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.
It’s not even that entirely
You can’t build X here unless every component is also produced… here. The component factories can’t be built here here until there’s factories building the subcomponents for them, AND a buyer for them here.
A button up shirt needs cotton -> chemical treatment -> dyes -> fabric, base chemicals > plastic pellets -> buttons, AND the machines to do all of those processes. It’s like 7 or 8 different factories just to produce a shirt with buttons on it. Imagine how many factories it is for anything more complex.
Then in comes your point of needing commitment when it’s not even certain for more than a week, nobody is going to build out entire supply chains in that scenario.
Another example would be Trump saying that US farmers now have unprecedented access to the UK market for sales but the US uses growth hormone which is banned in the UK and Europe. It’s very unlikely they’re going to designate a non growth hormone section of their farm just to ship beef overseas.
Which would only be financially sound if for some reason there is significant demand for American beef in the UK which… Why would there be?