SendCutSend. When you have an engineer's report on the prototype to turn in you unlock financing to order your first CNC machines. Develop a pipeline. A script to follow. Something a person can follow to get big enough to become a real business.
Grant time to pivot if necessary. If that doesn't work then ultimately the government takes possession of the equipment. Make it clear so long as you return everything in good working order then in X years you're eligible to re-enter the program. Then hand that equipment over to the next person in line.
You need a high credit score (680 at least) to even have a hope and 10% cash to put down if not more.
Unless you can prove experience managing a business forget it. You have to demonstrate other outside income (hope your spouse works a good job) or enough cash in the bank to cover living expenses for a year or more.
If the business is going to be a new venture you have to put together financial projections that demonstrate how you are going to start making money and it had better be quickly. You will not get 2 years to ramp up. And if you fail to meet projections they can call in the loan.
Oh and by the way: you must sign an agreement to take unlimited personal liability for the loan. So if the business fails they get to take away your savings, retirement, even your house. In fact if you don't have significant assets they will put a lien on your house as part of the loan closing!
In China if you want to start a factory in an area the national government lists as desirable the state-owned bank will almost shove money into your hands. Repayment timelines are extremely generous. You mostly don't take on personal liability - instead they focus on the assets, land rights, etc. That is if the business starts to fail you will own machinery, a lease on the land, and/or a factory building so they are content to secure the loan against those things.
When the state bank underwrites your loan in China they only care that your project is technically viable and you have some kind of plan. They assume you will find a way to be profitable and worst case they can take the factory away from you and give it to someone else. As long as your plan makes sense - if your plan says you're going to make robot arms but your plan doesn't mention buying any CNC machines or hiring any electrical engineers you will have difficulties. And if you want to build a factory to make lathes expect serious pushback - the Chinese government considers that sector to be "over-capacity" so they are reluctant to finance new factories for such things.
Not that it matters because unlike the USA if you aren't a Chinese citizen then you can piss right off because you aren't going to be approved for anything and you aren't allowed to own property anyway. Not that any court would ever side with you in any case either.
The entire philosophy is different and I'm saying we should adopt the Chinese philosophy. Instead of letting risk-adverse private banks make the decision the government should make the decision. And instead of focusing on credit score and making you sign an unlimited personal liability contract - do the opposite and secure the loan against the actual factory, machinery, and assets. Build a network of such so if a business fails you can turn around and offer it to the next suitable applicant who can bootstrap their business instead of selling everything for pennies on the dollar at auction.
But you’re right. Everything is in execution and for critical manufacturing it makes sense to pay the fraud price to boost it.
If the business fails the bank will pay someone to come take the machines away then dump it at the nearest auction. If something happens to the machine no one involved cares because you eat the liability (good luck proving otherwise when you're broke).
($LOAN_BALANCE - $AUCTION_PRICE) + $REPOSESSION_FEES + $AUCTION_FEES + $LOAN_DEFAULT_FEES = $YOUR_LIABILITY.
If you dig into the stats actual startups and small businesses mostly don't use any government small business programs. The few that do get used are most often gamed by much larger companies who "contract" with RandomJoe Inc who exists only to claim to be a small business.
That's the tragedy of it -- Democrats in office understood the macro picture and worked diligently and intelligently to fix it, the spurned labor interests in the MAGA movement understood what had hurt them and correctly rejected it, but the former didn't know how to message to the latter so a demagogue swooped in and here we are.
The gonzo free-trade rhetoric of the Clinton era should never have happened, second best time to get rid of it was 10 years ago before Trump I, third best time was a few years ago before Trump II, but the fourth best time is now.
If you disincentivize investment, economic surplus tends to shift toward rent-seeking behavior which creates relatively little labor demand. Many economies in Europe are poster children for this phenomenon. Ideally you want an economy that strongly incentives investment over rent-seeking.
There are circumstances in which tilting tax, labor, trade etc policy towards capital is actually good for everyone, in which trickle-down economics actually does work, but they are rare and specific, typically apply to developing economies, and are not nearly as universal as they are portrayed in the typical American econ class. Here's how you judge: look at interest rates. Real rates, not nominal rates. The price to rent money. Is it high? Then the economy knows how to productively deploy a marginal dollar of capital, as evidenced by people willing to pay to do it. Is it low? Then the economy has no idea how to deploy the marginal dollar of capital, as evidenced by its willingness to let you try for dirt cheap. In the latter case, proposals to shift tax, labor, and trade policy towards capital are simply propaganda put forward by the wealthy for purely self-serving reasons.
I agree with everything you're saying except this bit. I don't think democrats were working to fix it in any fundamental way. They're too beholden to corporate interests to do anything that overturns that apple cart. They were trying to tweak the program slightly to make it less bad, sure. But that's not a real fix for such a broken capital/labor split.
In general, stop trying to steelman the looters. Sometimes a con artist is really just a con artist.
Re-read my comment in the context of the message to which it replied.
If that was not your intent, then please don't take it personally.
Capitalism produces where it is convenient to do so.
And no politician can change it.
You can try to protect very few critical sectors, but not whole "manufacturing" which by the way keeps rising in US since ever.
What politicians want to sell is the "good old times of well paying manufacturing jobs".
Robots have long come for those.
If you want to protect your whole "manufacturing", you also need to make peace with the idea that consumer and industrial prices will balloon.
You can only compete, choose your battles, but you can't live in a world that does not exist.
Before tariffs, unemployments was ~3.5% and real wages were rising, and part of why wages have been rising is because the cost of goods like TVs have been falling.
Manufacturing is facing the same fate of agriculture: machines and robots will keep displacing people. Nothing is going to stop it.
2. There is no such world where we'll choose to do things less efficiently to artificially save few jobs. And it's not about your TV being 100$ more expensive, it is about everything you touch and see being considerably more expensive, with a cascade effect on the businesses that need the equipment.
3. Average Joe in US is as much a shareholder as some imaginary person you have in mind. And a company's duty is towards shareholders first, workers second.
> a company's duty is towards shareholders first, workers second.
This is just like, an opinion, man. There's no reason a company has to be like that.
It just benefits company management to act like it's an objective truth because their pay is stock-based.
Law. Board and CEO have fiduciary duty towards shareholders.
Management has to act in shareholders' best interests especially when those conflict with their own.
That's not the same thing as shareholders above workers (or anyone else for that matter).
Laughably untrue.
Is it most convenient to produce semiconductors in taiwan? No. Decades of taiwanese industrial policy produced that outcome.
Capitalism takes advantage of current conditions, but those conditions aren't inherent or natural, they're the result of history and specific choices by specific people.