These jobs are not going to return. 'The system' is too profitable in its current form. What will happen is tariffs will cause prices to rise as companies pass on this tax to consumers (which is inflationary). In fact, they may go up more than that, same way as they did during covid. Even if say two years from now a new congress and senate remove these tariffs. The prices will not go down. Companies will not build new factories here because it is easier, after they get the new higher prices locked in, to just lobby to get the tariffs removed and then keep the difference as sweet sweet margin.

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Gareth321 3 days ago | parent [-]

> These jobs are not going to return. 'The system' is too profitable in its current form.

The system is set up to ensure efficient allocation of capital. If it's more profitable for manufacturers to produce goods in-country, that is exactly what they will do. It's a bold claim that tariffs will have no impact whatsoever on investment and spending, because it's clear that they absolutely will.

	▲	mindslight 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		At best there are going to be a bunch of new bonded warehouses built, so that distributors don't have to front the cost (and uncertainty) of the new import taxes until they have customer cash in hand. Appropriately-implemented tariffs could have kept American industry here if implemented 2-3 decades ago. At this point it's closing the barn door after the horse left, started a new life, and watched his foals grow up and have their own families. The horse is not coming back. Far too many people think of markets as some kind of magical supercomputational system. They're really just a heuristic that does avoid some spectacular failure modes, but easily gets stuck in local maximums. China did the work over decades to prime the pump so that industry picked up and moved, while our "leaders" facilitated the looting. One pathetic man throwing policy tantrums for spectacle isn't going to reverse these now-entrenched dynamics. There is also the glaring issue that Chinese companies can just as easily set up factories in other countries with low US tariffs. They won't be paying import taxes on the equipment they bring there to do so (like setting up a factory in the US would require), and in fact they will probably receive favors from those countries' governments for the investment. So these ham-fisted import taxes actually encourage the expansion of Chinese influence into other countries.