I don't think so - did you see how the tariffs were calculated? They divided our trade deficit with a particular country by the total value of our imports. Take China - our deficit with them is $295 billion, our total imports are $439 billion. 295/439 = 67%. Which then they divided by half. "Reciprocal tariff" is not what you think.

They want to eliminate the trade deficits, not get to zero tariffs. The tariffs are to make imported goods so expensive that they are more than the high cost of making things in the US instead. So we're screwed either way. Pay more for imported goods, or pay more for goods made in the US. Maybe there will be more manufacturing jobs, but I don't think they will be as well-paying as people think.

Mark

Especially when done by automation/robots, since employers don’t want to pay a living wage because their products would be too expensive.

Yep. Trump has had an obsession with trade deficits for decades. Tariffs are just a tool he thinks will fix the trade deficit "problem."

Some insights in this if you have 20 minutes.

No one wants to work in a toaster factory anyway, except if its a fully automated place with proper good paying jobs, and the unemployment rate is already low at ~4%. Imo, the tariffs are nothing more than a slightly disguised sales tax and ofc. China, EU and the rest of the world is going to respond. Im sure they can find ways to hurt the flagships of US economy like Alphabet, Meta, Apple etc. even if they, for the most part, trade services rather than consumer goods.

Agreed, some. I’m an automation engineer, I get it.

There are remaining jobs at these places, any typically they pay fairly well.

My last major project, just under 1b, was a chemical plant that made a product (that ends up in bikes sometimes!!) that was proprietary/high end stuff.

After engineering and construction - close to 400 engineers for 2 years, and a few thousand construction workers for 2.5+ years- the plant hired and trained about 250 “super” operators to staff the 24 hours of operations. Decent starting pay, full benefits, career path.

—2500 to 3000 construction workers for 3 years— for every one of these places we build. Big impact.

Along with that were all of the vendors, contractors, outside consultants, outside construction contractors, logistics- all to support operations.

And the plant was supposed to grow 6x in size.

Billions of impact to the area.

The product was stolen by China, they hacked our technology, flooded the market with cheap knockoff versions of the product.

We shut the doors 5 years after we built the place. Everyone was laid off. All that investment went poof.

Out of curiosity, how would you measure this Moon-bound economy?

Maybe record highs in the stock markets? Perhaps record-low unemployment rates? What about record-high inflation-adjusted wages?

Just asking, because those all already happened in the United States within the past couple years.

I'm not seeing any talks of tariffs on engineering work, which represents much higher paying jobs than manufacturing, and has none of the pollutants associated with manufacturing. You also don't tend to find ten years olds doing engineering work.

Perhaps hard to identify foreign created designs, but not too hard to identify US based companies sending work offshore, or bringing foreign workers onshore with student and work visas. These are middle class jobs, gone.

Actually outsourcing enables Americans without specific skills or capital equipment, to turn their ideas into products. Jan Heine in an earlier blog talked about how he collaborated with Panasonic to produce his tires. The Panasonic engineer pored over all the nitty gritty of the manufacturing and engineering details, while Jan Heine himself, knowing nothing about that specific subject, just focused on the end product he wanted- which was the lightest and most supple tubeless gravel tires possible. And obviously he doesn't have the resources to build a huge factory capable of smelting and molding rubber tires. Outsourcing enables Jan Heine to bring his boutique line of tires to the market. He was able to climb to the top of the value-added chain, create a market for a niche product, and hire a number of people here in the US who sell the products. This story is repeated many times over in the bicycle and e-bike world. Lots of entrepreneurs were able to turn their fanciful ideas into reality thanks to low cost outsourcing.
It would be a sad day for all of us when all these creative small companies are driven out of business and the only remaining players are the big established legacy companies that are able to build brick and mortar factories here in the US; and the only products we can buy are the products that sell to the masses and fall neatly into the producers' price-point hierarchies.

I know everyone wants to talk about tariffs instead of our 401k disappearing, but this has been turned into a P&R thread.

Closing for moderator review.