- Joined
- May 16, 2019
It's received wisdom from about 50 years of studying the Great Depression and the decades before it. TL;DR the free-trade guys make plausible, mathematical claims that tariffs just make things more expensive for consumers, or cause outright recession/depression.
There's 2 problems with this idea. First, the free marketeers get a lot of the cost reduction in their data from one-time production shifts, like outsourcing to China. Second, they don't model such structural changes or constraints. Leading to conclusions such as:
In a static model, this is true. But the point this time around is to change this structure outright. Trump wants to force production back into the US, something he ran on in 2016, and doubled down on after 2020's Covid supply chain problems.
I won't do a whole rant on globalization, but the 60s-80s globalization wave wasn't just driven by cheap overseas labor. It was driven by the standardized shipping revolution, cheap oil (after the 70s crunch), and other innovations that made transportation dirt cheap. Decades later, oil isn't cheap, the labor costs shot up, and transportation now has security and quarantine risks. We may be at the point where overseas advantages can't overcome the costs of tariffs, because all its profit boosters have been normalized out.
Of course production won't move back to the US if we can't ramp it up any more. Building new factories is stupidly expensive and regulated, new power plants even more so. The population has been sending half its kids to college for decades, telling them they're too good for blue collar work. Real estate and land prices are still sky high, thanks to QE and inflation. Internal transportation networks are OK, but need upgrading if any serious volume is to be pushed through them. All of that has to be overcome at the same time, and cheaply enough that the simple math of it all winds up cheaper than whatever tariff Trump slaps on overseas products.
It's a huge task, with a lot of complicated regulatory fixes and logistics upgrades needed. I don't know that Trump can pull all that off, but he can at least get things moving in that direction. The real danger will be in 4 years, if someone else removes tariffs and kneecaps the whole process during its multi-year ramp up.
Of course production won't move back to the US if we can't ramp it up any more. Building new factories is stupidly expensive and regulated, new power plants even more so. The population has been sending half its kids to college for decades, telling them they're too good for blue collar work. Real estate and land prices are still sky high, thanks to QE and inflation. Internal transportation networks are OK, but need upgrading if any serious volume is to be pushed through them. All of that has to be overcome at the same time, and cheaply enough that the simple math of it all winds up cheaper than whatever tariff Trump slaps on overseas products.
It's a huge task, with a lot of complicated regulatory fixes and logistics upgrades needed. I don't know that Trump can pull all that off, but he can at least get things moving in that direction. The real danger will be in 4 years, if someone else removes tariffs and kneecaps the whole process during its multi-year ramp up.
