If I'm designing something that would need 100 units though, that's going to send a design cost from reasonable to out of reach rather quickly.
Another perverse incentive is that to get items sitting in a US warehouse (eg Amazon), the seller has to pay the high tariffs before they can even start selling them, while also hoping that tariffs aren't lowered before they can sell them all (and the expectation is that Trump is going to have to dial back this idiotic "plan" of his some time). Meanwhile the seller of a direct shipped item has a confirmed sale and cash-in-hand by the time the shipment gets to the border. So I expect the selection of US-stocked items is about to drop dramatically.
The sad fact that we lost all of these because of the entire electronics supply and design chain moving to Taiwan and China, is why we are where we are. These barriers might bring some back, who knows.
Ultimately global open borders, for goods and services, had their own issues. For example open competition between free market economies and centrally planned economies creates rather obvious advantages of scale that are skewed...
And yet almost all the actual design was still happening in the U.S.
It’s almost like the origin of the components didn’t matter. Access did.
And even if the origin might have shifted the fact that access increased made Americans stronger in Tech not weaker.
Right now, we don’t have origins of manufacturing nor access. Even if some parts of the industry does reshore to the U.S., the access will still be limited primarily to those parts of the industry that re-shored and even there access would be lower due to higher costs.
It’s incredible how America had the fastest growing major economy, was the leader in nearly all the industries of the future, has insanely high per capita income that continues to grow, and decided to throw all that away all because it refuses to undo the decisions that allow all that growth in wealth to accumulate with a tiny minority of the country.
Think for a second. Would you rather there be a new aluminum plant in the US? Or would you rather there be another successful airplane manufacturer. In no world does prefering the aluminum plant get you anywhere close to the same GDP of a airplane factory
https://www.financialexpress.com/trending/trump-tariffs-vira...
Was there a real example of centrally planned economies after the fall of the ussr? More like centrally guided: Korea, Japan, China are all equally good examples.
Which is where? A country outpacing everyone else in growth and recovery after COVID?
This assumption that globalism = bad because we don't have people assembling electronics for $10/hour is strange. Does some of that need to be reshored for national security? Definitely, and that's why we have the CHIPS act but Trump is trying to kill it so I'm not really sure what these tariffs are trying to accomplish and I don't think this administration does either.
Now prototypes will cost at least 2x, if not more.
These tariffs are essentially shooting US technology development in the foot. Chinese engineers will have the greatest access in the world to manufacturing and components, while engineers in the US who don't already have a large company to bankroll them will just find something else to do.
I had some projects in the pipeline that I might not bother with now. It's simply not worth the money. US PCB fabs are probably even worse, they still get a lot made overseas, but now they also hate you because they exist to do large orders for the DoD, not joe schmo democratizing hardware.