▲ | mindslight 3 days ago | |
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. |