I realise a lot of Americans fail to understand how difficult it is to set up manufacturing plants of various kinds for what was once imported goods; but microprocessors of all God damned things are the singular thing you should make an exception for importing.
That is not an industry that you can slap together with a few lathes and mills and dudes with “can do” attitudes. Those are billion dollar state of the art factories working on products on the microscopic level.
American made electronics are going to be powered by vacuum tubes at this rate and cost 5000x as much.
TMSC tried building a fab in Arizona. They had to stop all work and get Taiwanese workers in because the glorious American worker was unable to build clean rooms as per spec.
We can't even build the building, not to mention building or running the machinery inside.
We need industrial policy (such as the chips act) to slowly reindustialize. Tarifs are a pigeon-brain solution that will 100% fail and have negative repercussions. Just think of it this way - Ford and GM will continue building gas cars with weaker emission controls in a protected market and the rest of the world ever better EVs. Do you think those gas guzzlers will be competitive in world markets? Will export exactly zero of them in 10 years. On the other hand as soon as tarifs drop, modern foreign EVs will eat the market.
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u/Seffyr 1d ago
I realise a lot of Americans fail to understand how difficult it is to set up manufacturing plants of various kinds for what was once imported goods; but microprocessors of all God damned things are the singular thing you should make an exception for importing.
That is not an industry that you can slap together with a few lathes and mills and dudes with “can do” attitudes. Those are billion dollar state of the art factories working on products on the microscopic level.
American made electronics are going to be powered by vacuum tubes at this rate and cost 5000x as much.