U.S. considers fresh round of tariffs on semiconductors, report says

9 points
1/21/1970
6 hours ago
by mikhael

Comments


budman1

The CHIPS act was a good attempt at moving some back. Unlike tariffs, which are designed to 'make it hurt', the CHIPS act gave incentives to actually move some plants back to the US. And to make sure there were trained workers available.

Tariff is paid by the importer, who passes it on to the end user. If you are in a boom market for semiconductors, the manufacturer really doesn't care about how high it is. Like today with the AI bubble. Why build a plant in the US? The bubble may pop before it gets built; and the manufacturer still gets his margin.

4 hours ago

mindslight

Aren't we out of feet to shoot ourselves in?

The glaringly obvious answer to stop the looting of American industry over the past thirty years would have been to use our asset of having the world reserve currency to directly subsidize strategic industries. But that was denied from being in the Overton window, as it would have hurt line-go-up from fake austerity where monetary inflation was instead given away to banks as low interest loans (ie the asset bubble). And after the political will finally built up that "something had to be done", we merely get this dipshit con artist regime squandering what remaining strengths we have left, marketing their morally bankrupt destruction in narratives that beatings will continue until the market improves. But the market is clearly not going to improve from these actions - the sticky value center is manufacturing things using semiconductors, and tariffs on the inputs make it even harder to start domestic businesses!

5 hours ago