Comment by zjp
7 days ago
Yes! I've been consistently frustrated at both sides of the issue. It became salient for me when I read about how China had sanctioned three American drone manufacturers that were supplying Ukraine last year, and how it disrupted their supply chains and ultimately the war effort.
It is unacceptable for any other country to be able to do this to any part of the western-aligned military supply chain.
We needed a targeted policy -- I don't care about American cars except to the extent that those factories can be converted to aircraft and tank factories.
But the conversation has been frustratingly reduced to 'reshore low skill work' vs 'save my infinite trough of cheap plastic slop'.
I don't want to hear about tariffs bad, I want to hear about how subsidies are better or about how it doesn't matter anyway because of the structure of the Chinese economy (I saw it claimed without evidence that they depend on imports from places aligned with the west which is reassuring if substantiated).
There's an underlying issue everyone is dancing around.
I don't know why you are being down-voted, I think you raised some interesting points that add to the discussion.
National security / foreign interference hadn't occurred to me, and now I'm wondering what would happen to US economy and manufacturing if it was at war with China and or the EU over Taiwan and or Greenland.
How would US deal with Russian style sanctions? Can China simply ban all exports to the US?
In times of war, it probably is super important that a country and manufacture all essentials.
> I don't know why you are being down-voted
Just give it a few minutes to settle out. Sometimes people tap the downarrow by mistake, since it's 2mm away from the uparrow. It's not always a conspiracy :-)
If I were a third party downvoting my comment I would probably take issue with the characterization of the anti-tariff position as "save my infinite trough of plastic slop". Other countries do have highly skilled artisans. Tariffs are also considered bad on the merits (looking at it from a liberal [economically] world view). It's like vaccine skepticism to economists: an extremely low-status opinion for kooks and cranks. But I am open to being convinced on illiberal economics (this is not the same thing as saying I support it) because I consider military supply chain erosion a national emergency and I don't think "balloon the military budget even more with subsidies" is a politically viable position and "just build it in an allied country we now have to keep permapoor to make the economics work out" is cruel.
>We needed a targeted policy -
>But the conversation has been frustratingly reduced to 'reshore low skill work' vs 'save my infinite trough of cheap plastic slop'
The conversation has been reduced to that because this administration's tariffs are and have always been indiscriminate.
You bring up an interesting issue, but people aren't discussing it because it's orthogonal to what is currently happening.