- cross-posted to:
- politics@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- politics@lemmy.world
Firms are just passing the additional cost of tariffs onto consumers rather than eating it and incurring an additional financial burden to reshore all their manufacturing?
What a fucking surprise
At some point the drop in sales from the increased prices would pretty much require them to move manufacturing back. We’ll see if Trump increases tariffs further to try to cause that.
But yeah, there’s a pretty big hurdle of actually needing to rebuild the manufacturing base in the US that we abandoned decades ago.
Of course the quickest way to do such a thing would be massive government investments (and central planning would be even better). It’s funny how the “communist” policies they hate would actually achieve Trump’s stated goals much quicker and more efficiently than the free market could.
But it highlights Trump’s inconsistent ideology. Aggressive protectionism (“big government”) to bring manufacturing back, but domestically leaving it up to the free market to actually do so, because “big government bad”.
The issue at that point is that onshoring would be a decade-plus long project. Why commit to that when Trump changes his mind every twenty minutes?
It depends on how far Trump is willing to go. If he imposes 10000% tariffs or something and no one can afford to buy their products at all, their choice will be to shut down, abandon the American market (their largest market and where they are based out of), or onshore.
There is another secret option
Go bankrupt and let the consumers eat shit
That’s shutting down.