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Comment by Spooky23

7 hours ago

I think that’s the wrong way to look at it. Tariffs could be an important tool as part of a strategy to kickstart US manufacturing.

A big issue is education. In my region the state government is pushing hard to support semiconductor manufacturing. In addition to incentives for building facilities they funded education in community colleges to train up the workforce, did some similar stuff at the high school level and implemented incentives for supporting industry.

But… you get the army you have, not what you want. POTUS has the strategic insight of a cab driver and is surrounded by a wack pack of sycophantic C-team players. We’re hurting manufacturing because without a strategy you’re just driving margin enhancement for a few industries, and the grinding down of the economy will hurt most others.

We should look to the Chinese as a place to learn from rather than a faceless enemy. They achieved amazing results and made some mistakes and sought out to do some things that are kinda gross as well. But… they aligned policy, governance and incentives to move their country out of the sorry state it was in. DJI has like 20k PhDs working on drones. I doubt we have that many in the US.

I pretty much completely agree with you.

I'm not saying that Tariffs are necessarily bad or wrong. But they are a shape blade that is really easy to cut yourself with. Blanket tariffs are effectively putting a sword on a rope and wildly swinging it around in a crowd.

What you need is a surgeon to handle the tariffs.