Vineeth S

Tariffs are taxes. Tariffs are regulations. And tariffs cause inflation. Yes, they are a tool that can be used strategically for key industries, but there’s a big difference between targeted tariffs vs China on strategic parts vs random untargeted tariffs on French wine. And more importantly — tariffs aren’t by themselves going to bring back manufacturing. There are several interlocking problems: (1) The US issues the reserve currency, so it’s always higher margin to print 100 cents on the dollar, than to grind out a screw for 1 cent on the dollar. (2) Giving up the reserve currency to work on the factory floor is like going from a pampered heir that lives off a trust fund to toiling in the mines. It might be good for Uncle Sam on some spiritual level, but the population won’t enjoy it. (3) Environmental and labor regulations make it extremely costly to build in the US, but they also have nonzero benefit. And many won’t want the pollution and industrial accidents that accompany real production. (4) Becoming economically competitive with China — such that US products outsell Chinese products head to head in a neutral locale like Hungary — is not trivial. Tech can often do it in the digital world, but it’s a real fight and the Chinese are gaining ground here (see TikTok, Rednote, Deepseek). In the physical world it’s no longer a contest. China unfortunately has 100X advantage in areas like shipbuilding or consumer drones or construction speed. (5) The US itself relies on the ~1B members of the American Empire in places like Japan and South Korea and Germany to make things. These countries are essentially colonies — Biden was able to blow up Nord Stream without incident — so thinking of them as “foreign” enough to hit with huge tariffs is incorrect. Basically, giving up the 1B+ in American Empire to try to make everything with 77M MAGA voters is unrealistic. (6) I could go on about the timescales involved (China built up over 45 years, so this won’t be solved easily or quickly) or the need for stability (you need many years of reliable 10% price advantage to make it worthwhile to invest capex in a factory), or many other practical issues. (7) But essentially the practical solution if you really want to reindustrialize isn’t tariffs. It’s to give someone like Elon an unpopulated and geographically limited Special Economic Zone where all the old regulations are suspended (including tariffs, taxes, etc) and he can just build at the limits of physics. Everyone there has chosen to be there, so they all tolerate the externalities of construction and manufacturing. More I can say but let me pause there.