Because the US now gets no new jobs but the price for the cars will go up as the labour cost increases, proving the very trivial point that tariffs function as a tax on domestic consumers. If the goal of the policy was to redistribute money from Japanese carmakers and American consumers to Mexican factory workers they've done a great job, very altruistic.

Also it's quite hilarious how quickly the reputation of the US has deterioated. The US is now being treated like an unreliable country.

"We don't want to be whipped around by a policy that we don't know how long it will last," said an executive at a Japanese automaker."

Raising your neighbor's income means they will import more from you, it's not backfiring, it's working as intended.

But it’s not. It’s funding more robots for the Mexican plants, which means fewer jobs for Mexican auto workers. So some workers will do better, others worse. And American consumers pay higher prices, so they are worse off.

Are the robots cheaper or more expensive than human workers?

There is some broken thinking that high wages will increase consumer cost but replacing humans with cheaper robots won't, cherry-picking armchair cause-and-effect thinking to fit a "this is bad" narrative.

Reducing trade frictions forces economic equality, especially when that reduction is tied towards some equality metric, like wages.

Products being cheap because of economic disparity in trading partners isn't something to celebrate or bemoan the loss of. What is good for our neighbors is good for us. So many people are arguing from both sides at the same time.

The more you are forced to pay workers, the more attractive robots become.

The jaw of comparative advantage tells us that unrestrained trade benefits both parties. It means we get to deploy our workforce into higher value and higher paying jobs, while they get to increase their standard of living as well.

It’s still deteriorating to a position above where it should be.

The US has caused so much uncountable suffering with its middle east policy, half the country is obese due in part to taking advantage of the dollar reserve status, and its politicians with Wall St. sold out most of the American workers for a quick buck (now these workers are all killing themselves with drugs or from joining the military to protect other countries borders).

Reputation needs to drop much more to reflect the situation.

> Because the US now gets no new jobs but the price for the cars will go up as the labour cost increases

Over the long term it will help drive automation which will lower the cost of cars and bring jobs to the countries with high levels of education and training.

The quoted Japanese executive is betting that the next administration will probably do it's best to undo these actions that Trump is taking. That's the cost of Trump (and others) acting unilaterally rather than building consensus. If he had chosen to compromise on other things with his opponents and gotten them on board with this, this trade policy would have been taken seriously and had its intended effect. Instead Trump is left with nothing.

Although it's in vogue to hate on Biden for being old, out of touch, not progressive enough etc., this speaks to the effectiveness of his core political strategy - reaching across the aisle and building consensus. The system might not usually reward such behaviour, but it often leads to solutions that last.

> The US is now being treated like an unreliable country

All countries are unreliable. I'm sure FAANG feels the same about the EU.

What are these 'wages' of which you speak? Robots do not have hourly wages:

"Auto component maker Piolax, will also raise the hourly wage at its Mexican plant to $16 within the year. The company is also installing robots to mitigate rising labor costs, President Yukihiko Shimazu said."

Anyone else a 'robotic automation takeover of all jobs' skeptic?

There are obviously places where it makes sense, but a $15/hr human is preeeetty cheap compared to the price, programming, and maintenance of a robot.

Seeing the quote from Yukihiko, I feel it reads like PR or a soothing word to stockholders who hate to hear about employees and wages

> There are obviously places where it makes sense, but a $15/hr human is preeeetty cheap compared to the price, programming, and maintenance of a robot.

But such a robot is a good insurance against further increases of minimum wages.

It also is great if the tariffs get dropped, since you were going to invest in robots anyway and this just moves your R&D forward in time. Which is better, relocating your entire factory & supply chain permanently only for the tariffs to disappear and render the entire exercise moot, or prioritize robots (even more than you were before, given coronavirus) and then regardless of what happens, you still enjoy the benefits of the robots? This and coronavirus and the recession are playing their usual role of shocking entities out of local optima... in this case, towards more automation & remote working. It is deeply ironic that Trump is essentially gouging Americans' welfare by forcing jacked-up prices which will subsidize the very automation & trade dynamics the Rust Belt blames their woes on.

Cynically: you don't even need a real, working robot in-hand in order to threaten minimum wages. Even cheaper.

Toyota and Tesla (among many companies) found out the hard way that robots are still very dumb and not a substitute for all jobs.

But then somebody has to make and maintain the robots. If this is only the equivalent in cost to the existing jobs, it's still going to labor. If it's less then prices decline unless the manufacturer is a monopolist, and lower prices are about as good as higher wages. (If the manufacturer is a monopolist we've got trouble, but that's always the case.)