No one is going to spend millions to billions of dollars on manufacturing facilities in the current political situation (read: unstable, risky, constantly changing).

> Let’s assume tariffs are used as a means to bring manufacturing to the US.

I don't think it's that altruistic. This is simply a way to defend or fund income tax cuts.

If you look at the federal gov P&L according to DOGE (https://doge.gov/spend); excise and customs taxes are the best opportunity to drive revenue if you won't raise income tax.

I believe the idea is to replace the internal revenue service (income taxes) by the external revenue service (tariffs). The tariffs are kind of a hidden sales tax, with the hidden drawback of making cross border manufacturing pretty painful. The auto industry is especially impacted by this, with parts crossing the US/Can/Mx borders pretty frequently.

I doubt this scheme would work, but from what I understand the rich typically prefer sale taxes to wealth/income taxes since they only consume a small fraction of their net worth in goods, preferring to invest (which wouldn't be taxed). They're also not regressive, meaning that poorer people would end up paying a larger portion of their income in taxes.

> we don’t have the know how, labor to do it to begin with.

That, I believe, is one of the reasons why the H-series and E-series exist in the United States, along with the L visa. It gives you the opportunity to bring foreigners into the United States, either for a limited (but finitely-extendable) period of time, or permanently.

You can argue that the current forms of those visas do not work, but that is not my point: My point is that the above reason is why the visas exist.

To bring my point back around to tariffs: I think making the above-mentioned visas harder to get goes against the purpose of the tariffs. If you want manufacturing etc. brought back here, then make it easy (or easier) to get the knowledgeable folks who you need to train the folks who will do the manufacturing here.

> Let’s assume tariffs are used as a means to bring manufacturing to the US. By that definition the administration has no idea what level of tariffs will make this happen. Setting up manufacturing in the US for any item is not cheap - we don’t have the know how, labor to do it to begin with. On top of that the cost of manufacturing is many fold compared to china, India, Bangladesh or Taiwan. So 25% or 10% is still not in anyway going to force manufacture to come back.

I don't think there will be many startups reinventing products from scratch and building factories in the US.

I think multi-nationals will move a small factory to the US to avoid tarrifs.

That makes the US more resilient when some idiot leads us into another war.

25% is plenty to give a US location a comparative advanatage.

Tariffs are just a tax. Similar to a sales tax, but it needs to be paid on import. To be clear, it's a tax on your own citizens, not foreign exports.

If a product is cheaply produced in another country, and your domestic industry cannot match that price, your domestic industry might disappear. Suppose that other country is subsidizing their industry, then it's quite unfair, and it legitimizes supporting your own industry either by your own subsidies or retaliatory tariffs. As they say, to level the playing field.

If the domestic industry is already dead, tariffs won't magically resurrect it. For example, building a chip industry can take billions of dollars in investments and years of development. All that time, those taxes are basically just costing consumers money. They need to be kept in place up until the new factories come online AND are paid off. This can take decades. Will those tariffs still be there? Will those other countries have ALSO invested? Those uncertainties make it hard to invest in a dead/dying industry, even with tariffs in place.

One feature of tariffs is that it's a tax on consumption, so it's ultimately paid by consumers, and it's a regressive tax; the wealthiest will pay the smallest ratio of their income and/or wealth, while the working Joe will just see stuff getting more expensive - especially in the short term.

Tariffs can work to retaliate against, and discourage, dumping. They can play a role in protecting vital industries. But arbitrarily imposing them for political points is a dangerous gambit.

As someone that sells products that are assembled from components that are sold and manufactured globally.

My customers pay me for product. Some of that pays employees. The assembly house. And for parts are are imported. The tariffs basically means I have to pay extra to the government so they can give it to bunch of wealthy financial parasites.

> this can help some US company

These tariff threats are so broad. They are not aimed at encouraging this or that local industry. (And for the US you would need much more than a few percentage points of margin to encourage that.)

It feels like they are (1) threats. very crude threats. to get entire countries to change their policies a little this way or that - favoring the US a little more in exchange for dropping the threat. and (2) a source of govt revenue that doesn't look to the voters like income or capital gains tax. Although obviously it is - in the US everything ends up there.

> but that seems to benefit only a very small amount of industries.

Entirely logical response from a normal person used to think and act in a normal, decent way.

  Criminals break into a museum. There is an artwork there, 4000(!) years old. The thieves wreck the artwork and smelt the gold that is inside it for a €225 profit.

There is a phenomenon of "The Cult of Wealth". Most people here cannot imagine how people with unlimited wealth, unlimited options, almost unlimited power think like.

Have you seen the kids of the president ridicule the dying people in Ukraine? We are inclined to think that if you inherit almost the whole earth, you would be very grateful, kind and compassionate.

Instead, they see the world in terms of just a handful of peers with the rest as resources to be extracted. We live in a world where we are brainwashed to think it is normal for corporate to call human beings "Human Resources".

---------------------------

As soon as people learn to see what hides behind Trump and Doge, the networks that finance and selects people, they will lose the war. The theater is there to distract you, media will pick it up as bait but will not do the investigation of what it is. And so we are paralyzed by the news of the day.

What society needs to do is to not accept abnormal and egregious behavior as normal. We all know what is decent human interaction, and the few can only take power over the mass, if the people consent to it -- be it actively or passively.

> I understand this can help some US company to sell more products in their country

If they are even able to satisfy the needs of the customer, either in quality, price or supply.

I'm not defending it, but certainly if they then reduce income taxes (which is the plan), consumers would have more money to spend. A portion of that money would then go back into US manufacturing, further driving up wages

The tldr version imo of tariffs is to ask yourself if their should be tariffs on Chinese evs and work backwards from there to every other industry.

The more detailed answer boils down to if you as a business can save 1% producing a product by buying a widget you need from overseas, that's what you'll do. So instead of a domestic company paying employees in your country all through it's supply chain, it all goes overseas. This costs you as a business 1%, but in theory has a large enough economic impact to benefit the country overall.

AFAIK the Section 301 tariff (and increases) only applies to parts imported from China/HK. There are lots of manufacturers on DigiKey that make their parts from elsewhere where these tariffs are not assessed. As a data point, I recently bought a bunch of Lite-on LEDs on DK, their COO was Thailand, and I wasn't tariffed for those parts.

I guess there's always Goodwill, landfill. You can pull PCBs, desolder components.

Similarly my hobby involving ship to shore cranes is going to be painful.

Seriously though they have a lot of stock in their warehouse. If this is already imported and paid for then it should be exempt right?

The page doesnt state what happens to foreign customers. Does the duty only apply for domestic buyers?

Likely yes although I’m not sure if the administration has fully got rid of De Minimis or figured out how to reduce from $800 USD.

With UPS the added kicker is UPS charges a $70 processing fee themselves for processing something through Customs for you, paying the tariff for you so the package isn’t delayed and then enabling you to pay them back in advance of delivery on ups.com or the driver will ask for payment at the door when delivering your goods.

Just got a JLCPCB order this week (below $800) via UPS and it arrived no problem with no tariffs since the de minimis exemption is temporarily still active from the latest of the tariffs EOs.

In the past with a DHL order over $800 they just sent me an invoice to pay before they'd deliver the package. Make sure you check the invoice though - DHL screwed up the HTS codes and tariff calculations and substantially overcharged, so I had to talk to DHL support to get it fixed (which ended up being really straightforward).

I had a $300 order (ordered late January, arrived last week) and was hit with the tariffs via UPS along with their bogus processing fee as another commenter mentioned. They wait for it to reach the US before holding it hostage. Would recommend using DHL if at all possible, as they make dealing with it a lot less painful.

There's a piece of furniture in eyeing that's twice as much on Amazon as on AliExpress.

I have two anxieties about Ali that are keeping me from making a decision though:

- You're essentially trusting foreign eBay sellers to get customs right. If they screw up, it's a ding against your Global Entry account. You're making yourself liable for the competence of strangers, and I don't know the system well enough to know if you can trust their ratings.

- I've yet to hear anything about how the tariffs are working out in practice. I don't wanna hit buy and find out everything is way more complicated/expensive than it was last month.

I should probably just buy from Amazon, but it's hard to commit to paying full price when you know everyone else is selling it for way less (but more risk of something shady happening).

I think the de minimis exemption is still in effect temporarily because they don't have a system set up to charge the tariffs yet.

https://www.bicycleretailer.com/industry-news/2025/02/07/tru...

To my understanding, your board is a subassembly and not subject to the tariffs. There’s an existing semiconductor tariff as well as this product tariff, and various categories that make it hard to untangle. Anyone correct me if I’m wrong - trying to figure it out: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/supermechanical/pickup-...

Unless JLCPCB explicitly sold you under DDP terms[1], you'll have to pay applicable tariffs. I'm 99% certain they did not do that, it's usually explicitly mentioned. DigiKey for example has this as an explicit choice when I order to Norway.

Here in Norway that also involves a service fee by express companies like UPS as paying tariffs means they can't use a simplified customs declaration, and they typically front the payment to get you your goods ASAP. YMMV.

edit: Seems I missed that Trump postponded[2] the low-value exemption, De Minimis, so your shipment is probably in the clear. But next one might not be.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incoterms#Allocations_of_costs...

[2]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2025/02/07/trump-reins...

It will be $85: 35% customs plus $15 brokerage charges from UPS.

If JLCPCB doesn't charge, you will get a bill from CBP, customs and border patrol. I've purchased capex equipment (items over $25k) from China for my small company and that's how we've paid tariffs in the past.

(Contrary to the current US administration's lies, the buyer pays the tariff, not the seller.)

> I wonder if this also applies to Mouser.

Yes.

> I might have to just source from China

It also applies to anything you source from China yourself. It's an import tax. Any applicable goods or services introduced to the US market incur it.

The one place it doesn't apply is when Digi-Key (or Mouser) ship to outside the US, their warehouses are apparently transit areas. (Source: I ordered to Switzerland a few days ago. No tariffs. You can probably check yourself by creating an order.)

If you're buying from China, you'll be paying the Trump Sales Tax. And if you try to ship directly from China yourself, you'll pay administrative fees to whoever handles the actual tax payment for you. For a few moments in early February before the administration began backtracking, DHL was charging a $32 fee for each shipment, even for a $1 trinket, and the other shippers (Cainao etc) were rapidly gearing up to do the same. The de minimis exemption for low-value goods was also briefly suspended, which is why the fees were so out of whack, and also why USPS momentarily stopped accepting shipments from China and Hong Kong: they didn't have the infrastructure to suddenly deal with fees on huge volumes of packages.

Buying your Chinese stuff through Mouser or Digikey or Arrow will spread that administrative fee across a whole shipping container of components. You'll still be paying the tax, but the administrative costs will be amortized.

I think tariff targets Chinese goods in general. Maybe you can source from ShenZhen in person but I'm not sure how the Custom office deals with this. I guess it's OK as long as you don't bring in quantity.

Another solution is to just live in ShenZhen when it's applicable. The city is nice and vibrant, and you are treated pretty well as long as you don't get into politics.

There are also tariffs being applied to goods from China, so "just source from China" may not allow you to avoid the tariffs.

Republicans today definitely would be unrecognizable to Republicans of even 16 years ago. Here are some excerpts from the 2008 Republican Party Platform [1]. Are there any Republicans in Congress now who would agree with any of this?

They were for renewable energy:

> Alternate power sources must enter the mainstream. The technology behind solar energy has improved significantly in recent years, and the commercial development of wind power promises major benefits both in costs and in environmental protection. Republicans support these and other alternative energy sources, including geothermal and hydropower, and anticipate technological developments that will increase their economic viability. We therefore advocate a long-term energy tax credit equally applicable to all renewable power sources.

> Republicans support measures to modernize the nation's electricity grid to provide American consumers and businesses with more affordable, reliable power. We will work to unleash innovation so entrepreneurs can develop technologies for a more advanced and robust United States transmission system that meets our growing energy demands.

They were for energy conservation, recycling, telecommuting, and reducing business travel:

> Conservation does not mean deprivation; it means efficiency and achieving more with less. Most Americans today endeavor to conserve fossil fuels, whether in their cars or in their home heating, but we can do better. We can construct better and smarter buildings, use smarter thermostats and transmission grids, increase recycling, and make energy-efficient consumer purchases. Wireless communications, for example, can increase telecommuting options and cut back on business travel. The Republican goal is to ensure that Americans have more conservation options that will enable them to make the best choices for their families.

They wanted better gas mileage for cars and a push for cars that do not rely on oil, with electric cars specifically mentioned:

> We must continue to develop alternative fuels, such as biofuels, especially cellulosic ethanol, and hasten their technological advances to next-generation production. As America develops energy technology for the 21st century, policy makers must consider the burden that rising food prices and energy costs create for the poor and developing nations around the world. Because alternative fuels are useless if vehicles cannot use them, we must move quickly to flexible fuel vehicles; we cannot expect necessary investments in alternative fuels if this flexibility does not become standard. We must also produce more vehicles that operate on electricity and natural gas, both to reduce demand for oil and to cut CO2 emissions.

> Given that fully 97 percent of our current transportation vehicles rely on oil, we will aggressively support technological advances to reduce our petroleum dependence. For example, lightweight composites could halve the weight and double the gas mileage of cars and trucks, and together with flex-fuel and electric vehicles, could usher in a renaissance in the American auto industry.

They had a lot to say about climate change:

> Addressing Climate Change Responsibly

> The same human economic activity that has brought freedom and opportunity to billions has also increased the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. While the scope and long-term consequences of this are the subject of ongoing scientific research, common sense dictates that the United States should take measured and reasonable steps today to reduce any impact on the environment. Those steps, if consistent with our global competitiveness will also be good for our national security, our energy independence, and our economy. Any policies should be global in nature, based on sound science and technology, and should not harm the economy.

> The Solution: Technology and the Market

> As part of a global climate change strategy, Republicans support technology-driven, market-based solutions that will decrease emissions, reduce excess greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, increase energy efficiency, mitigate the impact of climate change where it occurs, and maximize any ancillary benefits climate change might offer for the economy.

> To reduce emissions in the short run, we will rely upon the power of new technologies, as discussed above, especially zero-emission energy sources such as nuclear and other alternate power sources. But innovation must not be hamstrung by Washington bickering, regulatory briar patches, or obstructionist lawsuits. Empowering Washington will only lead to unintended consequences and unimagined economic and environmental pain; instead, we must unleash the power of scientific know-how and competitive markets.

> International Cooperation

> Because the issue of climate change is global, it must become a truly global concern as well. All developed and developing economies, particularly India and China, can make significant contributions in dealing with the matter. It would be unrealistic and counterproductive to expect the U.S. to carry burdens which are more appropriately shared by all.

> Using Cash Rewards to Encourage Innovation

> Because Republicans believe that solutions to the risk of global climate change will be found in the ingenuity of the American people, we propose a Climate Prize for scientists who solve the challenges of climate change. Honoraria of many millions of dollars would be a small price for technological developments that eliminate our need for gas-powered cars or abate atmospheric carbon.

[1] https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/2008-republican-pa...

I miss conservatives.

I was discussing today with a relative how Cuba's Fidel Castro framed the public opinion in the country in such a way the nation is currently... having a very hard time. Even after Fidel Castro's dead. Worse, Hugo Chavez imported the same set of morose ideas, and a decade later, with both idiots dead, the two countries are competing to see which one has longer blackouts. Never underestimate people's capacity to listen to popular figures and embrace damaging cabals.

We're not really spending soft power as much as flushing it down the shitter. I won't be mad at all if Canada wants their own nuclear weapons now. Good fences and all that

Trump's tariffs against China are at least aligned with both his, and long-term America stated strategy and goals. America has tried the free trade trick with China to try to compel it to towards political liberalization - it didn't work. Remember that Trump's tariffs on China from his first term were not cancelled by Biden - infact Biden added to the tariffs, in addition to enacting export restrictions. Both Bush Jr and Obama enacted limited tariffs on Chinese products.

If you look at trade action against China, you can see the contours of a strategy that could maybe actually work. Obviously, tariffs cannot be the only component of such a strategy, since the disparity between Chinese and American manufacturing capability in many fields is absolutely gigantic. It took decades for China to reach their current position, there's no reason to expect that America, or the west as a whole could expect to catch up in anything less than roughly a decade scale, especially with only unpredictable tariffs.

Trumps tariff plans against the rest of North America and the EU however... those fly in the very face of attempting to seriously take on China. USMCA is up for renewal in 2026. Whatever legitimate issues Trump had with Canada and Mexico, and whatever strong arm position he wanted to take, he could have messaged as a part of a prelude to the renewal. This probably would result in better outcomes for the US.

The US is finding that many of their critical supply chains (including defense supply chains) are passing through China. Tariffs alone are not sufficient to disentangle these elements, and the domestic messaging from Trump simply does not create the domestic conditions for sustaining both the tariffs and whatever other policies and aid are required to enact these structural changes. It's difficult to reconcile "lower inflation", "slash the budget and deficit", "tax cuts for the rich", "tariffs", and "reindustrialize America" all at once.

Randomly picking the Toyota EV battery plant that's supposed to come online this year in North Carolina - site selection was announced back in 2021. In many of these critical areas, we're talking multi-year minimal lead times to bring new capacity online.

Yeah as much as I'm very much unhappy with the consequences of this to me directly, I imagine this admin is going to be really important abroad, for the EU in particular, for identifying unnecessary vulnerabilities and dependencies on US infrastructure.

> And as a Canadian whose country been the target of a certain leader's 51st state jibes, I find it pretty hard to sympathize with the pain that Americans are going through and how bad inflation is going to get.

Less than half of Americans that voted voted for Trump, and while there are definitely some people happy about what he is doing, there are also many who voted for him that aren't. I'd also like to point out that Trump didn't say anything about annexing Canada until after he had won the election.