So this is just a tax on imports for mostly the middle class.

Furthermore, this is the results of the CHIPS Act, which gave incentives for TSMC to build the Arizona fabs.

Dollars can only be created in the US by the Federal Reserve or US banks. Since the USD is the currency in which most global trade is conducted, the US MUST provide USD liquidity to the rest of the world that they can exchange between one another and the US (cf. Triffin Dilemma). If the rest of the world has no dollars, e.g. an Indonesian company cannot sell goods to an Ecuadorian company settled in USD.

The benefits of this system to the US are enormous (cf. Exorbitant Privilege) since US can print dollars out of thin air and 'give away' these bytes in a database and receive real goods in exchange. Real goods that people spent energy and expended labor for, in exchange for bytes in a DB.

If the US stopped supplying dollars to the rest of the world, it'd first spark a massive financial crisis as companies that owe USD to one another default in a chain reaction. Afterwards, an alternate to the USD would emerge as 'hard money that everyone accepts'. Candidates for this currently are limited in the space of fiat, Europe and China are net exporters so they cannot supply EUR/CNY to the rest of the world in net just like a US with trade surpluses cannot. Possibly there could be a return to precious metal backed currencies. But in any case, in such an environment, US could no longer receive goods 'for free' in exchange for bytes in a database and its life standards would greatly suffer.

https://www.bea.gov/news/2026/us-international-trade-goods-a...

This is somewhat justifiable with vital sectors like agriculture, but if you do this in an arbitrary way just for the sake of it you just make stuff more expensive and your workforce less productive for no gain.

Those dollars are not just vanishing abroad, you are getting actual stuff for them, and your citizens then don't have to spend their own time building it and can do something more productive instead.

Have you accounted for the dollars that are no longer re-entering the country due to boycotts or retaliatory trade policies?

Think whatever you want about them, whether they're good or bad when it comes to environment, public health etc.

But one thing cannot be ignored - that they are not built to employ some large swath of people. They can be run with very lean teams, much leaner than the average person thinks for something so large. Any claim that they are employing some measurable amount of people is a sham they try to push onto the public.

I've mainly seen it used this way in business contexts

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/spend#Noun

The initial headline also conveys both that there is current spend with Broadcom, and that the future spend is higher than current levels.

The company that moves (or starts) manufacturing here today might get run out of business when/if tariffs are repealed and their competitor already has production lines in other countries ready to go. Heck, the factory might not even open before the winds shift.

No one can accurately plan with the uncertainty.

All the big names like Apple are just paying lip service to this. They are throwing, quite literally, pocket change or funds from the government (like CHIPS, which was less ham-fisted than the tariffs IMHO but still not something that's going to change the landscape overnight) at these endeavours to appease the current admin in favor of reduced/removed tariffs on _their_ products and good PR.

If congress wanted to actually do their jobs instead of both them and the judiciary abdicating their responsibility to the executive branch then _maybe_ we'd have a chance in hell. Until then you can look forward to more flip-flopping as the government changes and the smaller companies continuing to be ground under the heel of large corporations who can weather (or bribe) their way out of the tariffs.

More to the point, the notion that dollars leaving the country is a real problem is really a kind of primitive understanding of money. Dollars are something we control. If dollars leave the country, that means there is demand for dollars. We control the supply of dollars. We literally can’t lose, so long as people are still using the USD, which they’re less inclined to when we’re tariffing their exports.

Note I am talking out of my ass but this is how I see the picture. I have no experience in supply chain or manufacturing :)

> To everyone who created with Sora, shared it, and built community around it: thank you

"built community"?

Different company.

That said, you're right about cultivating new experience in younger generations. It's probably not surprising to hear that the majority of factory workers in the US are GenX or older.

This seems to be part of a broader trend, not just business. One group of pastor-students would talk about giving a “preach”. Drove me nuts.

If not caused by politics, then by demographic crash.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_acoustic_wave

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akustische-Oberfl%C3%A4chenwel... (pictures)

Indeed, but the role of a government is to steer/push private initiative in a certain direction.

Tariffs and stuff are steering private companies towards building stuff in-house (as in: "in the us").

Future initiative inconsistent with this directions will essentially be a sabotage of the US economy.

Who is "we"? Trade deficit dollars are recycled into assets, which compete with exports in the balance of payments. If you have a big house and fat brokerage account, you win big. If you have a job building shit, you lose big. If you have a job building tradeable shit and a low net worth, may god have mercy on your soul.

If you want the full economist version, "Trade Wars are Class Wars" by Klein and Pettis

Granted, I don't think continuing to shift to places with slave wages is a good thing overall, but we need complete factory automation to solve that problem (the problem of wanting cheap goods AND ethical labor). But the major players have seen the writing on the wall ever since covid lockdowns and have been slowly moving out of China since.

> inevitable decline or elimination of China as a production and/or trading partner

I don't think this will happen anytime soon, that companies will need short-term planning.

Outlawing or taxing imports (=tarriffs) of course helps with this.

However, if you look at economic history this always slowly lead to problems that only got resolved by fresh loans (that's what the move to dollar effectively did), hyperinflation or wars.

The fact that a president can create them out of thin air means they can be removed just as easily. I'm not anti-tariff or anti-re-homing-production (where it makes sense) but the _way_ it was done is my problem. Additionally there was no ramp, it was 0->100 immediately. A bill passed by congress to slowly ratchet up tariffs or similar over a period of time would have a much larger impact IMHO. It would give companies the ability to plan instead of just react. The tariffs were enacted in a timespan that made it impossible to move production local before they went into effect. Additionally, tariffs being applied unequally is terrible, it just means whoever has the biggest bribes (solid gold plaque holders anyone?) or can pretend they are moving manufacturing back to the US gets an advantage.

The amount of power held in the executive branch is unacceptable. Just look at how they raided/repurposed the CHIPS act money to force Intel (which I have no real love for) to sell a stake to the government.

Authoritarian governments are bad for business.

Wiki says: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_in_China

    > In the book, McGee says that, under the leadership of Tim Cook, Apple invested $275 billion in China between 2016 and 2021, to manufacture its products in the country (including building factories and supply chains in China, as well as training Chinese workers). McGee compares this to the Marshall Plan, as this is in excess of other corporate spending and, in real terms, was about twice the monetary value of the Marshall Plan.

Apple invested 3x that because they got 30x in return from the savings versus US manufacturing.

>Imagine if they'd spent that on the US instead.

Then iPhones would either have to be 10x more exsolve to keep the same profit margins or Apple would be broke trying to compete with Chinese made goods using US manufacturing.

If tariffs were planned, steady increase on a long term we might see a good effect. Like tariffs were used before this trump admin.

People in favour of tariffs make it seem like the best and wealthiest economy in the world is in a bad shape, and it is completely opposite, while failing to address the inequality issue with the wealth distribution.

However, it seems that Americans are so tired of growing prices that they are getting used to paying them. Just yesterday there was an article that summarized oil price drop 40% from when the war cooled down, but prize at the pump went down only 12%. The big oil explains this that people will buy gas anyways, so why lowering the price? I think we will see the same happening with electronics - Apple breaking news on $500B factory spending in USA is mostly because they believe Apple owners will keep buying Apple regardless of the price. They may be right... will see.

It did make it easy to raise capital, though, which is nice.

Although I have also heard it said “RF physics is black magic” to cover all the bases

I don't think they're foolish enough to invite the entire third world into the country to bolster low birth rates like the west does. So that leaves doing it the old fashioned way, which is a slow ship to turn around.

Because that's the difference between China and the US. It's not that the US does nothing, just that China does way more. Some companies are apparently paying negative tax (meaning every products sold the state adds 15% to the price, such deals apparently exist)

But, yeah, less tax means less everything for everyone. Especially less social support and less healthcare. But I guess this is what some of the more constructive people mean when they say taxes are too high. As well as what socialists meant 30 years ago when they said that very high import tariffs are a necessity. They compensate for these huge differences. But at the cost of making any foreign product (ie. "your iPhone") a lot more expensive than it already is.

    > I still get iPhone and Lenovo laptops 40% cheaper than family members living in Europe.

Because the gas station across the street will sell it for less. Because a different refinery will sell it to the gas station for less. Gas prices are the pump and oil prices in the commodities market don’t move in perfect unison. But they do move eventually.

Wild how some ragebait “article” can erase people’s memory of gas prices going down. Not to mention that gas at the pump has taxes/labor applied to it that can also change.

https://www.macrotrends.net/2501/crude-oil-vs-gasoline-price...

https://www.macrotrends.net/3591/us-gasoline-prices

No, the alternative is Alexander Hamilton protectionism, which built the country into an industrial superpower that eclipsed the very shadow it was put in place to escape.

What's done is done, though. We successfully sold the industrial base of the USA to the Communist Party of China in order to pump our brokerage accounts. Winning?

Predominantly US financial assets, like Treasuries and company equity.

It's important to remember that money is not value. It's a score that's meant to represent value, but the value itself is entirely distinct.

To compare, 2024 (UN) fertility rates (highest-lowest):[1]

  US:     1.62
  Japan:  1.23
  China:  1.02
  ROC:    0.86
  ROK:    0.75 (where an increase to 0.8 in 2025 was cause for celebration, as is a predicted increase to 0.85 by mid 2026)[2]

  US:    +10%
  Japan: -16%
  China:  -8%
  ROC:    -6%
  ROK:   -12%

[2] https://www.chosun.com/english/national-en/2026/01/24/IVHGRT...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_past_and_...

It also increases the immiseration of those in the areas replaced[3], which is likely a contributor to rising populism and political instability. Most of this malaise is just hidden in places like the Rust Belt.

[1]https://www.csis.org/analysis/rare-earth-export-restrictions...

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Illusion

[3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disease_of_despair

It's true that people work hard for that representation, because we've built systems where the link between the representation and the underlying value is quite strong, but it is still just a number at the end of the day.

If the type of prosperity you want to point to is "stock market go up," we need to talk about who owns the stocks and who doesn't.

I think you should equally be confused about abstractions such as university credentials, or citizenship.

We used to actually have starving people in this country, now we talk about "food insecurity".

Would you prefer to go back to a time were people were literally starving?