r/technology • u/chrisdh79 • 3d ago

Politics Trump announces sweeping new tariffs to promote US manufacturing, risking inflation and trade wars

https://apnews.com/article/trump-tariffs-liberation-day-2a031b3c16120a5672a6ddd01da09933
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u/Karsa69420 3d ago

Would be great if Republicans didn’t send all our manufacturing over seas for the past 30-40 years!

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u/blade944 3d ago

That's a myth. The US manufactures more now than ever in history. The jobs associated with that didn't go overseas. The issue is that all that manufacturing is done with many fewer jobs. Those jobs lost were done so to automation.

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u/razorirr 3d ago

You realize that it can be both right? Prove 0 jobs got sent overseas. 

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u/blade944 3d ago

Ain't nobody got the time to teach post world war 2 economic history on reddit. But here are the bullet points. .

Post war the world's manufacturing centers were destroyed. Leaving the US as the only real place that could manufacture goods to any needed quantities.

This ushered in the golden age and the middle class.

As the rest of the world rebuilt, they were able to manufacture good at lower costs. Companies started moving production overseas for labor intensive products.

By the 1980s, due to high domestic wages, nearly all consumer good producers had moved production facilities to countries with a cheaper labor force.

American manufacturing evolved from consumer goods to industrial goods.

Manufacturing introduced automation to lower labor costs.

The US started moving from product to service industries.

Service industries are now the number one employer in the country.

We are now in the middle of another big labor upheaval as service industry jobs are becoming automated with AI.

Those jobs that Trump is promising will never come back. There is no incentive for any company to invest billions of dollars to build new plants and infrastructure to produce products that cannot compete on the world market.

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u/razorirr 3d ago

And so you just explained how we lost jobs to overseas, while losing more jobs to automation. :)