South Korea may be next, apparently they are 4x higher on tariffs than the U.S.; what Trump is doing is creating a situation where the manufacturers that left the U.S. for cheap labor in other countries, will be forced to return to the U.S. and begin manufacturing in the U.S. again.
I would like to see that, and see the "Made in America" or similar again.
If
@Vueroid chose to assemble their dash cams from "foreign and domestic products" in the U.S., I would not mind paying a bit more for the dash cam.
That, unfortunately will never happen.
Even with tariffs manufacturing in the US is higher cost due to wages, regulations and operational costs. Many companies rely on global supply chains where components and raw materials come from different countries. This reminds me of Dewalt's "made in the USA with global parts". Companies also use automation instead of hiring a large workforce nowadays so that doesn't bring back a lot of jobs. It will create jobs for the automation part, but not large scale. Other countries will retaliate with their own tariff's as we've already seen making it harder to US companies to export goods. We already see this happening. Finally, Companies will just pass the higher prices to the consumers anyway rather than move production.
There are some cases where tariffs work in specific cases. Tariffs helped protect and develop steel and textile industries among others from foreign competition during the industrial growth in the late 1800's. But this is also before global supply chains and automation. Post WWII Japan and S Korea is another example where tariffs worked for them, although to be fair, there was a ton of government and US investment in their industries as well. In 2018 Trump admin imposed tariffs on steel and aluminum imports. US Steel companies benefited in the short term, but it raised costs for industries that buy metals so results are mixed.
During the great depression tariffs were imposed on imports with the goal to project American farmers and manufacturing. This caused other countries to retaliate with their own tariffs. Instead of boosting American industry it drove prices up, hurt exporters and worsened the depression.
My point about the Depression is not to compare because that wouldn't be a good comparison. The world economy is very different today compared the the Depression era. The point is, if tariffs trigger a trade war, it will do more harm than good. It works in specific cases for short term, but it has NEVER brought back large scale manufacturing jobs back and it never will. I already mentioned the 2018 tariff on steel and aluminum imports; I think Bush admin did the same thing with steel tariffs with the same results. Trump admin also imposed tariffs on China in 2019? or 2020 I don't remember exactly. This goal was to push companies to bring production back. Some companies left China, but they didn't come back to the US, they moved to Mexico, India and other countries where labor is still cheap.
Companies prioritize profits over anything else.
They're not going to undo decades of outsourcing.
They will find somewhere else to find cheap labor, even with tariffs operational costs are still higher.
Germany and Japan have strong domestic manufacturing industries not because of tariffs, but because they invest in innovation and high tech industries. What we need in the US is investment in technology, infrastructure and vocational training/education.
Not to go off topic lol any plans for an updated remote dash cam model?
