If you're spending 3.5 years trying to "renegotiate a deal", you don't have a strategy to bring manufacturing back. If you change your policy multiple times in a week you don't even have a strategy.
Easier to onshore manufacturing with multi-year timelines, but you don't need multi-year timelines to impose tariffs on carefully selected industries, not penguins and your existing industries' key suppliers.
Well, if your goal is to pump and dump the stock markets, this is a strategy and it is working.
I don't think that the current administration has enough foresight to actually plan for such a scheme but I think they are smart enough to see an opportunity, to wit the posts on social media shortly before withdrawing some tariffs.
> This ignores the reality of power in the US. Presidents can't implement multi-decade initiatives.
Which is why if anyone wanted to actually bring manufacturing "back" to the US they would work with congress and pass laws that curtailed the tariff powers in a way that ensured that in the areas where you wanted long term investment the president would not have the power to change policy unilaterally. At which point the typical congressional gridlock would serve to ensure stability going forward and allow businesses to invest.
Presidents don't need multi-decade initiatives to be not so hopelessly inept at trade policy they end up hurting manufacturing rather than bringing it back.
Trump shouting about how his amazing tariffs are going to bring manufacturing back and then promptly cancelling most of them and bragging about how everyone wants to do deals with him and he's going to do beautiful deals isn't any kind of strategy for bringing manufacturing back, and frankly the fact that so many Americans are dumb or partisan enough to insist it is represents a bigger problem for US industrial policy than term limits
Meanwhile, every other country is also negotiating amongst themselves to remove any dependence on the US. Dealing with the US is only to soften the blow and buy time.
Nope, only the people defending the dumbest and most pointless act of economic vandalism in history.
In fact the only argument I can think of in favour of setting tariffs for the Heard and McDonald islands is that the average American that thinks that this level of attention to detail helps US manufacturing probably is less intelligent and capable than the penguins that live there....
> ... some were concerned about the law's provisions favoring American industry. ... the chairman of the 2023 G20 meeting in India, called it "the most protectionist act ever drafted in the world", asking American officials, "You believed in market forces and now you do this?" Other countries have begun to create their own similar laws. China requested WTO dispute consultations with the United States.
> 27 European Union finance ministers have expressed "serious concerns" about the financial incentives of the Inflation Reduction Act, and are considering challenging it. They have listed at least nine points in the legislation, which they say could be in breach of World Trade Organization rules. They were opposed to the subsidies for consumers to buy North American-assembled electric cars, as EU officials believe the subsidies discriminate against European carmakers. One EU official told CNBC that, "there is a political consensus (among the 27 ministers) that this plan threatens the European industry" and its supply of raw materials. In February 2023, the European Commission announced it would propose the "Net Zero Industrial Act", similar to the IRA, in turn putting pressure on the United Kingdom and South Korea.
In the mild sort of way. Mostly Biden didn’t change much and kept things stable (the way businesses like it), but there was definitely room in that for the CHIPs act, which is a double edged sword (by pushing China to invest more in its local chip production). He didn’t bother getting rid of the DJT tariffs that survived after COVID hit either.
This was the entire purpose of the CHIPS act. Biden just took some of the protectionist policies Trump started in his first term and did gave them an actual objective.
Easier to onshore manufacturing with multi-year timelines, but you don't need multi-year timelines to impose tariffs on carefully selected industries, not penguins and your existing industries' key suppliers.