On Friday morning, West Coast port officials told CNN about a startling sight: Not a single cargo vessel had left China with goods for the two major West Coast ports in the past 12 hours. That hasn’t happened since the pandemic.
“We lost money because americans spent it on Chinese made goods and not american goods.”
For one, a lot of these goods are sold by US companies. Those jobs, that revenue on leases and equipment, are spent in the US. For two, we don’t make most of this shit here to buy at all, and in some cases like “exotic” foodstuff like coffee, we cannot make it here. Americans can literally not spend our money on something American made even if we wanted to. For three, the factories and supply chain to make the things will take decades to stand up, the same way they took decades to stand up in China, where US corporate greed for offshoring and a local authoritarian government that plans for decades, generally at the short term detriment of its people, worked together to build it.
Putting shitty tariffs on the world wont shift the above. It has to be followed with ungodly, focused government spending for a generation. Everyone knows this shit is over in a small handful of years, not 20, so no corporation is going to make the huge investment in the US infrastructure that we would need.
His rational is powerfully idiotic.
For one, a lot of these goods are sold by US companies. Those jobs, that revenue on leases and equipment, are spent in the US. For two, we don’t make most of this shit here to buy at all, and in some cases like “exotic” foodstuff like coffee, we cannot make it here. Americans can literally not spend our money on something American made even if we wanted to. For three, the factories and supply chain to make the things will take decades to stand up, the same way they took decades to stand up in China, where US corporate greed for offshoring and a local authoritarian government that plans for decades, generally at the short term detriment of its people, worked together to build it.
Putting shitty tariffs on the world wont shift the above. It has to be followed with ungodly, focused government spending for a generation. Everyone knows this shit is over in a small handful of years, not 20, so no corporation is going to make the huge investment in the US infrastructure that we would need.