05-25-2021, 11:29 AM
(05-25-2021, 11:13 AM)Au165 Wrote: The short answer is no, tariffs do not really work in bringing back jobs it is more of a political move than an effective tool for job creation. They can be used to fight predatory pricing by other countries looking to destabilize economies but the end result isn't really more jobs. Even beyond just the global nature of today's economy, moving it away from China sounds good but the reality is so many of the rare earth metals and raw materials in a wide variety of the goods we consume come from China as they are simply the world leaders in a lot of those items. Even if you moved the manufacturing of the final products away from them to other countries or even here, in the end, you'd still almost have to play with China to get raw materials at the scale we need.
No, that is a straight pass-through back to consumers. Essentially the tariff cost is getting passed back to consumers by raising the price of the good. The general idea of tariffs is that they raise the price of the foreign product enough that the consumer buys the cheaper, and normally local, alternative. The issue often is that there aren't local options to choose from instead, or the foreign option even after the tariff price increase is still lower than the local option. In both cases, the foreign manufacture simply passes the cost back to the consumer while not "eating" it so they actually take little to no penalty from it but the consumer does.
I agree China is abhorrent in terms of its human rights violations and other issues. The reality though is China's dominant role in a global economy will not be unseated through tariffs. China is about the only thing that can derail China as their geographical advantage in terms of raw materials, along with their state forced slave wages to make them a "necessary evil" to most of the world hence why there has been little actually done about their human rights issues. There is a belief that Africa could potentially provide an alternative but because of the fractured nature of the content with a lot of destabilized governments, it is hard to put too much of your eggs in that basket. Interestingly enough, China recognizing that potential has actually invested a lot in "owning" Africa in an attempt to preemptively cut off future competition.
Fwiw, I just skimmed this and will read the rest after posting this...
I just want to be clear, my question didn't really relove around the idea of bringing jobs home or creating jobs in the US. It's more of a simply moving production (to anywhere else) from China.
I understand this idea that we should bring all of our manufacturing back home is fool's gold. While I do applaud companies that are able to do this, it's not feasible on a larger scale.
Fwiw, I used to work for a company (guitar company) years ago that did a ton of importing. We actually built our own factory in China, and also used Vietnam and Korea for other production runs. I'm a little versed on the subject. I understand moving production is easier said then done because companies have invested in infrastructure in China. I also know there's a cost to using more expensive labor (Korea was much more expensive than China, but it was also higher quality)
Even if this takes some time I think it's worth it. Perhaps we could even maybe even roll back some current tarrifs, and then scale them higher as time goes on to allow companies the time they need to explore alternatives.
