the tariffs are a ploy to get as much production back into US as humanely possible. And I'm cool with it, even if there is some short term pain, if it ultimately works. US companies and importers are pretty damn good at sourcing- and when people aren't buying their products and their sales are crashing- they'll adjust. The smart ones will be the ones adjusting quickly and before the other players. It's pretty simple- if they don't want to pay tariffs they'll shift production here or to somewhere else where the US is not imposing tariffs.
Tariffs on cars or car parts should be so astronomically high that GM, Ford, and Chrysler (now Stellantis) would never want to build cars or parts anywhere but here- or they should flat out be barred by law from manufacturing any car or car component for themselves or any subsidiaries they own in part or whole anywhere but inside the US. It's a crying fucking shame they were ever allowed to shift production in Canada or Mexico because of NAFTA in the first place.
And as far as the foreign auto makers go- well Chinese EVs sold here (they aren't yet, eventually could be) should either have to by law be manufactured here and JV with American companies and have forced tech transfer (like they do to us in their country), or banned from ever being sold here, or have 5,000% tariffs so ridiculously high they'd never sell any. Throw the gauntlet down on the Germans, Japanese, and Koreans as well while we're at it. Those motherfuckers either tariff our cars and barely buy any of our cars (EU) or don't buy our cars at all (Japan, SK) - but we buy a fuck load of their cars.
free trade agreements don't exist- there is no such thing as free trade- and those agreements have never been about free trade, they are simply investors rights agreements with all sorts of lunacy attached to them- mediators that have jurisdiction over member countries courts and legal systems in trade disputes- no like for like equal protections for workers or environment- they weaken labor make unionizing virtually impossible- in a word: they are bullshit. All NAFTA did was shift manufacturing production from the US to somewhere cheaper and allow for the importation of those goods or cars or car parts from Mexico or Canada back into the US and avoid tariffs- while simultaneously allowing the flooding of Mexico with cheap US BigAG products which put millions of small and medium sized Mexican farmers out of business.
Ross Perot was dead on the money about "free trade agreements" NAFTA back in the '92 election, of course everyone laughed and smirked at him- but the man was dead right.
"We have got to stop sending jobs overseas. It's pretty simple: If you're paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory south of the border, pay a dollar an hour for labor, ... have no health care—that's the most expensive single element in making a car—have no environmental controls, no pollution controls and no retirement, and you don't care about anything but making money, there will be a giant sucking sound going south. ... when [Mexico's] jobs come up from a dollar an hour to six dollars an hour, and ours go down to six dollars an hour, and then it's leveled again. But in the meantime, you've wrecked the country with these kinds of deals."
Give 'em hell. Tariff the fucking shit out of Mexico, Canada, and China.
