Well if Biden had the good sense to get rid of Trump's China Tariffs that would help. But he's not going to do it.
An example, there's a huge, entire supply chain for production of textiles in China. Separate companies process cotton, make yarns, produce the chemicals for polyesters and dies, manufacture the fabrics, and make the finished garments. They're often located close together, minimizing transportation costs and the cost of holding inventory.
So you stick a 25% tariff on Chinese textiles. What happens? Well, the American companies that buy the Chinese textiles increase their prices by 25%. Alternative supply chains that are more spread out, and more susceptible to the disruptions like what Iskyan's describing, take over to an extent. But they don't have sufficient capacity to satisfy demand. So the Chinese start building fabric and dyeing plants in Vietnam, and garment factories in Cambodia and Myanmar. The Indians build more factories. That takes time. This has been going on for years now. You've got idle capacity in China, and the customers of Chinese textile manufacturers are still begging them to get more capacity going in Vietnam. To be fair, it's not just the USA, Trump and Biden who are responsible. The Europeans and to a lesser extent Japanese also have tariff regimes that favor moving production away from China.
The situation is similar with consumer electronics. A huge and complete supply chain in southeastern China is being replaced by factories in Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Mexico, etc. Instead of taking components twenty or thirty miles down the road for the next step they go a thousand miles.
I realize we've got inflationary pressures coming from industries where China's not a factor, like automobiles and energy. Still I wonder whether this may take longer to straighten out than Iskyan suspects.
Your explanation is better and more convincing than his btw.
Originally Posted by Tiny
Very interesting observations; thanks for posting.
It seems that one thing people often forget is that tariffs impose costs and produce a number of unintended consequences, especially when clumsily and incompetently implemented, as has been the case recently.
If the primary goal is pushback against Chinese neo-mercantilism and the ultimate fulfillment of their global hegemonic lusts, we should recruit the Europeans and the Canadians to our side, instead of alienating them with tariff practices we've sometimes aimed at them over the last few years.
To this end, a few conservative economists, including Peter Morici and the three generations of Richmans (conservative/libertarian economists) have advocated for a regime of
scaled tariffs, with rates that rise and fall with the relative bilateral trade balances between the US and the subject country. For instance, the rate would be low (or zero) for a number of nations, but much higher for nations with which we run a big trade deficit (such as China).
Although I have no idea how well this would work in practice, I suspect it's got to be better than what we do now.
Still, I think our main problem is that we, as a nation, consume way too much relative to what we save, produce, and export. Many economists (even conservatives like Bob Barro) have opined, therefore, that we would do better to largely replace our income and payroll tax system with a consumption tax, such as a VAT. In fact, Rand Paul advocated this idea during his 2016 campaign, suggesting a combination of a low-rate flat income tax and a consumption tax which was described by one observer as simply a subtraction method VAT.
This would, at least in some measure, disincentivize consumption of all that crap we import, and incentivize saving and investment.
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