I think there is, but it would screw over large capital owners and would be practically impossible in the US political system. The policies I believe could too it are also too radical to realistically be implemented in Europe.

We know that massive investment in early education with tutoring etc. could easily give the average US child the equivalent of today's top 2% level academic performance. This would be expensive, but essentially unproblematic it will never happen. Similarly, university education could be made publicly funded, and also cheaper. Here in Sweden it's cheaper per head than highschool education.

We know that physician labour in the US cost more than it should due to a shortage due to too few residencies. It could be solved tomorrow, and all US medical system problems could be solved over 15-20 years.

You could ensure that there's investment capital and no inflation, sidestepping the simultaneous inflation and need for investment caused by supply shocks due to war and technology change, by making everybody save a certain inflation-dependent fraction of their income from wages.

When a company is doing weird legal stuff to prevent their competitor from opening a warehouse in a certain, crush them-- impose criminal penalties, throw the planners and everyone who knew about the idea in jail.

15 years of this and you'd be in another world, one in which China might not be such a competitor after all. The only reason you aren't moving towards this world is because 'you' in the sense of the donors and the political leadership don't want to do it. There's even people who don't want publicly funded school lunches. With this attitude one makes oneself irrelevant.

Sure there is, it's just a real monkey's paw.

Not proven - america can engage in selected manufacturing esp if profit isn't the main tool of measurement.

Also keep in mind then ... China can't be cheap labor forever either ... either it will regress or we're all be buying from Africa which is the last place there's lower cost labor at scale.

In other words it's a double edge sword for China.

This would be easier to believe if tariffs were actually helping American manufactures. As of now, the tariffs on raw materials and high uncertainty means life is getting significantly worse for them. Those actions are drastic, yes, but they are harming the wrong side (American one).

It's too bad this administration is taking it's stand very incompetently, by ostracizing all our allies and smashing our govt capacity

If Trump was really going to focus on China in a constructive manner, he wouldn’t have gone off and pissed off all of our allies first. Our allies now are just as likely now to form trade agreements with China as they are with the USA, since we now appear just as bad to them as China (even worse, we don’t have much to offer compared to China). As it stands now, China couldn’t have asked for a better situation of American just deciding to go off on everyone at once.

Even Canada is now looking seriously at making a trade agreement with China than with the USA, which was unthinkable just 3 months ago.

"taking a stand" - is this what the narrative is going to shift to when the decades-out-of-date approach of this mentally ill false idol blows up into widespread shortages and high inflation (again) ? "Our country is in ruins, but at least we took a stand"

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> Now we have no trade and a drop in demand for US currency.

Trade hasn't been this fair to the US since before WWII.

If you take "fair" to mean, less imbalanced, that would give three possible solutions: increase exports, decrease imports, or a bit of both. Tariffs only make goods produced within the tariffing country more competitive within that country. I.E. they don't make made in the US goods more competitive outside of the US. Add that to the other stated goal of producing more inside of the US and unless they are expecting a consumption boom to absorb imports and internal production a reduction in imports is a goal.

Also the fact sheet[0] uses a paper which found a reduction in trade with China as evidence for why they should do this which I think is evidence enough that they are hoping for at least a modest reduction in trade "A 2023 report by the U.S. International Trade Commission that analyzed the effects of Section 232 and 301 tariffs on more than $300 billion of U.S. imports found that the tariffs reduced imports from China and effectively stimulated more U.S. production of the tariffed goods, with very minor effects on prices."

[0]: https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/04/fact-sheet-pr...

I think the desire is a stupid one, not a malicious one. If you read through their documentation and their statements they seem to think this is a positive outcome and genuinely desire it.

If the suppliers decide that it's not worth the risk of letting the consumer to decide to pay the passed on tariff then there simply is no consumer choice.

There needs to exist a domestic supplier to be able to fill the gap. My guess is that for many products, there simply isn't one.

The on-again-off-again of the tariffs throws another wrench in there. It would be a big gamble to start building a domestic factory right now because you don’t know if the tariffs are going to stick around long enough to make it worth it. Plus you still have the issue of tariffs on imported materials cutting away at any potential margin.

Most of what comprises a port is infrastructure for handling containers and bulk cargo. If cargo volumes are down, some fraction of that infrastructure is disused, or used below its capacity. That a ship was at berth is cold comfort to the longshoremen, truck drivers, etc. who expected to work that cargo, nevermind to the people that expected to, y’know, purchase and consume those goods.

Is 30% underutilized / partially disused tantamount to empty? Maybe not. But it’s in the ballpark in a way the snopes rating undersells.

The claim was "at this moment right now, the port is empty". The article then talks about 35% drop of "shipments" and "imports".

They've always seemed informative and do a good job of showing their sources. How big a deal is the single-word true/false judgement for an ambiguous claim if all the relevant details are summarized?

These aren’t static systems.

Keep removing 1 cup of water and add 2/3 cups and eventually it goes to zero. For a port that very well may be sending people home early on an ‘empty’ port. Even if tomorrow brings in new ships for now it looks like a ghost town.

And then at one port on one day zero cargo ships showed up.

No, but if the claim is that the glass no longer has any boba it's irrelevant how much liquid you drink.

The specific claim was that the port no longer had any container ships on that specific day. And that claim was true.

Yes, there were other ships in the port. But that's irrelevant. A container ship is a specific kind of cargo ship used for international cargo shipments. In an article about international shipments, that distinctions matters.

If I drink 30% less water overall, I’d be pretty unhealthy.

its closer to empty than before you drank

I think it's pretty self-apparent? He's saying it occasionally happens but it's rare and the fact that it's happening now is a concerning data point.

It's like climate change: sure, historically you naturally get years with lots of hurricanes or really strong ones.

But if you get, on average, more and more hurricanes and the hurricanes themselves are stronger? That's a trend.

Idk the whole discussion is hard for me to parse.

- Any one-off data point could be just random decrease or tariff impacts and we do not have a forward-looking time machine to accumulate more data

- It doesn't really shed any light at all if volumes are less or more: both outcomes can be spun as a success (if they're less, great, American Juche continues unimpeded, if they're more, great, then we just debate if the manufacturers ("China") are "paying for" the tariffs by decreasing list prices to the importer enough that the importer can maintain the same price for customers) ("China" cannot literally pay for the tariffs, they are paid for by the US company or individual accepting the shipment from the dock)

It's sort of like if it was February 2020, Wuhan was overrun and Italy was exploding, and people spent a lot of time in the nuances of if the US double digit case was up more this week than it was last week or two weeks ago

Take a look at where Vancouver's port facilities are. They're shoved up against steep mountains, a major city, and a major suburb. That makes it some of the most expensive land in the world. You'll also need to register that land with the government to operate as a bonded warehouse and invest at least a little in security to meet the requirements. For its part, the Canadian government isn't terribly incentivized to help you acquire that land so you can explicitly avoid paying any import duties.

I didn’t say it was a close second.

Again, LA/LB are basically the same port. One would also want to look at the next biggest geographically distinct port, which on the west coast is Seattle

These in particular are calculated based on time of departure. I don’t believe that’s the common case though.

It's fine if the US wanted to encourage onshoring of certain key industries for national security reasons.

You do that through strategic investment. Silicon Valley is where it is because of government investment here.

You don't do it through sudden high tariffs and angering our other allies. You don't need to be an economist to know it's a terrible idea.

You only need to know how tariffs work to understand it's an insanely stupid idea that'll crash our economy and put American businesses into bankruptcy.

Those easy times of the 50s were created from the pains of the 30s and 40s. 25% were unemployed in the early 30s.

If you wanted to go back you would have to kick women and minories out of the workforce so a man could earn double and have a percentage of young able bodied men killed or broken a generation before (through a war) before to get that demand where a highschool dropout who becomes a mailman can buy a house for a few thousand dollars.

Existing built home prices are going to go up in value if your society growing expanding. If you want declining home prices you need to reduce people/demand. The problem today is everyone wants to live in the biggest cities mostly because of jobs and everyone wants to setup a business because greater selection of employees. If the work from home movement succeeds this can break one of the pillars of why people need to be in big cities and cheaper houses can be built elsewhere.

Trump can afford to do that because the highest court in the land said anything he does as President in official duties he cannot be tried for.

So now he doesn't care what any court says.

He found the loophole that courts hate!