re: Companies continuing to offshore jobs….

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It's sad because a lot of American business owners would like to hire locally and use goods sourced in America.

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Then they can.

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For many American entrepreneurs there is joy in providing a good living to a member of the community in the form of a rewarding and well-paying job.

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Then why don't they do it?

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It is again sad when they aren't able to do that and also keep their doors open.

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I see. They don't do it because it's not economically feasible to do so.

So why don't they just move to Mexico or Guatemala?

Then they could provide great, rewarding jobs to local people in their own community.

I'm not sure these entrepreneurs you think are out there are really out there.

But even if that's true, them not being able to create an impossible fantasy situation is no more "sad" than me not being able to flap my arms fast enough to fly (I'd really like to, you know) or to dominate the NBA (been a dream of mine all my life).

How "sad" is it that I can't fly under my own power?

Or is the tragedy rather my extremely immature view of the situation?

Is the solution that the government should mandate that I get to play in the NBA and other players have to let me dominate them, or is the solution for me to grow up?

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o 300%? Surely that won’t lead to inflation

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The advantage of a tariff is threefold.

1) for critical infrastructure items like chips, medicine etc it ensures those items can never be used against us as leverage by ensuring they’re produced domestically.
2) the threat of the embargo is the real benefit because it produces leverage for better trade deals
3) for areas of manufacturing we need to protect in their infancy or as areas of particular focus we can use it to allow them a foothold as they achieve competitive levels of competency

But do I care if BMW gets hit with a 20% tariff as long as we have Ford, GM and Toyota building vehicles here instead of Mexico or even worse China? No.

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Why would anyone do this? They can make more money by simply skipping the US market.

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Your position is that GM will simply stop selling vehicles in the US market if we apply a tariff? Are you joking? They’d go out of business.

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In a vacuum? Sure! But no such magic wand exists. The only way to use vastly more expensive domestic labor is to increase the cost of goods. What happens next?

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It’s not a perfect magic wand but creating jobs by which workers can actually afford to purchase products rather than sitting on welfare, a UBI or working at Target for $16 is a far preferable outcome than having 20% cheaper products being sold to unemployable unskilled labor who require public benefits.

But again, if properly executed and sustained the 20% increase in price is never actually felt by the consumer because the tariff is never applied, only the relative wage increase for the domestic vs foreign workers which is then additionally mitigated through them paying taxes and spending their money domestically.

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This isn’t relevant. Unless of course, you believe corporations exist for the “common good” of society, not the people that own it. There’s a word for that.

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The rules under which the corporations compete should be created with an eye towards optimizing outcomes for people rather than the corporations.

Socialism is a horrible structure, but so is endstage capitalism.

The government sets the rules by which corporations operate and that is what I would seek to tweak in order to build middle class wealth and end the reliance on the social welfare system.

That’s done through focusing on what drives individual wealth and small business creation rather than what has given us Amazon and consolidation of commerce via economies of scale.

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But do I care if BMW gets hit with a 20% tariff as long as we have Ford, GM and Toyota building vehicles here instead of Mexico or even worse China?

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We don't have Ford, GM, and Toyota building cars here. There is no car on the market being manufactured 100% in the US. Ironically, of the three mentioned, Toyota has the highest percentage of domestic manufacturing, while GM has (by far) the lowest. (You will find sources that give different results, but if you look carefully, they are all reporting on manufacturing done in the US AND Canada...I don't know why. My claims are based on sources that I found that reported for the US only.)

But none of them are more than 60-65% manufactured in the US.

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It’s not a perfect magic wand but creating jobs by which workers can actually afford to purchase products rather than sitting on welfare, a UBI or working at Target for $16 is a far preferable outcome than having 20% cheaper products being sold to unemployable unskilled labor who require public benefits.

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It's not self-evident to me that that statement is true.

First of all, the idea that you're going to completely (or even mostly) eliminate the need for government assistance by creating jobs is a fantasy. And even if you could, it would still be by government subsidy in the form of the tariffs, so I'm not sure what the perceived benefit would be...you'd still be paying for it with taxes.

But it doesn't matter because you can't.

Jordan Peterson has a video on YouTube from some years back in which he uses a standard bell curve of intelligence distribution and the military's threshold for accepting recruits (I want to say it was an 80 IQ, but I could be misremembering) as a threshold for determining how many people are in American whom the military wouldn't accept because their intelligence falls below a point at which—by experience—have determined that they are incapable of successfully occupying any position the military could place them in, regardless of how repetitive and simple.

Using those two metrics he ends up showing that the number of people in America who fit that description is statistically tens of millions of people (I don't remember the exact number). Having more manufacturing jobs is not going to eliminate the need to basically support those people (or allow them to turn to feral lifestyles and violent crime to survive). It just won't.

Secondly, that idea that no one really pays for tariffs or higher wages for domestic workers is also a fantasy.

You're falling for the same thing the liberals did with the ACA. All they did was shift the curve upward for people on the cusp of not being able to afford health insurance. They 'effed around with it, made it more expensive, but required taxpayers to subsidize it for people below a certain income threshold—so those people basically got it for free—but the people just on the other side of that threshold got screwed hard. Their insurance costs went up exponentially, and they had to pay for it all themselves.

The same thing with this.

Sure, people who would normally make $18 an hour but now have the chance to make $30 an hour benefit, and that benefit outweighs the 20% increase in price for them.

But what about people who were already making $70,000 a year in non-manufacturing jobs?

They don't get a pay boost, but their purchasing power just went down 20%.

This is why the famous saying exists. There is no free lunch. SOMEBODY has to pay for it.

If you're o.k. with market engineering a la Obama for the purpose of redistributing income and making people who were higher in the economic ladder pay for it, o.k.

But we need to be clear that that is absolutely what is happening.

There is no such things as this: "If properly executed and sustained the 20% increase in price is never actually felt by the consumer...which is then additionally mitigated through them paying taxes and spending their money domestically."

Them paying more taxes doesn't help our $70,000 a year teacher at all. Her taxes don't go down as a result. Neither does that one select group spending more money.

But the next time she has to buy a car or a washing machine or fruits and vegetables at the grocery store or a computer, she has to spend 20% more than she otherwise would.

Somebody has to pay, dude. There's just no way around it. For more Americans to get paid more, someone has to pay for it.

Money doesn't just magically appear.

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There are no principles other than Us vs Them.

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We’ve got them in this thread arguing for straight up socialism. It’s fascinating to watch.

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We don't have Ford, GM, and Toyota building cars here.

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The only reason we have a domestic auto industry at all is due to protectionist trade policies.

I would prefer to see that number increase to whatever extent is reasonably possible and tariffs or the threat of them are a means by which to do so.

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First of all, the idea that you're going to completely (or even mostly) eliminate the need for government assistance by creating jobs is a fantasy.

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Elimination of welfare is not a realistic outcome, nor should it be considered the standard by which a policy is judged…rather minimization of its use.

The current system doesn’t minimize welfare nor improve the standard of living for the widest range of middle class work capable citizens therefore I prefer tweaking it as I outlined earlier.

We’ve imported non functional low IQ illegals brought in at the behest of the DNC as a replacement voting block and by the GOPe as it benefits their chamber of commerce owners.

This is a negative to domestic workers as it drives down their wages and I would see them sent home asap.

The remaining domestic population of non work capable individuals should be heavily sifted to ensure they aren’t abusing the systems and our tax system revamped to encourage the most competent among us to have children rather than the least capable as we currently do.

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But what about people who were already making $70,000 a year in non-manufacturing jobs? They don't get a pay boost, but their purchasing power just went down 20%.

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Only on the items impacted by actual tariffs rather than those items that were just threatened to have tariffs enacted.

Surely you see the value of the leverage the threat conveys? And market forces would dictate that if the tariff works as intended it would result in competitor products being produced domestically as those firms adjust to the new market realities eventually bringing prices back to the real cost to produce plus whatever the new domestic wage costs are rather than the full tariff amount if enacted.

As I mentioned this is also mitigated via taxes on the wages paid and a direct reduction in government services required for those who are currently unemployed.

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f you're o.k. with market engineering a la Obama for the purpose of redistributing income and making people who were higher in the economic ladder pay for it, o.k.

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Market engineering happens every day in every nation. As long as it results in beneficial outcomes to the middle class it’s a net ad.

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This one doesn't benefit the middle class. It benefits a small group of people in the middle class and hurts all the rest of the middle class.

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Bingo. Any time you push someone defending tariffs you end up with some magic handwaving where everybody wins, but that's not reality.

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Possibly, but the government isn’t forcing them to move by law like that idiot mentioned.

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Sadly, offshore is where innovation is coming from in things like autos...

Our protectionism basically pushed innovation away. There is no need to make cars that can compete internationally when the govt is propping up your industry

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Saw an article earlier today with several “Made In USA” companies that are relocating most if not all manufacturing to Mexico and Asia.

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Finding labor in the US is an actual problem