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Trump orders U.S. firms out of China after Beijing sets new tariffs

reuters.com

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Re: Trump orders U.S. firms out of China after Beijing sets new tariffs

#91

Post by AnimalMuppet »

zaroth wrote: post #78
mindthegap wrote: post #5

> “Our great American companies are hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China, including bringing your companies HOME and making your products in the USA.” What a weird tone. Is that a thing in the US? Can the president (legally) order companies "home"? Doesn't sound like "land of the free" to me.

At this point people should really understand how to read a statement from Trump. It actually is important to read all the words. “Hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative” does not mean he is trying to say companies must cease importing from China, even if that’s what the headline will read tomorrow. It simply says that companies need to start looking for alternatives to China. Trump is saying…

Reading all the words is a good idea. But even after doing so, you're left with one big problem: He does not have the authority to order that.

Re: Trump orders U.S. firms out of China after Beijing sets new tariffs

#92

Post by AnimalMuppet »

markbnj wrote: post #84
thrill wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"hereby ordered" = "hereby ordered"

> "hereby ordered" = "hereby ordered" Furthermore, doesn't "hereby" mean specifically "this thing that you are now reading/hearing/seeing is the instrument of the order?" In other words is he issuing an order via a tweet?

He may think he is, yes. He's not issuing a legally valid order, and he's not issuing it by a legally valid medium. (At least, I'm pretty sure it's not, but IANAL.)

In fact, if he thinks that Twitter is a legally valid medium and that anything he says is a legally valid order, that would explain a lot...

Re: Trump orders U.S. firms out of China after Beijing sets new tariffs

#93

Post by AnimalMuppet »

ashelmire wrote: post #27
mindthegap wrote: post #5

> “Our great American companies are hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China, including bringing your companies HOME and making your products in the USA.” What a weird tone. Is that a thing in the US? Can the president (legally) order companies "home"? Doesn't sound like "land of the free" to me.

There are probably a few ways the president could do it unilaterally, legally: 1) Raise tariffs to absurd levels (like, 10000% tax on anything from China). 2) Some sort of national defense justification. He could probably put all employees, companies, and executives on terrorism or customs watch lists and make life difficult for them. 3) Use existing sanctions on other nations as a way to forbid doing business with v…

Can the president unilaterally decide the levels of tariffs on imports? Without congressional oversight or veto?

Re: Trump orders U.S. firms out of China after Beijing sets new tariffs

#94

Post by zaroth »

markbnj wrote: post #90
zaroth wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point people should really understand how to read a statement from Trump. It actually is important to read all the words. “Hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative” does not mean he is trying to say companies must cease importing from China, even if that’s what the headline will read tomorrow. It simply says that companies need to start looking for alternatives to China. Trump is saying…

In what world does "hereby ordered" typically precede a bit of friendly advice? "All my relatives are hereby ordered to depart a day early for the annual Christmas gathering, as storms are predicted for the I-80 corridor."

It’s not friendly advice, that’s the point! Businesses don’t typically like it very much when someone makes their supply lines double-digit more expensive overnight.

He’s putting companies on notice. He’s doing it with language which will get the statement widely reported (and unfortunately mis-reported).

But carefully reading what he is actually saying, you can see he’s not actually ordering anything. That’s the point.

In your hypothetical example you would need to change two things. One, it would read “All my relatives are hereby ordered to starting looking at flights a day early...”

And two, you would have to be God, because in that example you would be the one controlling the weather.

Re: Trump orders U.S. firms out of China after Beijing sets new tariffs

#95

Post by thrill »

zaroth wrote: post #83
mindthegap wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just the headline. As far as I understand, Trump said what I quoted.

He said what you quoted, but then you implied he ordered companies out of China, which he did not do.

An order is still an order, whether it is legal or not.

Re: Trump orders U.S. firms out of China after Beijing sets new tariffs

#96

Post by zaroth »

belltaco wrote: post #81
ashelmire wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That isn't the heart of the issue. The issue is US products being produced in China and sold in the US. We import > 500 billion from China and export under 130 billion to China.

>We import > 500 billion from China and export under 130 billion to China. It's not so simple as, "Hey, lets pocket 500B - 130B = $370B and put it in the bank or spend in what we want". First of all, prices will increase, and production will move to other countries. If you ban imports from other countries, many things will become unaffordable to many people, which creates knock on effects. PCs and Smartphones getting…

> Tesla is down 4% just today based on new tariffs announced by China for the future.

The tariff is scheduled to take effect Dec 15th. Tesla will be producing cars locally in China by then, or within 30 days of then. I believe Tesla China sales have already slowed in anticipation of the lower cost locally produced version.

If anything, Tesla stands to gain from increased import tariffs from US->China.

Re: Trump orders U.S. firms out of China after Beijing sets new tariffs

#97

Post by Aperocky »

NohatCoder wrote: post #74
Aperocky wrote: post #32

It won't matter if US implement 100% tariff on China, what's going to happen next is that they're still going to create 800 parts in China, which gets shipped to Vietnam and assembled there and exported as a product of Vietnam. Vietnam (or whatever other country) would benefit at the cost of China/United States and more carbon emission due to shipping. The enormous electronic manufacturing in China isn't moving anywh…

Every country with tariffs have an army of bean counters whose job it is to deal with that kind of loopholes. Sure something will slip though, but anything big will get caught.

What do you mean? The stuff is made in Vietnam. Just like all of apple which source their chips to Intel and then assembled in China still count as made in China as a whole in the tariff book. This practice is as legal as it gets and cheaper than paying that 25% extra.

Re: Trump orders U.S. firms out of China after Beijing sets new tariffs

#98

Post by thrill »

zaroth wrote: post #66
tibbydudeza wrote: post #44

Well it makes about as much sense as buying Greenland. Good luck with that ... my money is on China.

If it was actually possible to buy Greenland, for say $50 billion, it would be an incredible deal for the US. It has rare earth deposits, but more importantly as the Arctic undergoes drastic climate changes—particularly in the availability of shipping lanes—it becomes increasingly strategically significant. Importantly, Greenland is a net economic loss to Denmark of about $500 million per year, so it would be saving…

That could be put to a vote in Greenland. Trump says to the ~57,000 residents, "I'll give each of you a million bucks if you vote yes". What do you think will happen?

Re: Trump orders U.S. firms out of China after Beijing sets new tariffs

#99

Post by ac29 »

umvi wrote: post #3

It's hard to just pick up and switch when you are so entrenched. That said, I would love if more US companies built stuff here in the US. Yeah, prices might be a little higher, but at least we aren't exploiting the labor of vulnerable people in foreign countries anymore.

> prices might be a little higher

I was curious about this, so I found a somewhat recent study that looked at how much it would cost for an "all-american" iPhone. The authors of the study think it would cost about $30-40/phone to do final assembly in the US (with Chinese and other foreign components), and sourcing all-US components would add another $30-40/phone. What is only lightly mentioned is the many, many billions of dollars it would take to build all of those production lines domestically, which makes it a non-starter. I could easily imagine it costing hundreds of billions of dollars.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601491/the-all-american-i...

Re: Trump orders U.S. firms out of China after Beijing sets new tariffs

#100

Post by Balgair »

umvi wrote: post #3

It's hard to just pick up and switch when you are so entrenched. That said, I would love if more US companies built stuff here in the US. Yeah, prices might be a little higher, but at least we aren't exploiting the labor of vulnerable people in foreign countries anymore.

This shows an incredible ignorance of the employment market of tool and die makers in the US and the American manufacturing enviroment in general.

Simply put, the US has nowhere close to the skilled labor force needed to 'bring it home'. In Flint, MI, as of 2017, journeyman die-makers pull about $130k. Yes, that Flint. [0,1] Yes, starting wages for a CS bachelors in SF. But for a person without a HS degree. In Flint.

Journeyman takes about 5 years of post-HS apprenticeshiping and the relevant CAD and math skills, FYI.

So, you may be thinking that in about 5 years time the US would be able to get back to where we are today.

We currently have ~70k tool and die makers in the US [2]. Though numbers are very hard to come by, as of 2006 there were about 3 million tool and die makers in China, about 1 million of which came at the expense of US jobs [3]. So, we need to grow the US tool and die makers in the US by roughly 1500%. Not 10%, not 100%, not 500%, but by ~1500%.

That, simply, is not going to happen without massive government financial input. That bill, to get all the tool and die makers that we need in the next 5 years at ~$15/hr that an apprentice makes, would cost about $145,000,000,000 in just wages. For just die-makers. Then you have assemblers, machinists, lathers, welders, etc. We're talking trillions at the low-ball numbers for the cost to re-educate the workforce. This will be a double digit percentage increase in the cost to manufacture anything that you pay for. The US consumer and the US government are simply not going to pay for that.

[0] https://www.industryweek.com/supply-chain/tool-and-dying-aut...

[1] https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Certification=Journeyma... US average wage for die-making is about $26/hr, FYI.

[2] https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes514111.htm

[3] https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/moncrieff_statement...

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