These new tariffs are posturing. Trump seems to understand how to negotiate and is willing to take short term hardship for long term gain. We need to have balanced trade agreements. Not balanced in the sense of trade amount, but balanced in the sense of tariffs and subsidies. Access to US consumers is a big bargaining chip. If China won’t deal, there are other countries that will. I think we all understood we had an…
Which is why finished consumer products are not part of the new tariffs, so companies that make stuff in China and ship it to the US are better off than companies buying parts in China and assembling in the US? Or was there a big push of end-product tariffs before that didn't make headlines?
In most cases, buying all your parts locally is fairly impractical. (The documentation of various "fair trade" electronics projects is often interesting in that regard, since they often are willing to accept higher prices from trustworthy local sources, and often find that only a few things can be gotten locally at all, and often only in specialist variants, e.g. high-precision parts, with matching prices). Maybe it'll be enough push to restart some component industries, but I'm skeptical.