We can “buy or make the things China has been”? Buy from whom? Make in what factories, with what workers, with what supplies, equipment, and materials?
Ok if we can't then you're proving the need for economic and policy measures to make it so we can.
But yes, instead of buying a made in China t-shirt you can just spend a little more and buy one made in the USA, or even other non-authoritarian governments throughout the world (EU for example).
The unemployment rate is what, 3%? Where are you going to find the millions of people needed to make the iPhone domestically? Immigration? Hah, that would be an interesting stance. Automation? It would work to fill some gaps, but even apple doesn't want to pay Chinese workers for tasks that machines can do today. Someone in their company decides on when they automate, and when they use elbow grease. They may be able to afford a lot of the capital outlay to greatly improve the productivity of their workers if effectively required to onshore, or they may just stop selling iPhones in the US for a few years if all cell phones become prohibitively expensive to own. If Apple can't make the economics work, I can't see who can.
> The unemployment rate is what, 3%? Where are you going to find the millions of people needed to make the iPhone domestically?
I don't know off the top of my head, but that sounds like a great problem to have and I'd be happy to do whatever it takes to make sure we have that problem.
We instituted many processes during the Biden era for bringing manufacturing to the US. They were all carrot based: provide stability for capital investments and even some tax benefits. This resulted in massive investments in factories in the US, the most in a generation.
Tariffs do not provide capital security, they do not make it cheap to build the factories and in fact gigantically jack up the cost because we need to import a lot of the machinery to get the manufacturing going, and building the entire supply chain from scratch would add massive lead time to the other factories that use the machinery.
Further, the need for onshoring cheap tshirt manufacturing is far from clear. We have massive amounts of our workforce in far more productive areas that produce absolutely massive amounts of GDP, and reallocating the workforce to tshirt manufacturing makes us far poorer.
We are cutting drastically from scientific research, where each dollar spent by the government generates 2x-10x GDP, and telling those scientists to go work in factories. The very same types of factories that our trading partners would give up in an instant if they had the hi tech scientific research instead.
What do we need? Certainly not tshirt factories. We need scientists, services, and more productive sectors of the economy. It is absolute idiocy to give up the higher tiers of the economy only possible in the US in the 21st century, to return to far lower 20th and 19th century productivity level.
I was broadly responding to the OP's broad comment. Like yea you don't need to buy cheap crap from Temu that you saw on TikTok. And if you have to pay $5 more for a t-shirt suck it up and stop supporting authoritarian regimes. If that results in Americans working in t-shirt factories which aren't morally better or worse than any other factory, being paid higher wages and having that money stay here in our local economies at the expense of cheap goods with economic outflows to China, I say good and maybe tariffs are a good way to make that happen.
Remember, tariffs are just an economic and policy tool we can leverage. The EU uses them against China today even. I personally found the Biden administration's approach to trade to be better, but maybe we need a mix of policies to effect change?
To that effect I don't really understand your last comment about giving up higher tiers of the economy that are "only possible in the US" - we can't make computers and iPhones here. Those are those high tiers. That is a problem. Tariffs can be a tool to effect change there. Maybe not, maybe so. The status quo isn't sustainable though.
Cheap crap on Temu and phones that mainline social media into everyone's pockets are part of the circus machinery that keeps the population distracted and docile.
Nuking them is unlikely to end well politically.
As others have said, if you want to use tariffs to wage a trade war, you prepare first, so you're not cutting off the branch you're sitting on. You don't create tariffs and then build your factories.
Because you can't. It's just not possible.
But this regime has a shoot-from-the-microphone policy style which is completely irrational and unworkable, and minor considerations like practicality don't figure.
In any case, it's clear the regime is in a race between enforcing its grip on power with martial law (whatever it's going to be called) and political collapse brought about by economic collapse.
It's too early to tell, but if martial law wins, economic collapse on an unprecedented scale will follow.
You can be toxically positive and say that a lot of dead wood needed to be cleared. But in practice that just means whole swathes of the country will turn into Detroit of the 00s, but worse - rotting ghost towns, haunted by the ghosts of those who starved to death.
For some things, I agree it’s important to have domestic capability. For most things, global trade works well for everyone involved, so long as we do it in a cooperative way. The current tariff bullying approach is the worst way of building domestic capability or improving trade relations. More likely the US will sink into a decade or more of stagflation or worse as world markets move on without us, far more easily than we can become self-sustaining.
For your t-shirt example, sure we can buy US made shirts. But the US factories have a limit to what they can produce. Then what? What business person would invest in any new factories in the current environment? Where do they buy the materials to build the factory? (From our trading partners.) Where do they buy the tools and equipment used in the factory? (From our trading partners.) who do they hire to work in the factory? Former government bureaucrats? Immigrants? Oh wait!
You can Google something like "made in America t-shirts" and should find plenty of results as I did (not trying to be a jerk and say "Google it", really just trying to be helpful if you are indeed looking). I'm not sure about the European Union.
There are quite a few but just an example: https://www.american-giant.com/pages/about-us (no affiliation or any further research other than identifying from a lengthy list of made-in-USA clothing).
All I did was a quick google search, but I searched what the US imports from China, to fill in the word "stuff" from your post:
"The U.S. imports a wide variety of products from China, with the top categories including electronics, machinery, and furniture. Specifically, significant imports include computers, smartphones, electrical equipment, toys, and furniture."
I just don't think there will be riots in the street over this stuff. Maybe there will be, maybe there should be, I can't say for sure. I do know kids will survive just fine without toys, and I don't see riots over furniture. I don't know about the rest of it.
The other side of the coin is interesting: What if China decided they were never going to sell anything to the US? Would people riot in the street? Even more interesting, if China really wanted to play that game, why don't they? Why are they so mad? If this wasn't a threat to them it would be a giant nothingburger on their end.
Think of all the Made in USA stuff that makes use of Chinese components.
Many of the machines used in factories are made in China.
A lot of tool making is outsourced there (an injection molding die that might cost $50,000 to make in the US might be $10k in China, and the Chinese typically make them with a quicker turnaround time, even with shipping.
Unfortunately our homes, offices, and lots of infrastructure kinda require things like electrical equipment (amongst other trivial things like wood, metal, insulation materials, etc)
