Based on the previous comment, it sounds like the fuzziness well predates Trump.
Are you arguing that the fuzziness was built into the system previously to allow presidents to pick winners and losers in the auto industry? Do you know if there are clear examples of past presidents actually using that power?
The fuzziness was primarily left to bureaucrats making best guesses, without any particular agenda. Of course there would be some bureaucratic capture going on, but shame would still work. Systems work best with some sort of fuzzy logic, which is what courts and bureaucrats provide. Regulations are not supposed to be a suicide pact.
What has changed here is that loyalty to the head of state is the primary determinant for all of the gray areas — and that guy can be as arbitrary and capricious as he wants. Context always matters; context is the difference between prerogative and corruption.
There is a revolving door between industry and bureaucracy, true. There is a problem with getting qualified people who are not conflicted financially and who are not bound by preconceptions. This problem is not particularly tractable, but granting all the decisions to the leader can only make it worse.
Granting the powers to either is also an option, and a reasonable one in my opinion if our two options are granting decisions to those using the revolving door or the one person at the top (regardless of who that person is).
I actually see this as an example of why the fuzziness should always matter. We may occasionally find good reason to take the risk, but we have a ton of this kind of fuzziness written into our countless laws and we have no real way to stop those in charge from deciding to misuse it.
The mechanism to stop it is to lean on the chickenshit Republican congress critters to impeach and convict the president who is using his discretionary powers to overtly loot for personal gain, attack our country (/me waves at the import blockade), and is already ignoring the check of the judiciary. It would be great if there were other methods of accountability, yes. But it's impossible to codify legal rules into perfect mechanically-executable formalities, and it's impossible to avoid the principle agent problem. Since you seem to be concerned about this problem, surely you are contacting your congressional representative and senators to express support for impeachment, right?
I live in a state where unfortunately my senator will absolutely never turn on Trump and impeach, those calls would be a waste of time.
I agree that holding people accountable today is important if and when laws are broken. But surely you can't just stop there. We don't need to codify legal rules perfectly, but acknowledging that we can't should lead to much more hesitation with the powers we allow and the sheer size of our legal codes.
Dealing with an immediate problem first makes sense. We would need to follow that up with overhauling our laws to better ensure this can't happen again. We're never going to do that though, solving the root cause is slow, tedious, and politically untenable.
Fuzzy in the sense of "you need a bunch of experts and lawyers to sit down to determine what the correct answer for the government is in any specific situation". The work is exceedingly tedious and expensive.
I was involved in similar efforts to remove Chinese parts from the supply chain during the previous Trump administration. It was a nightmare that involved dozens of people reviewing tens of thousands of parts across hundreds of components with multiple revisions. I was involved for two years and that wasn't even the entire thing. Most changes required multiple layers of analysis/engineering review, change proposals (which often had to pass change review boards), vendor negotiations, manufacturer negotiations, reams of documentation about changes to refit procedures for previously produced HW, testing, validation, etc.
Removing Mexico and Canada from supply chains would be even worse. Probably nigh-impossible for some OEMs.
Accounting tricks are likely the best option. Buy your offshore supplier, or setup an offshore reseller. Start supplying the components to yourself at a loss, making the cost of that component cheaper when it comes to tariffs or this 85% calculation. Increase profit margins to cover the offshore loss. Send money back offshore as part of some sort of suppliers agreement if you need to balance their books. Even if the gov tells you to stop it, it will have taken them a few years and any fines negotiable since politically they still want you happy enough to keep manufacturing onshore.
Whether some parts could be manufactured in the US is irrelevant, when you give 3 days' notice instead of 3 years. You simply can't build a factory in 3 days, let alone train up the required personnel and set up an entire local supply chain.
Once a skillset and supply chain is lost, manufacturing a specific item absolutely may not be possible "now". You'd need to rebuild a supply chain and import skilled workers to get it happening.
Goo luck importing external highly skilled immigrants into current super-hostile US environment to undermine their own countries. Proper patriots would even sabotage such effort.
Sure you can massively overpay them, exacerbating the effect of massively rising prices for US domestic product.
Access to raw materials may be a fundamental blocker there.
I had seen stats putting China's control of certain rare earth minerals as high as 80% and products like lithium batteries as high as 97%. I don't know the industry well enough to validate that, but I couldn't find anything refuting or disproving those numbers either. If true, we very well may not be able to make them here if China were to cut off those resources long term.
That will be a rude awakening for a lot of people if we have to start mining that heavily here. We were able to have our cake and eat it too as long as we could talk green while outsourcing our environmental damage due to mining overseas.
No one can do anything in the west because you can’t mine or process anything. Countries like China have no regulations preventing the processing of raw materials.
Oh, you can, generally, it's just not fine to poison the whole region's water supply doing it, which less rich countries care less about, and which makes it expensive.
It probably also means that companies will not do it: It seems impossible to keep the tariff this high for years, and Trump will only stay in office for a few years...
Trump has been replacing anyone who would realistically force him out with flunkies as his first order of business. No one is getting rid of him in a few years.
His term ends in a few years. At that point he’s either replaced, maybe with the same kind of person (the US people have showed their hand with these elections), or he stays in place somehow.
Are you hinting at the second scenario? Then we’ll get to see what US democracy is about, or if those people hoarding guns to fight an undemocratic or abusive government were just overcompensating, as it looks like today.
Trump’s term ends with a high probability of a Democrat being elected to clean up his mess, as happened in 2020 and 2008. He will almost certainly lose congress in the midterm unless he can somehow suspend the election (all bets are off if the constitution falls).
Or his exec order asserting that the 2020 election was stolen and targeting former CISA head Chris Krebs for not lying to that effect in his security evaluations of the voting systems.
I really don't want MAGA people watching who I vote for. I'm sure you see logic in that? Also, I love vote by mail, I appreciate it as much as the residents of red state Utah who also appreciate that.
lol so you are ok with the party you oppose skipping votes for your party because it happened behind closed doors and poll watchers / challengers are not allowed in.
And yet it democratic voting areas it’s democrats who are blocking poll watchers and challengers or are suspect of voter fraud when they don’t close voting or have suitcases randomly show up and quickly shuffled in.
It’s only democratic areas who don’t want voter id.
It’s not actually a fuzzy concept. CBP determines it at the port of entry and they basically have this huge list of every type of product. Fraud is taken extremely seriously so its not something companies mess around with.
The fuziness mentioned comes from when outside firms try and estimate the % domestic content. Unlike CBP they’re largely making estimated guesses, but luckily that’s not how the tariffs are calculated.
Even in normal times regulators don't take kindly to origination fraud even, so it's highly unlikely anyone will risk it with an admin like the current one. Look at what happened to Amazon earlier today and SentinelOne last week.
Most manufacturers will eat the cost and raise prices to a certain extent. Base models of any product tend to be manufactured in such as way that they have much looser margins.
I meant 2 weeks ago - Chris Krebs "resigned" and S1 had to do a lot of damage control around their Fed business (which is significant as a cybersecurity vendor).
Won't be surprised if Stamos quietly "resigns" in a couple months as well.
And that was under the Biden admin, which was much less pushy. The Trump admin is much more vindictive, especially with a policy that appears to be backed personally by DJT.
Here are some interesting legal articles discussing this very thing in the Trump admin
