{"id":115907,"date":"2025-04-09T15:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-04-09T19:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.freethink.com\/?post_type=ftm_article&p=115907"},"modified":"2025-04-09T14:55:30","modified_gmt":"2025-04-09T18:55:30","slug":"us-tariffs-manufacturing-in-america","status":"publish","type":"ftm_article","link":"https:\/\/www.freethink.com\/opinion\/us-tariffs-manufacturing-in-america","title":{"rendered":"America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Molson Hart is the founder and president of\u00a0Viahart<\/a>, an educational toy company. For more insights like these, subscribe to his\u00a0newsletter<\/a>\u00a0or follow him on\u00a0X<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

On April 2nd, 2025, our president announced major new taxes on imports from foreign countries (\u201ctariffs\u201d), ranging from 10% to 49%. The stated goal is to bring manufacturing back to the United States and to “make America wealthy again.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These tariffs will not work. In fact, they may even do the opposite, fail to bring manufacturing back and make America poorer in the process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This article gives the 14 reasons why this is the case, how the United States could bring manufacturing back if it were serious about doing so, and what will ultimately happen with this wrongheaded policy<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve been in the manufacturing industry for 15 years. I\u2019ve manufactured in the USA and in China. I worked in a factory in China. I speak and read Chinese. I\u2019ve purchased millions of dollars worth of goods from the US and China, but also Vietnam, Indonesia, Taiwan, and Cambodia. I\u2019ve also visited many factories in Mexico and consider myself a student of how countries rise and fall.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In other words, unlike many who have voiced an opinion on this topic, I know what I am talking about. And that\u2019s why I felt compelled to write this article. I had to do it. I\u2019m a first generation American and I love my country and it pains me to see it hurtling at high speed towards an economic brick wall. This article is an attempt to hit the brakes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The 14 reasons why these tariffs will not bring manufacturing back<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
    \n
  1. They\u2019re not high enough<\/strong>

    A tariff is a tax on an imported product. For example, when Apple imports an iPhone that was made in China, it declares to the United States government what it paid to make that product overseas. Let\u2019s say it\u2019s $100. When there is a 54% tariff, Apple pays $100 to the manufacturer in China and $54 to the US government when importing. In this simplified example, an iPhone used to cost Apple $100, but it now costs $154. For every dollar Apple spends, Apple needs to make profit. So Apple sells iPhones to stores for double what it pays for them. And stores sell iPhones to consumers like you and me for double what it pays for them, as well.

    Before the tariffs, prices looked like this:<\/strong>
    Apple bought iPhones it designed for $100
    Apple sold iPhones for $200 to stores
    Stores sold iPhones to you and me for $400

    After the tariffs, prices look like this:<\/strong>
    Apple bought iPhones for $154 ($100 + $54 in import taxes)
    Apple sells those iPhones for $308 (double what it paid)
    Stores sell those iPhones to you and me for $616 (double what they paid)

    Now that you know what a tariff is, let me tell to you why they aren\u2019t high enough to bring manufacturing back to the United States.

    In short, manufacturing in the United States is so expensive and our supply chain (we\u2019ll explain that next) is so bad that making that iPhone in the United States without that 54% tariff, would still cost more than in China with 54% tariff. Since it still costs less to make the iPhone in China, both Apple and consumers would prefer it be made there, so it will, and not in the USA.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  2. America\u2019s industrial supply chain for many products is weak<\/strong>

    Think of a supply chain as a company\u2019s ability to get the components it needs to build a finished product. Suppose you wanted to build and sell wooden furniture. You\u2019re going to need wood, nails, glue, etc. Otherwise you can\u2019t do it. If you want to build an iPhone you need to procure a glass screen, shaped metal, and numerous internal electronic components.

    Now you might be thinking, \u201cWhat do you mean America has a weak supply chain? I\u2019ve built furniture. I\u2019ve assembled a computer. I can get everything I want at Home Depot and at Amazon.\u201d

    That\u2019s because America has an amazing consumer<\/em> supply chain, one of the best, if not the best in the world, but this is totally different from having an industrial<\/em> supply chain.

    When you\u2019re operating a furniture factory, you need an industrial quantity of wood, more wood than any Home Depot near you has in store. And you need it fast and cheap. It turns out that the United States has a good supply chain for wood, which is why, despite higher wages, we export chopsticks to China. We have abundant cheap wood in the forests of the Northern United States. But if you decided to move that chopstick factory to desert Saudi Arabia, you would not succeed, because their supply chain for wood is poor; there simply aren\u2019t any trees for 1,000s of miles.

    When it comes to the iPhone, all the factories which make the needed components are in Asia, which is one reason why, even with a 54% tariff, it\u2019s cheaper to assemble that iPhone in China than in the United States. It\u2019s cheaper and faster to get those components from nearby factories in Asia than it is to get them from the US, which, because said factories no longer exist here, has to buy these components from Asia anyways.

    Supply chains sound complicated, but aren\u2019t. If you can\u2019t get the components you need at a reasonable price and timeline to build a finished product, it doesn\u2019t matter what the tariffs are, you have to import it, because you can\u2019t build it locally.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  3. We don\u2019t know how to make it<\/strong>

    Apple knows how to build an iPhone, but may not know how to make the individual components. It may seem trivial to make that glass that separates your finger from the electronic engineering that powers your ability to access the internet, but it\u2019s difficult.

    The world buys semiconductors from Taiwan, not just because its relatively [inexpensive] (but more expensive than China) labor and excellent supply chain, but because they know how to make the best semiconductors in the world. Even with infinite money, we cannot duplicate that, because we lack the knowhow.

    A 54% tariff does not solve that problem. We still need to buy semiconductors from Taiwan, which is perhaps why the administration put in an exception for semiconductors, because we need them and because we can\u2019t make them without their help.

    This is a problem which applies to more than just semiconductors. We have forgotten how to make products people wrongly consider to be basic, too.

    My company makes educational toys from plastic called Brain Flakes. To make Brain Flakes, you melt plastic and force it into shaped metal molds. Were we to import the machines and molds needed to do this, it would work for a little while, but as soon as one of those molds broke, we\u2019d be in trouble, because there are almost no moldmakers left in the United States. The people who knew how to build and repair molds have either passed away or are long retired. In the event of a problem, we\u2019d have to order a new mold from China or send ours back, shutting down production for months.

    People trivialize the complexity and difficulty of manufacturing when it\u2019s really hard. And if we don\u2019t know how to make something, it doesn\u2019t matter what the tariff is. It won\u2019t get made in America.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  4. The effective cost of labor in the United States is higher than it looks

    <\/strong>Most people think that the reason why we make products in China instead of the United States is cheaper labor. That\u2019s true, but it\u2019s not the whole story. Frankly, the whole story is hard to read. People are not machines; they are not numbers on a spreadsheet or inputs into a manufacturing cost formula. I respect everyone who works hard and the people I have worked with over the years, and I want Americans to live better, happier lives.

    Chinese manufacturing labor isn\u2019t just cheaper. It\u2019s better.

    In China, there are no people who are too fat to work. The workers don\u2019t storm off midshift, never to return to their job. You don\u2019t have people who insist on being paid in cash so that they can keep their disability payments, while they do acrobatics on the factory floor that the non-disabled workers cannot do.

    Chinese workers [are] much less likely to physically attack each other and their manager. They don\u2019t take 30-minute bathroom breaks on company time. They don\u2019t often quit because their out-of-state mother of their children discovered their new job and now receives 60% of their wages as child support. They don\u2019t disappear because they\u2019ve gone on meth benders. And they don\u2019t fall asleep on a box midshift because their pay from yesterday got converted into pills.

    And they can do their times tables. To manufacture, you need to be able to consistently and accurately multiply 7 times 9 and read in English, and a disturbingly large portion of the American workforce cannot do that.

    Chinese workers work longer hours more happily, and they\u2019re physically faster with their hands; they can do things that American labor can\u2019t. It\u2019s years of accumulated skill, but it\u2019s also a culture that is oriented around hard work and education that the United States no longer has.

    Sadly, what I describe above are not theoretical situations. These are things that I have experienced or seen with my own eyes. It\u2019s fixable, but the American workforce needs great improvement in order to compete with the world\u2019s, even with tariffs.

    So yes, Chinese wages are lower, but there [are] many countries with wages lower than China\u2019s. It\u2019s the work ethic, knowhow, commitment, combined with top notch infrastructure, that makes China the most powerful manufacturing country in the world today.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  5. We don\u2019t have the infrastructure to manufacture<\/strong>

    The inputs to manufacturing are not just materials, labor, and knowhow. You need infrastructure like electricity and good roads for transportation, too.

    Since the year 2000, US electricity generation per person has been flat. In China, over the same time period, it has increased 400%. China generates over twice as much electricity person today as the United States. Why?

    Manufacturing.

    To run the machines which make the products we use, you need electricity, a lot of it. We already have electricity instability in this country. Without the construction of huge amounts of new energy infrastructure, like nuclear power plants, we cannot meaningfully increase our manufacturing output.

    And it would put huge stress on our roads and create lots more dangerous traffic. When we import finished goods from foreign countries, a truck delivers them from the port or the airport to distribution centers, stores, and where we live and work.

    When you start manufacturing, every single component, from factory to factory, needs to be moved, increasing the number of trucks on the road many times.

    Paving more roads, modernizing our seaports, improving our airports, speeding up our train terminals, and building power plants in the costliest nation in the world to build is a huge undertaking that people are not appreciating when they say, “Well, we\u2019ll just make it in America.”<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  6. Made in America will take time<\/strong>

    We placed a $50,000 order with our supplier overseas before the election in November 2024. At the time of ordering, there were no import taxes on the goods. By the time it arrived, a 20% tariff had been applied, and we had a surprise bill for $10,000. It can easily take 180 days for many products to go from order to on your doorstep, and this tariff policy seems not to understand that.

    It takes at least, in the most favorable of jurisdictions, two years (if you can get the permits) to build a factory in the United States. I know because I\u2019ve done it. From there, it can take six months to a year for it to become efficient. It can take months for products to come off the assembly lines. All this ignores all the infrastructure that will need to be built (new roads, new power plants, etc.) to service the new factory.

    By the time \u201cmade in America\u201d has begun, we will be electing a new president.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  7. Uncertainty and complexity around the tariffs

    <\/strong>To start manufacturing in the United States, a company needs to make a large investment. They will need to buy new machinery and if no existing building is suitable, they will need to construct a new building. These things cost money, a lot, in fact. And significantly more in the USA than they do in other countries. In exchange for this risk, there must be some reward. If that reward is uncertain, no one will do it.

    Within the past month, the president put a 25% tariff on Mexico, and then got rid of it, only to apply it again, and then get rid of it a second time. Then, last week, he was expected to apply new tariffs to Mexico, but didn\u2019t.

    If you\u2019re building a new factory in the United States, your investment will alternate between maybe it will work, and catastrophic loss according to which way the tariffs and the wind blows. No one is building factories right now, and no one is renting them, because there is no certainty that any of these tariffs will last. How do I know? I built a factory in Austin, Texas, in an industrial area. I cut its rent 40% two weeks ago and I can\u2019t get a lick of interest from industrial renters.

    The tariffs have frozen business activity because no one wants to take a big risk dependent on a policy that may change next week.

    Even further, the tariffs are confusing, poorly communicated, and complex. Today, if you want to import something from China, you need to add the original import duty, plus a 20% \u201cfentanyl tariff,\u201d plus a 34% \u201creciprocal tariff,\u201d and an additional 25% \u201cVenezuelan oil\u201d tariff, should it be determined that China is buying Venezuelan oil. The problem is there is no list of countries which are importing Venezuelan oil provided by the White House, so you don\u2019t know if you do or don\u2019t need to add that 25% and you also don\u2019t know when any of these tariffs will go into effect because of unclear language.

    As such, you can\u2019t calculate your costs, either with certainty or accuracy. Therefore, not only do you not build a factory in the United States, you cease all business activity, the type of thing that can cause a recession, if not worse.

    For the past month, as someone who runs a business in this industry, I have spent a huge portion of my time just trying to keep up with the constant changes, instead of running my business.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  8. Most Americans are going to hate manufacturing<\/strong>

    Americans want less crime, good schools for their kids, and inexpensive healthcare.

    They don\u2019t want to be sewing shirts.

    The people most excited about this new tariff policy tend to be those who\u2019ve never actually made anything, because if you have, you\u2019d know how hard the work is.

    When I first went to China as a naive 24-year-old, I told my supplier I was going to \u201cwork a day in his factory!\u201d I lasted four hours. It was freezing cold, middle of winter, I had to crouch on a small stool, hunched over, assembling little parts with my fingers at 1\/4 the speed of the women next to me. My back hurt. My fingers hurt. It was horrible. That\u2019s a lot of manufacturing.

    And enjoy the blackouts, the dangerous trucks on the road, the additional pollution, etc. Be careful what you wish for, America. Doing office work and selling ideas and assets is a lot easier than making actual things.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  9. The labor does not exist to make good products

    <\/strong>There are over a billion people in China making stuff. As of right now there are 12 million people looking for work in the United States (4% unemployment). Ignoring for a moment the comparative inefficiency of labor and the billions of people making products outside of China, where are the people that are going to do these jobs? Do you simply say \u201cmake America great again\u201d three times, and they will appear with the skills needed to do the work?

    And where are the managers to manage these people? One of the reasons why manufacturing has declined in the United States is a brain drain towards sectors that make more money. Are people who make money on the stock market, in real estate, in venture capital, and in startups going to start sewing shirts? It\u2019s completely and totally unrealistic to assume that people will move from superficially high productivity sectors driven by US Dollar strength to products that are low on the value chain.

    The United States is trying to bring back the jobs that China doesn\u2019t even want. They have policies to reduce low-value manufacturing, yet we are applying tariffs to bring it back. It\u2019s incomprehensible.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  10. Automation will not save us

    <\/strong>Most people think that the reason why American manufacturing is not competitive is labor costs. Most people think this can be solved by automation.

    They\u2019re wrong.

    First, China, on a yearly basis installs 7x as many industrial robots as we do in the United States. Second, Chinese robots are cheaper. Third, most of today\u2019s manufacturing done by people cannot be automated. If it could, it would have already been done so, by China, which, again, has increasingly high labor costs relative to the rest of the world.

    The robots you see on social media doing backflips are, today, mostly for show and unreliable off camera. They are not useful in industrial environments where, if a humanoid robot can do it, an industrial machine which is specialized in the task can do it even better. For example, instead of having a humanoid robot doing a repetitive task, such as carrying a boxes from one station to another, you can simply set up a cheaper, faster conveyor belt.

    Said another way, the printer in your office is cheaper and more efficient than both a human and a humanoid robot with a pen, hand-drawing each letter.

    It\u2019s unlikely that American ingenuity will be able to counter the flood of Chinese industrial robots which is coming. The first commercial electrical vehicle was designed and built in the United States, but today China is dominating electric vehicle manufacturing across the world. Industrial robots will likely be the same story.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  11. Robots and overseas factory workers don\u2019t file lawsuits, but Americans do

    <\/strong>I probably should not have written this article. Not only will I be attacked for being unpatriotic, but what I have written here makes me susceptible to employment lawsuits. For the record, I don\u2019t use a person\u2019s origin to determine whether or not they will do good work. I just look at the person and what they\u2019re capable of. Doing otherwise is bad business because there are talented people everywhere.

    America has an extremely litigious business environment, both in terms of regulation and employment lawsuits. Excessive regulation and an inefficient court system will stifle those with the courage to make in this country.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  12. Enforcement of the tariffs will be uneven and manipulated

    <\/strong>Imagine two companies which import goods into the United States. One is based in China, while the other is based in the United States. They both lie about the value of their goods so that they have to pay less tariffs.

    What happens to the China company? Perhaps they lose a shipment when it\u2019s seized by the US government for cheating, but they won\u2019t pay additional fines because they\u2019re in China, where they\u2019re impervious to the US legal system.

    What happens to the USA company? Owners go to prison.

    Who do you think is going to cheat more on tariffs, the China or the US company?

    Exactly.

    So, in other words, paradoxically, the policies which are designed to help Americans will hurt them more than the competition these policies are designed to punish.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  13. The tariff policies are structured in the wrong way

    <\/strong>Why didn\u2019t the jobs come back in 2018 when we initiated our last trade war? We applied tariffs. Why didn\u2019t it work?

    Instead of making America great, we made Vietnam great.

    When the United States applied tariffs to China, it shifted huge amounts of manufacturing to Vietnam, which did not have tariffs applied to it. Vietnam, which has a labor force that is a lot more like China\u2019s than the United States\u2019, was able to use its proximity to China for its supply chain and over the past seven or so years, slowly developed its own. With Vietnamese wages even lower than Chinese wages, instead of the jobs coming to the United States, they just went to Vietnam instead.

    We\u2019re about to make the same mistake again, in a different way.

    Let\u2019s go back to that last example, the China-based and the US-based companies which were importing goods into the United States. That US-based importer could\u2019ve been a manufacturer. Instead of finished iPhones, perhaps they were importing the glass screens because those could not be found in the USA for final assembly.

    Our government applied tariffs to finished goods and components equally.

    I\u2019ll say that again. They applied the same tax to the components that you need to make things in America that they did to finished goods that were made outside of America.

    Manufacturing works on a lag. To make and sell in America, first you must get the raw materials and components. These tariffs will bankrupt manufacturers before it multiplies them because they need to pay tariffs on the import components that they assemble into finished products.

    And it gets worse.

    They put tariffs on machines. So if you want to start a factory in the United States, all the machinery you need which is not made here is now significantly more expensive. You may have heard that there is a chronic shortage of transformers needed for power transmission in the United States. Tariffed that too.

    It gets even worse.

    There is no duty drawback for exporting. In the past, even in the United States, if you imported something and then exported it, the tariff you paid on the import would be refunded to you. They got rid of that so we\u2019re not even incentivizing exports to the countries that we are trying to achieve trade parity with.

    Tariffs are applied to the costs of the goods. The way we\u2019ve structured these tariffs, factories in China which import into the United States will pay lower tariffs than American importers, because the Chinese factory will be able to declare the value of the goods at their cost, while the American importer will pay the cost the factory charges them, which is of course higher than the factory\u2019s cost.

    Worse still.

    With a few exceptions like steel and semiconductors, the tariffs were applied to all products, ranging from things that we will never realistically make, like our high labor     Tigerhart stuffed animals<\/a>, to things that don\u2019t even grow in the continental USA, like coffee.

    Call me crazy, but if we\u2019re going to make products in America, we could use some really cheap coffee, but no, they tariffed it! Our educational     engineering toy Brain Flakes<\/a> also got tariffed. How is the next generation supposed to build a manufacturing powerhouse if it cannot afford products that will develop its engineering ability? It\u2019s like our goal was to make education and raising children more expensive.

    Not only did we put tariffs on the things that would help us make this transformation, we didn\u2019t put higher tariffs on things that hurt us, like processed food, which makes us tired and fat, or fentanyl precursors, which kill us.

    The stated goal of many of our tariffs was to stop the import of fentanyl. Two milligrams of fentanyl will kill an adult. A grain of rice is 65 milligrams. How do you stop that stuff from coming in? It\u2019s basically microscopic.

    Maybe we could do what every other country has done and focus on the demand instead of the supply, ideally starting with the fentanyl den near my house which keeps my children indoors or in our backyard instead of playing in the neighborhood.

    It\u2019s frustrating to see our great country take on an unrealistic goal like transforming our economy when so many basic problems should be fixed first.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  14. Michael Jordan sucked at baseball<\/strong>

    America is the greatest economic power of all time. We\u2019ve got the most talented people in the world, and we have a multi-century legacy of achieving what so many other countries could not.

    Michael Jordan is arguably the greatest basketball player of all time, perhaps even the greatest athlete of all time.

    He played baseball in his youth. What happened when he switched from basketball to baseball? He went from being an MVP champion to being a middling player in the minor leagues. Two years later, he was back to playing basketball.

    And that\u2019s exactly what\u2019s going to happen to us.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    My prediction for what will happen with the tariffs<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

    This is probably the worst economic policy I\u2019ve ever seen. Maybe it\u2019s just an opening negotiating position. Maybe it\u2019s designed to crash the economy, lower interest rates, and then refinance the debt. I don\u2019t know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    But if you take it at face value, there is no way that this policy will bring manufacturing back to the United States and \u201cmake America wealthy again.” Again, if anything, it\u2019ll do the opposite: it\u2019ll make us much poorer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Many are saying that this tariff policy is the “end of globalization.” I don\u2019t think so.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Unless this policy is quickly changed, this is the end of America\u2019s participation in globalization. If we had enacted these policies in 2017 or 2018, they stood a much stronger chance of being successful. That was before COVID. China was much weaker economically and militarily then. They\u2019ve been preparing eight years for this moment, and they are ready.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Globalization will continue without us if these policies continue unchanged.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

    China trades much less with the United States as a percent of its total exports today than it did eight years ago and, as such, is much less susceptible to punishing tariffs from the United States today than it was back then.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Chinese-made cars, particularly electric vehicles, are taking the world by storm, without the United States. Go to Mexico to Thailand to Germany and you will see Chinese-made electric vehicles on the streets. And they\u2019re good, sometimes even better than US-made cars, and not just on a per-dollar basis, but simply better quality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    That is what is going to happen to the United States. Globalization will continue without us if these policies continue unchanged.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    That said, I think the tariffs will be changed. There\u2019s no way we continue to place a 46% tariff on Vietnam when eight years ago we nudged American companies to put all their production there. Most likely, this policy will continue another round of the same type of investment; rather than replacing made in China with made in the USA, we\u2019ll replace it with made in Vietnam, Mexico, etc.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Finally, in the process of doing this, regardless of whether or not we reverse the policies, we will have a recession. There isn\u2019t time to build US factories, nor is it realistic or likely to occur, and American importers don\u2019t have the money to pay for the goods they import.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    People are predicting inflation in the cost of goods, but we can just as easily have deflation from economic turmoil.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    The policy is a disaster. How could it be done better? And what\u2019s the point of this anyways?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    <\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

    The three reasons why we want to actually bring manufacturing back<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
      \n
    1. It makes our country stronger. If a foreign country can cut off your supply of essentials, such as food, semiconductors, or antibiotics, you\u2019re beholden to that country. The United States must have large flexible capacity in these areas.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
    2. It makes it easier to innovate. When the factory floor is down the hall, instead of 30 hours of travel away, it\u2019s easier to make improvements and invent. We need to have manufacturing of high-value goods, like drones, robots, and military equipment that are necessary for our economic future and safety. It will be difficult for us to apply artificial intelligence to manufacturing if we\u2019re not doing it here.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
    3. People can simplistically be divided into three buckets: those of verbal intelligence, those of mathematical intelligence, and those of spatial intelligence. Without a vibrant manufacturing industry, those with the latter type of intelligence cannot fulfill their potential. This is one reason why so many men drop out, smoke weed, and play video games; they aren\u2019t built for office jobs and would excel at manufacturing, but those jobs either don\u2019t exist or pay poorly.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n

      How to actually bring manufacturing back<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

      Every country that has gone on a brilliant run of manufacturing first established the right conditions and then proceeded slowly.

      We\u2019re doing the opposite right now, proceeding fast with the wrong conditions.

      First, the United States must fix basic problems which reduce the effectiveness of our labor. For example, everyone needs to be able to graduate with the ability to do basic mathematics. American healthcare is way too expensive, and it needs to be fixed if the United States wants to be competitive with global labor. I\u2019m not saying healthcare should be socialized or switched to a completely private system, but whatever we\u2019re doing now clearly is not working, and it needs to be fixed.

      We need to make Americans healthy again. Many people are too obese to work. Crime and drugs. It needs to stop.

      And to sew, we must first repair the social fabric.

      From COVID lockdowns to the millions of people who streamed over our border, efforts must be made to repair society. Manufacturing and economic transformations are hard, particularly the way in which we\u2019re doing it. Patriotism and unity are required to tolerate hardship, and we seem to be at all-time lows for those right now.

      Let\u2019s focus on America\u2019s strengths in high-end manufacturing, agriculture, and innovation instead of applying tariffs to all countries and products blindly. We should be taxing automated drones for agriculture at 300% to encourage their manufacture here, instead of applying the same blanket tariff of 54% to that that we apply to t-shirts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

      \n

      We can level the playing field without causing massive harm to our economy…<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

      The changes in the policies needed are obvious. Tax finished products higher than components. Let exporters refund their import duties. Enforce the tariffs against foreign companies more strenuously than we do against US importers.

      If American companies want to sell in China, they must incorporate there, register capital, and name a person to be a legal representative. To sell in Europe, we must register for their tax system and nominate a legal representative. For Europeans and Chinese to sell in the United States, none of this is needed, nor do federal taxes need to be paid.

      We can level the playing field without causing massive harm to our economy by adopting policies like these which cause foreign companies to pay the taxes domestic ones pay.

      And if we want to apply tariffs, do it slowly. Instead of saying that products will be tariffed at 100% tomorrow, say they\u2019ll be 25% next year, 50% after that, 75% after that, and 100% in year four. And then make it a law instead of a presidential decree so that there is certainty so people feel comfortable taking the risks necessary to make in America.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

      Sadly, a lot of the knowhow to make products is outside of this country. Grant manufacturing visas, not for labor, but for knowhow. Make it easy for foreign countries to teach us how they do what they do best.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

      Conclusion and final thoughts<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

      I care about this country and the people in it. I hope we change our mind on this policy before it\u2019s too late. Because if we don\u2019t, it might break the country. And, really, this country needs to be fixed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

      This article was reprinted with the permission of Molson Hart<\/a>. It was originally published on his website<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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