Comment by freeone3000
5 days ago
Auto tariffs have kept Detroit producing automobiles despite various other entrants, while still being low enough for foreign competition.
5 days ago
Auto tariffs have kept Detroit producing automobiles despite various other entrants, while still being low enough for foreign competition.
Auto tariffs are currently keeping far less expensive - yet much more advanced - Chinese EVs out of the US market, costing American consumers thousands of dollars on every car purchase.
While not allowing an entire industry and supply chain to die. One of the last heavily industrial and manufacturing industries left in the US at any decent sized scale.
You need such things for national security, so it's very likely "worth it" even all the way down to the American consumer level.
Look at the shipbuilding industry if you want to see what happens to that capacity without it. Due to the lack of commercial shipbuilding in the US, we can't even keep up with building for our Navy during peacetime. If a war ever were to attrit naval forces to any meaningful degree there would be zero hope of scaling up that supply chain in a relevant timeframe.
Arguments could of course be made if the auto manufacturing industry (and it's suppliers) are useful in an actual hot war, but I think without them we'd be in even heavier dire straights in that regard.
The US ship building industry is barely kicking along .. by intent, for whatever reason the US is not competing for the 90% of global commercial ship building demand currently met by China, Korea, and Japan.
This does not mean there is zero hope of scaling up should wartime demand come into existence.
~ Is the U.S. Shipbuilding Capacity in Crisis? - Today’s Low Industrial Output May Not Signal Strategic Weakness https://www.theunseenandtheunsaid.com/p/is-the-us-shipbuildi...
Currently the demand for US military shipping is low, some suggest a change in organisational structure and siloing might be a path forward: The Next Great Era in U.S. Shipbuilding https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2025/february/nex...
You could make a rational argument for short-term protectionism if the US government were simultaneously pushing the domestic auto industry to modernize, but the government is doing the exact opposite: it opposes electric vehicles.
The large American manufacturers are able to keep on selling technologically outdated, overpriced vehicles in the US, because they have a captive market.
When the Chinese imposed protectionist measures in the auto industry, they were aimed at allowing Chinese domestic manufacturers time to catch up technologically, and they were scaled back as that happened. Any international car manufacturer can now set up shop in China and compete directly with the local brands on an even footing. But the US has imposed drastic protectionist measures with no end-game (worse than that: US policy is backwards-looking and intended to maintain an old technology). It's just a permanent state of affairs.
_Just about_. After significant government bailouts.
Ultimately, this sort of protectionism tends to be expensive, and yield an inferior product.
But may still be worth it to protect a skilled domestic industry.
I think the same effects can be achieved using subsidies, and I do accept such interventions can have legitimate justifications.
At significant loss to the consumer. Sure a tariff can benefit a subset of people, by costing others even more.
We could also do this without tariffs by simply taking money from some group and handing it to another.
Someone mentioned a week or two ago on HN that the point of the auto tariffs was national security (maintaining the industry/expertise/etc. in the US, I assume), not economic.
They’re wrong. Lyndon Johnson imposed the 25% Chicken Tax during trade skirmishes with Germany to make Volkswagens more expensive, and later tapes surfaced showing this was actually done for political favors. It had zero to do with national security. As a result Americans pay about 25% more for light trucks of inferior quality ever sense, as a giant handout to the car industry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_tariffs_in_the_Unit...
So as usual, tariffs cost the country imposing them, returning less net goods, and moves money into the protected class at the expense of the wider public.
Receiving money for free is different than money earned for work (even if subsidised).
It creates different incentives for the receiver.