You'll have to remove the potatoes as well as those can come from Canada.

Specifically thin sliced potatoes fried in industrial lubricants.

Think you want an Amstrad CPC? Try burger instead.

Good thing that the US cancelled collection of unemployment stats just as all these sorts of negative business effects were happening. If a job is lost in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?

I stopped buying vintage cameras from Japan on eBay.

Well, there's always the next administration…

Reminds me of a comment I think by Nancy Teeters the first female Federal Reserve board member. She said the other board members thought they could savage the US manufacturing industry to kill wage inflation and break the unions and it would come right back once they stopped. And it didn't.

I am imagining Mexican cartels smuggling hardware into the US...

(But seriously I do not know how good US Customs is but in my country every day millions of packages from Asia arrive and they are checking not even a percent).

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a purported niche/low-volume electronics, but the profit is somehow dependent on BOM price? a tariff bump on a small BOM doesn’t take you from profitable to homeless.

if that happened, the business already had seriously bad margins, bad cash flow, over-leverage, or maybe he was just doing it out of love getting paid maybe back for his time or not.

tariffs might’ve hurt, but they don’t collapse a healthy niche hardware company where buyers are presumably also into the niche.

seems weird i dont get it. can you explain further?

If the seller from the country doesn't pay the tariff then it gets passed to the consumer. Someone has to pay the tarrif to import a tariffed good.

Since it came from India shouldn't they be paying a tariff on that model

I understand your sentiment, but I feel like your position is somewhat simplistic, and the actual situation is more complicated.

First, overall, the US has increased manufacturing output over the last couple decades. 2019 was the highest year ever, covid interupted a bit, but levels are back there again.

However the number of people involved has dropped a lot. US manufacturing prefers automation and prefers to manufacture things which are high-volume, low labor.

A good parallel is agriculture. Foods produced in the US (and the US produces a lot of food) tend towards low-labor. Think fields of wheat or corn, not vegetables. Most fresh produce comes from cheap-labor regions like Mexico (or is grown locally with foreign labor.)

So really your point is not about American manufacturing, but rather American labor.

Secondly, this free market you refer to is the American consumer. They are very price sensitive, and deeply favor cheap over good. This contrasts to a lot of the rest of the developed world which strikes more of a balance in this regard.

Since labor is cheaper elsewhere, it follows that cheap imports are favored (by the consumer) over the locally produced items. Unfortunately the imported good is often of a higher quality now (because foreign manufacturers can afford quality and still be cheap.)

So, the politicians you speak of (regardless of party) are reluctant to medel, partly because of unintended consequences, and mostly because the only real lever they have is to increase the cost of imported goods (ie tarrif them) which in turn gets consumers upset. (Witness the fury of the voter in 2020 because of more expensive goods.)

Thus while it's helpful to blame politicians, politicians are elected by consumers. Consumers who could by local, but choose not to. Consumers who vote against politicians that cause price hikes. (Even when those same politicians incentivise local production with things like CHIPS act.)

You can blame politicians, and indeed corporations all day long, but the consumers are voting with their wallets, and "cheap" is the only metric they care about.

Please engage sarcasm-awareness mode.

I believe the OP was attempting humour.

No sure why you are being down-voted. Your argument is coherent and correct.

Targeted tariffs on specific goods leads to the development of local production of that good. Lots and lots of countries have these in place.

Blanket tariffs are, of course, useless. The US doesn't have the climate to grown coffee, so tarifing Brazil serves no purpose other than taxing coffee consumption.

A surgeon uses a scalpel, not an axe. Used well, tariffs are a very powerful tool. Used badly they create more harm, and don't achieve the goal of promoting local production.

Tariffs which are here today, but gone tomorrow, don't created the stable environment which long-term investment in local production requires.

> We need manufacturing in the US.

Overall there is a lot of manufacturing in the US. What the US doesn't have are manufacturing jobs because labor is more expensive than automation.

Maybe you meant the US should make sure to have some certain types of manufacturing like chips. In that case, targeted programs are a better approach than any sort of tariffs. See the CHIPS act for example.

You're not very good at it though. You're too aristocratic in your thinking - let the coolies make the stuff, we'll consume it.

The reason services are such a big part of your economy is because you can sit in an air conditioned office, send some emails, push some numbers around on a spreadsheet, and call it work.

Or targeted investment in relevant industries, similar to what the previous administration was doing before voters were suckered by the New York con man whose entire campaign was bemoaning everything about our country while apparently having some pretty spicy long-term kompromat hanging over him.