The Trump administration’s tariff scheme appears less and less likely to bring manufacturing jobs back to U.S. shores.
Businesses across the country are crunching the numbers and realizing that, despite Donald Trump’s insistence, they can’t balance out his tariff hikes across the supply chain.
“Some manufacturers who had plans to open factories in the country say the new duties are only adding to the significant obstacles they already faced,” Bloomberg reported Friday.
That’s because the supply chain to produce those goods in the United States simply isn’t there, requiring companies to import raw materials and factory equipment—which Trump’s tariffs have made unaffordable—from abroad.
Assuming rebuilding manufacturing is the intended goal, how feasible is it to start at the local level, as if in a preindustrial society? That means towns would be going back to having their own smiths, bakers, butchers, like in preindustrial times? Guess that’s a consequence of deindustrializing—go back to making handmade stuff since the local businesses that once mass-produced closed long ago.
Feasible? Only in smallish communities surrounded by arable land. The urban and suburban life needs large scale industry to function at all.