He's also fond of saying we're going to make trillions from the tariff payments, but we'll all be buying American products. The math does not check out.
The government will take trillions from the American populous, then when all manufacturing comes back to the US, tariff revenue will drop to zero. But Americans will still pay the higher prices to the corporations.
Another factor no one seems to mention: externalities -- in particular, pollution and burdens on our infrastructure. Assembly operations can be relatively clean, but manufacturing, drilling, mining, and minerals processing generate pollution and can use a lot of electricity, and our grid is already struggling to provide the power needed by AI modelling, crypto-mining, and charging e-vehicles. No politician seems to be even acknowledging that past generations' worth of industrial and chemical sites created thousands of sites that remain heavily and dangerously polluted to this day, let alone insisting that we manage it better this time.
It's no coincidence that New Jersey, home of so much of the heavy industrial (and chemical, petrochemical, and electronic) job-creating activity in the US since the 19th-C., still has -- googles -- "115 Superfund sites listed on the National Priorities List (NPL)" "as of 16 August 2024", and that's after 36 additional sites have been cleaned up and deleted from the list.
IMHO, de-offshorization and re-industrialization must also revolutionize our traditional model of: 1) letting corporations and their executives, boards of directors, and principle shareholders do whatever they want; 2) evade fiscal responsibility and criminal culpability for their pollution via shell corps. and strategic sales and bankruptcies; 3) rinse-and-repeat. Ideally, we'd price-in and anticipate likely pollution risks and force corps. to fund escrow accounts (along with continual monitoring of factory operations, to prevent anticipated future costs' outstripping a corp.'s escrow funds, which might have to be increased every year or so) for cleaning up their pollution regardless of their legal status and financial solvency for a very long stipulated duration (say, 101 years).
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u/damunzie 1d ago
He's also fond of saying we're going to make trillions from the tariff payments, but we'll all be buying American products. The math does not check out.