At times, it seems futile

 

No matter how many good people refuse to participate in the Trump government's corruption, there are tens of thousands who are willing.

They can't take our jobs if there aren't any

 

But don't tell Trump.  He thinks everything is going great.

MAGA regrets

 

I'm surprised they haven't been bailed out yet.

The folly of Trump's tariffs

 

Jobs report nightmare

 

But don't blame it on Trump!

I think that's a good example of why Trump cut federal funds to NPR.

Related...

The Trump effect

 

MAGA doesn't really want the 50s

 Not for everything anyway.  They just want the cultural 50s.

Trump has defended his tariffs by arguing that young American girls don’t need a lot of dolls—in fact, they can make do with fewer. His basic case, as top adviser Stephen Miller elaborated, is that we don’t need imported Chinese toys, because kids are already drowning in them, and most American parents will happily pay more for fewer quality dolls made in America rather than buy cheap and superfluous Chinese ones.

[...]

As many have noted, Trump—whose own kids were raised in literal golden splendor—is in no position to lecture Americans about accepting scarcity created by his own policies. Indeed, the whole conceit is a tacit admission that the tariffs will hike prices on consumers, which he keeps denying will occur.

[...]

Many of the jobs this would create are bad ones. And even if it were possible for some fraction of manufacturing jobs along these lines to be decent ones, Trump’s own hostility to unions and government regulations would work against that goal.

[...]

[Trump] reiterated the point to reporters on Air Force One, but this time, he grew angrier. “Let’s not waste a lot of time with stupid questions,” Trump ranted darkly, even though the queries posed concerned his own ideas about girls’ dolls, ones that raise obvious questions about the impact he himself expects his policies to have.

Stephen Miller: "If you had a choice between a doll from China that might have lead paint from it that is not as well constructed, as a doll made in America that has a highly environmental and regulatory standard ... and those two products are both on Amazon, that yes, you probably would be willing to pay more."

  New Republic

You'd only be willing to pay more if you had more.

And with the Trump regime doing away with regulations, your American made dolls will not have "a highly environmental and regulatory standard" and may well be made by children themselves with states knocking back child labor laws as Republicans are doing now to make up for loss of cheap immigrant labor.

Josh Bivens, chief economist at the Economic Policy Institute, points out that Trump has laid off large numbers of officials at agencies overseeing worker safety, halted government rules ensuring good working conditions, and fired pro-worker, pro-union appointees at the National Labor Relations Board, among many other things.

“What makes manufacturing jobs good is unions and regulations that protect worker safety.”

That's just the point. Manufacturing isn't what made America great for employment. Unions did.

As for the desirability of manufacturing dolls in the US...

“Do most Americans want to sew tiny little skirts a thousand times a day?”

[...]

There’s no easy way to envision mass domestic doll manufacturing creating lots of good jobs, these people tell me. It’s not just that much of the human-performed work is drudgery. There are also other factors, they say: Lots of the materials you’d need to make the dolls, as well as many of the machines for making them, are also manufactured abroad. So you’d need to import all that anyway.

Rebuild textile factories, without regulations, for toxic dyes and chemicals.

Even if we could construct a massive and largely domestic supply chain for dolls, it would take many years to spin up. And it’s not clear how long many of the manufacturing jobs would last, even if we did do that. “The only thing that will happen is eventually robots and AI will take over,” Cathey says.

And the environment will be polluted.

Even if you think some good outcomes might result from producing far fewer plastic toys, lots of quality jobs won’t be one of them. Indeed, the opposite would happen, these industry officials tell me: Because toy companies also employ lots of higher-end professions like design and marketing—and these are the jobs that are concentrated in the United States already—producing far fewer toys would kill many of those good American jobs, while creating far fewer bad manufacturing jobs in their place.

“You’d be trading millions of good-paying jobs for tens of thousands of horrible-paying jobs,” Cathey says.

[...]

As Paul Krugman details, many Trump officials are now explicitly packaging the idea of a revival of low-level manufacturing work in many areas—from sneakers to apparel—in the language of nostalgia for the 1950s. It’s a preposterous notion, one that gets at the core absurdities and outright lies embedded in MAGA ideology at a very fundamental level.

After all, the whole selling point behind the promise of restored manufacturing is supposed to be that this will create a lot of good breadwinner jobs that will then shore up stable, virtuous manufacturing communities. But trying to reshore things like doll manufacturing—while rolling back worker protections and the regulatory state, which are also core ideological commitments of Trumpism—is a recipe for anything but.

[...]

“Painting eyeballs on Barbie dolls and styling the hair of Bratz dolls,” notes Foreman drily, “aren’t the kinds of jobs that President Trump has promised in Michigan or Alabama.”

I think they very much are.

Bringing production back to the states with tariffs

 

Nice job, Trump

 

Nutlick at it again

 From screwing tiny screws in iPhones to servicing robots.

Well, not Nulick's kids.

On Fox News, bad news for Michigan

 

About those factory jobs

 

Mark Twain would have his answer

 Mark Twain once wrote: Sometimes I wonder if we're being run by smart people who are putting us on or imbeciles who really mean it.

Wonder no more.

Trump’s massive 104% tariffs on China are set to go into effect at midnight tonight [April 8], a move that will have a major impact on Apple and its supply chain. Ahead of that, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said today that Trump firmly believes that Apple can move iPhone manufacturing to the United States.

[...]

In response to a question from Maggie Haberman of The New York Times, Leavitt said]:

“[Trump] believes we have the labor, we have the workforce, we have the resources to do it. As you know, Apple has invested $500 billion here in the United States. So, if Apple didn’t think the United States could do it, they probably wouldn’t have put up that big chunk of change.”

Leavitt is referencing Apple’s announcement from February, when it said it would “spend more than $500 billion in the U.S. over the next four years.” Apple’s commitment, however, made zero reference to iPhone assembly in the United States. The press release focused on R&D in the U.S., chip production in Arizona, AI server manufacturing in Houston, Apple TV+ production, and an academy in Michigan.

[...]

As reported yesterday, Apple has been stockpiling iPhone inventory in the United States ahead of Trump’s tariffs. This will help the company stave off the impact of the tariffs and avoid price increases for now.

  9to5Mac

We don't have the factories, the specifically skilled workers, or the materials to build iPhones here. So there's that.

By the way, US tariffs on China are now 104%, and Chinese tariffs on the US are at 84%. Nice work, Trump.

And, the rest of the world is moving on without us.

President [of the European Commission Ursula] von der Leyen held today a phone call with Premier Li Qiang to discuss the state of EU-China relations, as 2025 marks the 50th anniversary of diplomatic ties.

[...]

The President underscored the vital importance of stability and predictability for the global economy. In response to the widespread disruption caused by the US tariffs, President von der Leyen stressed the responsibility of Europe and China, as two of world's largest markets, to support a strong reformed trading system, free, fair and founded on a level playing field.

[...]

President von der Leyen emphasised China's critical role in addressing possible trade diversion caused by tariffs, especially in sectors already affected by global overcapacity. The leaders discussed setting up a mechanism for tracking possible trade diversion and ensuring any developments are duly addressed.

[...]

The conversation also covered EU-China cooperation on the international climate agenda and the clean industrial transition.

Finally, President von der Leyen reaffirmed the EU's steadfast support for a just and lasting peace in Ukraine, emphasising that any conditions for peace must be determined by Ukraine. She invited China to intensify its efforts to contribute meaningfully to the peace process.

  official EU website

Sure, hon.  Tell me again, how much of what we're buying at the grocery is produced in this country?

In a nutshell...

Yeah, we saw China kissing your ass.  

Has Charlie Kirk gone Commie?

 Read your labels.

Oh, whew.  He pulled it out there in the last half.  

But Charlie, the fall of American manufacturing happened a long, long time ago.  The world now operates on a global economy.  

Also....

I don't know if any country is going to experience an economic boom with Trump's policies, but it won't be the United States.  Not in Charlie's lifetime anyway.  Unless it's when he's a very old man.

Jeremy at The Quartering is a noodlehead.  You can tell by his use of the term "prolly".

About those tariffs

 

Whatever the notion of economic goal that a tariff could accomplish or assist, you cannot control how other people or other countries react. This is why tariffs are terrible policy—because you don’t have power to tell another country what to do. This is the version of I’m going to walk up and sucker punch you in the face, but you’re not allowed to kick me and you’re not allowed to bite me and you’re not allowed to get a friend to help. You don’t get to dictate rules in a street fight that you started.

[...]

And it might be why tariffs aren’t vested in the power of the executive and the Constitution. You put them with Congress where they have many people contributing, where you have negotiations that had to be held, where you have to get people on board with your plan. [...] You don’t want so much economic policy being shot from the hip of someone who has a temper, and that’s why most economic policy doesn’t flow through the president most of the time.

[...]

[Y]ou’re also seeing from all of this the heart of the problem of his executive power: There’s no points of leverage over him. He doesn’t take constituent calls. He doesn’t go out into his district and have to meet people who run coffee shops and people who run tea houses and people who are small manufacturers who are seeing their supply chain hit. This is just a personality fight, an ego fight. Whereas your members of Congress, like it or not, even if they don’t agree with you, do have to ask you for a job and do have to answer to you.

[...]

[T]ariffs can be incredibly destructive to a small set of people. For example, you’ve got a supply chain that rests on one good from one country, and it becomes 50 percent more expensive—your whole business model then is out the window.

  New Republic

And, what's the goal, anyway? We don't really know. It could be to get manufacturing back to the US (pipe dream), or it could be to make imports cheaper (a game of chicken).

I was on a WNYC show that was a call in, and one of the people who called into the show about tariffs is starting his first board game company. He has investment money and he’s contracted with a board game manufacturer in China to make the game. But of course, now that tariffs are announced, he has no idea what his production costs will be or if he’ll able to afford to launch his company, his new game. I think that this is a great case study of what a tariff is supposed to do.

In one version of the world, tariffs are meant to onshore domestic production of board games, so we’re going to close off trade relations with China in order to protect the domestic board game industry. In that version of the world, you’ve got to find a factory, find investors, find equipment, find people, get it all started. And then you can start making board games—lots of which are really hard to do if the market is tanking and there’s not a lot of investor funds to be had.

In the other version of the world, if it’s not to build out domestic board game manufacturing, tariffs are just a negotiating chip. In which case, any type of movement toward domestic production would be immediately superseded by renegotiating a deal with China. It then wasn’t about getting board game production to the U.S.; it was about just making board game imports cheaper. [...] And certainly in the case of the former, if you did want to grow domestic board game production, you would do all of those things before the tariff. The tariff would be the last thing you did when you had the factory and the machines and the people and you were all ready to go. So it’s a struggle to find a coherent economic policy from this because manufacturing and negotiation are in conflict.

Trump has no plan. He only has instincts and thin skin. Or perhaps someone told him that when the market crashes, he can "buy the dip" (as Eric Trump recently told everyone to do) and make a killing when it eventually (maybe!) goes back up.

We have shoes now. We had shoes in 1925. We’ll have shoes in 2125. If you imagine a shoe factory a hundred years ago versus a shoe factory a hundred years from now, I can bet that the first picture you think of is a grainy black and white photo with 200 people bent over a production line. And in 2125, I doubt there’ll be a person in the room. This is a lot of economic pain to throw around for an industry that decreasingly uses people.

And if you really wanted to have good middle-class jobs in the U.S., you would identify the jobs that can’t be exported and replaced by a machine, and you would ensure that those jobs are high quality and well-paid. What made a manufacturing job good is that they were high-paying, had health, and had retirement. That’s not special to manufacturing. That’s just special to labor economic policy.

[...]

Are we really going to sacrifice all of our economy to bring back unionized manufacturing jobs as opposed to thinking of something more creative? Are we really going to bankrupt the federal government for a tax cut that serves very little articulated economic purpose? At some point, are we going to address problems of basic rights in our labor market for workers that have long been not addressed? We don’t have paid sick days. We don’t have childcare. We’ve got a very aging population, and none of their kids have paid family leave to take care of them as they die.

[...]

We have a massive sprawling low-wage service sector. You could make that into the middle class if you really wanted to, but I don’t think we want to. I think we prefer to lament about the lost past, but it cost a lot to destroy the future.

Jobs stats look crazy

Former President Bill Clinton on Wednesday used part of his speech at the Democratic National Convention to hit back at the notion that Republican presidents were better on the economy than Democratic presidents.

[...]

"You’re going to have a hard time believing this, but so help me, I triple-checked it,” Clinton said in the speech. “Since the end of the Cold War in 1989, America has created about 51 million new jobs. I swear I checked this three times. Even I couldn’t believe it. What’s the score? Democrats 50, Republicans one.”

Washington Post fact checker Philip Bump decided to fact check Clinton's claim and found that it was 100 percent correct.

"There have been six presidents since 1989, three from each party," wrote Bump. "Under the three Democrats — Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden — there was a cumulative increase of 50 million more people working between the starts of their terms and the ends. Under the three Republicans — George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush and Donald Trump — the cumulative total was, in fact, only 1 million."

[...]

Bump decided to try to make an apples-to-apples comparison of job growth under former President Donald Trump and under President Joe Biden by excluding the period where the COVID-19 pandemic hit the economy and put millions of Americans out of work.

"In 2018 and 2019, under Trump, the country added 4.3 million jobs. In 2022 and 2023, under Biden, it added 7.5 million jobs," he concluded. "You don’t have to be a sports whiz to see that seven puts you ahead of four, either."

  Raw Story

Meanwhile...

Next up for heavy exploitation...

...Chilean lithium miners.

Is Trump trashing American manufacturing?

Toilets, dishwashers.  What next?

Unless there's a dishwasher commercial on TV during Fox & Friends, Trump has no idea what one even looks like.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.