I'm not sure even Tesla unambiguously qualifies here. Looking at the NHTSA part 583 list for 2025 [0], none of the Tesla vehicles have a "US" content higher than 75% (which I think includes Canada?). The highest is the base Kia EV6 at 80%. This seems to be coming from the Kogod manufacturing index. That's a more qualitative ranking that attempts to deal with things like corporate structures rather than just origin like the NHTSA numbers.
As someone who works in the industry, "where" something comes from is an inherently fuzzy concept. Different parts of the government use radically different definitions. For example, under NAFTA "domestic" parts are usually things manufactured anywhere in North America. This was done to onshore automotive manufacturing that wasn't realistically going to come back to the US, but political leaders didn't want to stay in Asia. One result of these tariffs may actually be that more auto manufacturing moves to Asia as the advantage of North American manufacturing is lost.
How is it corruption? Any automaker could have chosen to build their factories here. Tesla did. Others chose not to. Shouldn’t they be lauded for that?
Apple builds phones in China, but Teslas are built in Oakland. I just find it pretty cool.
That's a strange assumption to make. Most other auto OEMs are basically just final assembly plants with parts shipped in from everywhere. Tesla makes way more parts farther down their supply chain directly in their own factories. Ford, GM and the rest for example aren't designing and populating their own circuit boards.
Interesting, does the proportion by weight, size, value or count? eg a EV battery could be 25% of the weight, 50% of the cost and 0.01% of the number of parts.
Items that contain multiple elements get the highest tariff rate of any of them - a glass window with aluminum frame gets the aluminum rate because it’s the highest one.
It's by value. And it's not just domestic only but USMCA (US-Mexico-Canada). And the tariffs are seemingly prorated by percent 'domestic' (their example math is nonsensical, but I think that was just a math fail on the writer's part) with numerous relief and rebate options available to help ease in the transition period for various auto manufacturers.
GM, Ford, and other companies have chimed in positively.
> GM, Ford, and other companies have chimed in positively.
Given how Amazon tried to start showing the cost of the tariffs on their site, Trump publicly threatened them, and they backed down with hours, I’m not so sure I read too much into anyone praising the policies of this government as it’s clear that companies are erring on the side of staying on this governments good graces publicly regardless of personal opinions.
Wouldn't that be actually good thing for supporting local manufacturing and local buying, if customers could easily see which products are expensive because they are imported and which ones are expensive because they are locally made ?
> Given how Amazon tried to start showing the cost of the tariffs on their site, Trump publicly threatened them, and they backed down with hours...
The facts:
- There was a report that Amazon was going to begin showing prices
- Amazon clarified that was for their low-cost Amazon Haul site, not their main one
- The White House griped about them at a press briefing
- There were reports Trump called Bezos
Amazon has backed off on doing it for Haul after Trump’s press secretary publicly flamed them invoking a direct conversation with him:
> “The team that runs our ultra low cost Amazon Haul store considered the idea of listing import charges on certain products,” Amazon spokesperson Tim Doyle said in a statement. “This was never approved and is not going to happen.”
> Trump told reporters Tuesday afternoon that Bezos “was very nice, he was terrific” during the call and “he solved the problem very quickly.” He added that Bezos is “a good guy.”
If this had already started being leaked to the press I doubt that it “wasn’t going to happen” and was likely past exec review at that point. Then Trump calls Bezos and Bezos overrules the team and PR damage control as if this was some rogue action. Of course it’s pure speculation but it fits the timeline of events we know about better and we know this administration is a completely unreliable narrator as evidenced time and time again (from Trump continuing to lie claiming a photoshopped photo with ms13 overlayed was actually his tattoos to claiming he’s spoken to the Chinese leader with China disputing that any conversations have been had)
1. White House uses machinery of state to force the hand of private enterprise to hide impact of tariffs on prices.
2. Private enterprise acquiesces.
to "The whole thing is murky at best"?
It's pretty clear fascism to me. From wikipedia (while they are allowed to exist): "centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition".
Using "the machinery of the state to force private enterprise" is a rather hyperbolic way of describing a phone call. I do agree in general that the government should be much more strongly separated from private enterprise than it is, but a phone call to exert pressure is a ridiculously low standard of governmental pressure, not even just objectively but also what we've seen over the past several years in completely systemic practice.
A phone call is a bit of a coward way to describe the press secretary moaning about a hostile and political involvement of a (somehow) foreign government intervention to international journalists.
She was referencing this [1] article. And Amazon did indeed exactly what she said. They launched a side gig "Chinese Books", guided by the Chinese propaganda arm NPPA, at the behest of China exclusively in order to further their reach and business in China. That, while complying with ever more onerous requests of the Chinese government including removing reviews for certain Chinese books, granting complete control of "their" cloud services in China to Chinese government approved companies, and so forth.
It creates a reasonable argument that Amazon will do basically anything to get some of that sweet Chinese $$$, which makes their unprecedented foray into politics (at a consumer facing level), in a way that would be completely beneficial to China, look particularly bad. This still has nothing to do with using "the machinery of the state to force private enterprise" or anything like that.
Wait, because Amazon followed the law in China while doing business in China, anything they do in the US that the Orangefuhrer doesn't like is..... something beneficial to China?
The claim was that Amazon wanted to display the added tax due to the tariff separately, which is what the white house histrionics were in response to. There is no indication that only Chinese imports would have been labelled. China is not the only country that Trumpet added tariffs on.
He relies on MAGAs not knowing what a tariff is. He wants to blame price rises on Biden - if it becomes too obvious that the buyer pays the tariffs, he would lose a lot more support.
One has to be careful, with faced with opposition that ignores facts, not to succumb to the same debasement.
We all have speculation about what might have happened behind the scenes -- but it's just that, speculation.
Disliking Trump isn't license to spin supposition as factual reality.
Hyperbolic phrasing for effect errodes respect for reality, regardless of which side it comes from.
(I realize there's a 50/50 chance I'm going to get a whataboutism spiel in response to this, focusing on your fascism phrasing, and how you believe it is supported. I'd encourage you to take a beat and instead consider places you were reaching past what facts supported in your original phrasing.)
> Disliking Trump isn't license to spin supposition as factual reality.
Evaluating situations in a vacuum and sticking just to confirmed facts isn’t a hallmark of being considered and knowledgeable. One must also consider patterns of behavior and Trump pressuring Amazon to change a policy of both consistent with all of this. Facts in order of events:
* fact: News report that Amazon is going to show tariff impact on their Haul product
* fact: press secretary blasts Amazon in the news indicating she’s repeating a conversation she just had with Trump
* fact: Trump had a phone call with Bezos
* fact: Amazon puts out a clarifying statement they won’t be doing it.
* contradicting fact: Amazon claims they were never actually going to do it
* pattern: quid pro quo is how Trump operates. see the Ukraine call that got him an impeachment in the first term trying to pressure Ukraine to investigate Biden in exchange for weapons
* pattern: businesses and politicians being yes-men to Trump.
So facts + pattern = reasonable hypothesis of what happened. If you have contravening facts I’d love to hear them but you can’t just stick your fingers in your ear and pretend you have to have a confirmed fact before building a hypothesis of the likelihood of what happened.
It’s like trying to pretend Putin isn’t the one murdering dissident journalists or opposing politicians or trumping up fake charges.
I'm not referring to anything behind the scenes, I saw the press secretary intervention and I was embarrassed for America. It's as pathetic as the president complaining about "bad numbers". I miss the times when the free world had an articulate leader.
Probably driven in large part by the expansion of the voting pool. Great political thinkers have no more appeal to the masses at large than Beethoven, Dostoevsky, or Linux.
So we get entertainers and silver tongued devils for politicians whose primary skillset tends to overlap heavily with that of conmen.
Speaking of figures with no mainstream appeal, Plato wrote extensively, and utterly prophetically, about this phase of democracy in The Republic, and how it will inevitably lead to tyranny. It's playing out as if from a script.
Trump's twice election certainly makes a case for universal voting, but maybe different individual vote weights?
Basic stuff, like if you don't know what 5 - 1/4 equals or what cells are. If not, maybe you shouldn't have as loud a say in choosing political leadership?
Universal voting is the opposite of the direction to go. See: Australia. Of course going in the opposite direction is probably impossible, because it's not about knowledge but about susceptibility to typical forms of manipulation, emotional highest among them.
This is the reason that politics has largely shifted from a game of knowledge and vision, to one of mud slinging, ad hominem, and appeals to emotion, fearmongering, and so forth. It's not because the electorate doesn't know enough, but because they have poor emotional control, making them easy to manipulate. It's exactly how conmen, operate with Wiki offering the typical pattern as exploiting "the victim's credulity, naivety, compassion, vanity, confidence, irresponsibility, and greed." [1]
The only murky thing is how far Amazon was in implementing it, but there is no doubt that the White House reacted furiously to it. This is a very sensitive issue for them, and companies should be aware that Trump is willing to make their lives very difficult if they show this information.
I don’t think business leaders generally respond to chaos like the rest of us: wait and see, and maybe some light prep work. Unless everyone else starts panicking most people won’t.
This administration is governing by executive action congruent with the pacing of news cycles. Nobody knows what will happen tomorrow, which makes it futile to make long term plans. No?
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
I was expecting Hyundai to have a higher domestic content, actually. Culturally, they seem to prefer to be vertically integrated. I would expect something like the Santa Fe (produced in Alabama) to draw nearly all their parts from local partner and related firms (is "chaebol" an anti-trust term in the US?) and not import major parts like BMW does in Greer SC where engines are flown in on cargo 747s from Germany.
I won't say that NAFTA is dead, but supply and production lines were designed with the assumption the parts could cross the borders any number of times without paying duty. The WSJ looked at the Ford 10-speed transmission used in the F-150 and it apparently crosses the Canadian border at least 3 times, paying different duties each time depending on the content (machined aluminum casting, steel planetary gear sets, subassemblies, etc.)
My guess is that by imposing tariffs on Canada and Mexico, the government is intending to block the Chinese firms who are attempting to back-door their way into the US economy by building factories in the traditional maquiladora areas. Bold move, let's see how it plays out.
If Americans think Canada is the backdoor route for China into the US market, then why did Canada impose tariffs on BYD to align with US policy towards China made automobiles? Clearly actions mean nothing with the current administration.
Honestly, at this point I think Canada would be better off partnering with China. At least their tariff policies don't change from hour to hour. Canadian policy should be to rescind the tariffs on China made EVs going forward.
NAFTA was already killed off by 45. USMCA is being actively destroyed by 47. Canadians simply cannot trust the USA to be a reliable partner in anything now with present leadship.
The Kogod index includes things that likely aren't considered by the government when considering if a product is American made, though. It considers things like where the headquarters is.
I wonder if/when (going from N to S) Canada, US, Mexico will form a "North American Union" (in the spirit of the European Union). 50 years? 100 years? never?
Current politics aside, I think:
Canada and US have 'very much' in common (I'd risk saying (imho) 85% common 'stuff').
Canada, US and Mexico have 'plenty' in common (mostly Christian, capitalism/consumerism, way of life) (I'd risk saying (imho) 70% common 'stuff').
Once Mexico sorts out this 'minor' (cough-damn!!!-cough) problem (mass graves, decapitated and/or missing students, murder of anyone that doesn't want uncontrolled drug trafficking, etc.) this idea could start becoming a reality.
I mean, the US is already a sort of "north american union", I still don't know why it's one country when all the individual states are so diverse and want different things
Tesla blatantly makes their cars and even most of their components themselves in America… gosh, such a blatant crime that they escape a tariff on goods made in other countries.
The actual root cause of all this is a climate change guilt complex on the left. Elon is involved, so they have to assume bad intent, because they need an excuse for their own bad choices.
That's pure speculation, but quite possible. Corruption is nothing new in Washington.
The real question is whether people support bringing auto manufacturing back to America. As always, people who like the policy/candidate/official will overlook the corruption, while people who dislike the policy/candidate/official complain about it. The people who demanded evidence about Biden will accept speculation about Trump, just as the people who speculated about Biden will demand evidence about Trump.
With that in mind, I'm curious, what's everyone's stance on American manufacturing? Do you agree with Steve Jobs that "Those jobs aren't coming back"?
American Manufacturing never left. Total goods manufactured in the US peaked in 2018 and 2019. It dropped during covid but has returned to those levels now.
Of course manufacturing jobs left. Replaced by automation. A much smaller number of people are making things. Americans have moved on to Services jobs (many of which are poorly paid) and Knowledge Worker jobs (many of which are highly paid.)
Even industries that are traditionally thought of as solid blue collar (Boeing, Ford etc) are producing more, but with way fewer people.
Fundamentally of course, automation is cheaper, and more consistent than human labour.
Naturally the US does not make everything. Nowhere does. Some industries resist automation. Construction and some agriculture crops spring to mind. The high cost of US labor makes these attractive to foreign labor. Mexico for example produces 80% of produce that is cultivated or picked by hand.
Incidentally foreign labor doesn't have to be executed in foreign lands - the primary industries for undocumented (and hence cheap) labor in the US are agriculture, construction, child care and so on. Things that cannot be automated.
(On the agriculture front, the major outputs are crops that can be automated, thing wheat, corn, chickens, pigs etc. The major imports are things that are more labor intensive to harvest, like vegetables and flowers. )
So no, factory jobs are not coming back. Because they were replaced with robots, not foreigners. You may see local production increase though as more robots come online.
> ...replaced by automation. A much smaller number of people are making things.
Some manufacturing was replaced by automation, but most of it was not. The jobs still exist, just not in the US. Worldwide, a much larger number of people are making things.
In China, manufacturing jobs account for 29% of total employment, according to UN data reported by Our World in Data.
Nonetheless, the UN still reports that many countries have more manufacturing jobs (relative to total employment) than the US. China, if 29% is correct, has the most, but almost all European nations also have more than the US.
I used to work in a factory (i was an engineer working upstairs, never on the floor). Employment peaked in the 1950s at just over 2000 humans - today there are just over 200 to make essentially the same output. The lazer cutter replaced 70 humans running saws with 3 to run the machine. The paint system is entirely automated with only off hours maintenance done by humans. And so on.
that is how the us makes more than ever with much small % I in labor.
American labor is low quality and high cost. China is no longer a guarantee of cheap and terrible like it used to be. If america wants to make shit again they need to compete on cost terms and quality terms.
Honestly the biggest issue I have seen with US companies trying to manufacture goods is that they tend to only target US customers. Especially at the low end.
There must be some quirk with US postage where it is cheaper to buy foreign goods than it is to purchase outgoing postage.
I keep trying to buy local self pub (as in proper self pub, not just Amazon POD) books from americans and the half that actually permit foreigners to buy their books have actively stopped permitting their promotions to be accessed by foreigners.
I used to try to buy hobby stuff (militaria etc) from americans via eBay and 90+% of them would explicitly tell ROW to get bent in the listing.
And etsy postage from yankistan? Forget about it.
Kickstarter postage from the USA? Often as much as the product.
Speaking as a non-American, this is just not true. I have always been impressed by the very high quality of American engineers.
I cannot comment on manufactured goods though, but I think if the US rebuilds its mid-level industrial pipeline, quality would be amongst the best in the world since Americans generally hold themselves to a high standard. I don't think there is a need to be so negative.
That is the opposite of my experience with software engineers, and my observation of the work ethic of most Americans in a variety of professions makes me think the opposite is true in pretty much every industry.
I think "American labor is low quality and high cost" is one of those things people think must be true about some other industry besides the ones they've seen, kind of like they think the news is inaccurate when it reports things they know to be false, but accurate when it reports on other subjects.
Its my experience with US network engineers, system administrators, cablers, DC operators, business owners and a few other bits and bobs.
Something near 100% of the US telco industry I could not find a polite word to describe. And its very common for obvious deficiencies to be laughed off as normal and acceptable.
>Work Ethic
Lets start with "Listening Ethic" and "Understanding Instructions" and maybe "Work Ethic" will become relevant.
At least internationally speaking, American products tend to have a reputation of being expensive, low quality and the company's marketing department is gonna try to find ways to squeeze even more out of you after a purchase, to the point of doing things that probably should be illegal.
This is in contrast to European designed products, which are expensive, but usually are high quality, work really well and last for much longer. (In exchange, the user experience does often feel like it was designed by someone who is way too technically minded/thinks that all UX innovations past the 80s or 90s should be treated with extreme prejudice, whether that's good or bad.)
> some quirk with US postage where it is cheaper to buy foreign goods than it is to purchase outgoing postage.
International rates (or the system that runs it) were decided a long time ago. The international postal system was set up so that all developing countries (which still includes China) are subsidized by developed countries.
Yes but there are barriers there that other countries dont have.
Its lower cost than serbia, where you need to either register a business locally or help the staff out with taxes.
But its higher cost than canada, where people just sort of dont fuck around and get on with things.
And in some circumstances the lack of regulation can make things more expensive. Or at least, lack of regulation + lack of respect for norms.
I had a customer insist on using a particular tower climber for cabling, but the guy had no idea about cabling or network engineering. He was "cheap" in that he didn't draw a large wage, but he was actually expensive because he needed so much hand holding. Later I found out he had several 500M + runs of Cat5 that could have been 3 meters and a switch.
In fact it seems a fairly uniquely american thing that some bloke will go off and do a lot of """work""" and then hand over an absolute pile of dogshit that proper engineers need to come in and resolve. The shit I have seen american network engineers "produce" that needed to be cleaned up by expensive consultants would curl your hair.
Its because americans try and do everything with slave labor that they are so damned expensive to deal with.
If I engage a cabler in an Australian or Canadian data centre, they tend to find a fault and fix it in the first instance.
Literally never happened for me with yanks. Its always 5 visits, back and forth, arguments about responsibility, providers closing tickets before they have resolved anything, and engineers that dont understand the difference between light stats and BGP neighborship.
The real question isn't whether people support bringing auto manufacturing back to America. It's already in America. Only 50% of sold cars are imported.
So the question is whether these tariffs will increase the number of cars manufactured in this country, and whether that increase is an acceptable trade-off for making the cars sold more expensive.
This is not business as usual, no matter how much this administration tries to pretend it is.
Regardless, that wouldn’t make it okay. It’s weird to claim that it’s normal.
> The real question is…
No, that’s a separate question. Not the “real” question. The current tariff drama is widely regarded to be temporary because it’s so economically damaging that Trump’s successor (of any party) will remove it, if Congress doesn’t get there first.
This isn’t bringing manufacturing back to America, it’s making America a toxic and unpredictable place to do business.
> This is not business as usual, no matter how much this administration tries to pretend it is.
Rules that favor a politically connected company over others is absolutely business as usual. It's the foundation of the multi-billion dollar lobbying industry.
Letting the politically connected company buy a presidential advertisement on the Whitehouse lawn is unusual, so is letting it exfiltrate nlrb data when facing cases from the nlrb. But most importantly it isn't usual to not bother hiding the corruption. That normalizes it which is even more damaging. This corruption makes the worst corruption in the history of the nation look like a traffic violation.
The problem is that people have become so divided that the smallest of offenses by 'the other side' is blown up into the most egregious act since the birth of man, and the worst of offenses 'by our side' is turned into the smallest of issues, a technicality, perhaps not even especially real.
This is why you might think that isn't usual to not bother hiding the corruption, because I assure you most on "the other side" would rather disagree with you. Consider that a President gave banks who were failing, exclusively due to their own greed and reckless investing, hundreds of billions of dollars in an unprecedented scale bailout, and would then go on to go give 30 minute "chats" to these companies after leaving office for $400k a pop, making himself tens of millions of dollars out of it.
I'm trying to avoid more contemporary issues precisely because of my first paragraph. But I will say that overt corruption and weaponization of various institutions was perceived, by many, as exceptionally widespread in the previous administration. That's largely why November turned out the way it did, and similarly why many were so surprised by it. People increasingly live in two different realities and the hyper-polarization of media is heavily contributing to this.
I don't believe that you believe that, in the circumstance we're discussing. I obviously could list basically endless lies of any contemporary political administration. Before the country became so polarized there were common 'jokes' that weren't really jokes like, 'How do you know a politician is lying?' 'Because his lips are moving.'
This is whataboutism. Everyone lies, power corrupts, but degree does matter. Sen. Murphy's speech does a good job of enumerating the big ones. One possible benefit of all this is that the left is trying to clean house to distinguish itself. If that actually happens using the moment to get them to put in laws to enforce it staying that way would be nice. A lot of Democrats regret enshrining independent districting boards in blue states because now they want to gerrmyander, but it is done. The rest of us have our best chance at increasing freedom by playing them against each other. Rather than letting them play is against each other like they have been. We all agree corruption is bad, and campaign finance reform is good I think. Democracy is a bit more contentious it is a matter of protecting individual rights while still letting the majority rule.
I think comparing the wrongs of one administration vs another is not really viable. This is in large part because of partisanship but another issue is that we all value different things, and have different worldviews. For instance gerrymandering is an interesting thing, but I think it's entirely political theater, because there's a simple completely self-serving solution.
First off imagine an ostensibly completely fair system where each district was somehow made up of a random person within a state. Contrary to intuition, you would have actually just created the most gerrymandered system imaginable, where a party with only 51% of approval within a state would end up with 100% of representative seats, winning each and every district by 51%.
So counter-intuitively you do intentionally want to pack voters of a similar type into certain districts to create a fair system, which leads to all sorts of weird things, including the "solution"! It turns out the most fair system is to intentionally gerrymander! If you let each party with at least e.g. 1% of the vote take their turn creating an intentionally gerrymandered district for themselves (you can only 'district' your own voters), the self-maximizing solution is to create a 51% district in your favor. But if you mathematically work this out, this actually creates a perfectly fair (as close as possible to x% voters = x% of seats) result in the end! I can give an example if you find this unbelievable.
So all the rhetoric about trying to solve gerrymandering is mostly just theater and gesturing. The solution I gave is not some huge secret, even if most people are not aware of it. The only argument against it is that x% voters = x% seats is not desirable, but I think that's a rather fringe view. Geographic stuff doesn't mean what it used to, especially when there's millions of voters per district.
> I think comparing the wrongs of one administration vs another is not really viable.
Yet this is what we do at every election.
It is true that lies are about different things and have different impacts. People value different things. Lies are difficult to enumerate. Yet if person A says he ate 99 jellybeans when he only ate 98 and person B says he ate 99 jellybeans when he actually ate your mother, we can safely say that person A's falsehood is sufficiently different from person B's that we would rather put A in charge than B.
You can make this abstract argument, but imagine you have two politicians, call them T(rump) and H(arris). You ask advocates for T and H to make lists of the others' politician's lies ranked from most to least egregious and present them for judgement to a third party who will make an effort, showing their work, to evaluate their truth. Neither party may be fully satisfied by this process, but one is going to look ridiculous much faster than the other. When the argument is particular, not abstract, it becomes much harder to sustain.
Throwing your hands in the air and giving up because we cannot calculate a numerical measure of honesty like we can digits of pi is silly, because we still have to make decisions based on imperfect information. Claiming one must do this -- give up on evaluating honesty -- while still advocating for a particular candidate or policy is itself dishonest: you clearly do not believe your own argument but propound it in the hopes that others will and will then withdraw from the debate.
The point is that the example of 98 beans vs eating somebody's mother is obviously nothing like what we have in reality. We have different scales of offenses, many extremely serious in character, but there is no administration has been even remotely likely ethical and above board perhaps since JFK.
And the issue you're not considering is that we all subconsciously, if not consciously, discount the wrongs of those we prefer while blowing up the wrongs of those we dislike. I hate to use contemporary examples, because it's still so emotionally charged for most people - but I think there's too perfect an example not to here, and we've probably scared off everybody else by having responses with more than 100 words anyhow.
The last administration essentially turned the White House into the latest remake of Weekend at (B)ernie's. And they did this in complete collusive coordination with the media, and aggressively attacked and defamed anybody who tried to call them out on it. A person who fancied that administration is largely going to discount this because in the end the arguable net result was not much more than that advisors in that administration ended up playing a much more executive role than they would normally have.
But if you look at it from another person's perspective, it was a complete undermining of democracy that emphasized that the "independent" media is functionally identical to what we pejoratively refer to as state media in adversarial countries. And the response to people saying and seeing what was happening before their eyes (as, for instance, when the President would wander about in a senile stupor) was nothing short of 1984 - "The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."
One person's molehill is another's mountain, and vice versa.
WTF does this primitive incorrect argument that "banks were given hundreds of billions" - you make your whole post irrelevant when clearly unfamiliar with basic facts on topic you so furiously discuss.
Those money were loaned and were returned back with interest, so US government actually earned some good money. Do you understand each word in that sentence and its overall meaning?
I am not defending banks and their too greedy and frankly idiotic behavior in any way, but if people keep ignoring absolutely basic facts about topics they so desperately want to discuss this has no bigger meaning than ie evolution vs creationism discussions with religious fanatics.
So would it be fair to say that you're claiming the bank bailout is the smallest of issues, a technicality, and perhaps not even especially real? I mean after all it should be called the "banking temporary investment", right...?
I'm sure if Tesla, through their own excessive recklessness, did something that ruined countless lives and sent them spiraling towards bankruptcy, only to be saved by a not-a-bailout of hundreds of billions of dollars from the government, repaid some years later with token interest, you'd feel the same.
For some weird psychological reason though a lot of people seem to prefer that the corruption is explicit and open perhaps because the hidden aspect of it makes it easy to imagine more nefarious things happening while when it's blatant like this it's easier to minimize it with a "what's the big deal, it's just a little tax cut for Tesla".
>The current tariff drama is widely regarded to be temporary
It was also widely regarded to obviously not happen before it happened, despite Trump's explicit statements that it would happen and also his past tariffs from his first term.
Murder is an interesting example, because like corruption, people overlook it when "their side" does it. Governments employ soldiers to do it on demand. Gang members and mafiosos use it as a tool. Sometimes people even celebrate it, such as equating body count with success in war.
The problem in politics is that everyone seems to choose a side, then apply that same kind of double standard. Rules for thee and not for me, as it were.
Edit: but of course, "war is the continuation of politics by other means." So it makes sense that the behavior would be similar.
> Warfare is entirely different.
Not so much. A lot of people are already talking about civil war. If political differences escalate to that point, how many will mourn the loss of lives from "the other side"?
> Murder is an interesting example, because like corruption, people overlook it when "their side" does it.
No they don't. If someone I know committed murder, like almost everyone - organized crime members are very few in the population - I would absolutely not overlook it. What an absurd argument.
> If someone I know committed murder, like almost everyone - organized crime members are very few in the population - I would absolutely not overlook it. What an absurd argument.
Fails to define murder and focused on organized crime vs what if it was your best friend, wife, close relative etc. it’s easy to claim how you’ll react in an abstract scenario but revealed preferences often show something happening very different in reality than what people claim about theoretical situations publicly. Oh and as if it wouldn’t matter who the victim was. What if it was someone bullying your child viciously for months on end? What if they claim it was an accident and now you have to pick which story sounds more plausible?
And does “not overlook it” mean they cut ties with that person, turn them in, visit vengeance upon them?
If you think murder it’s easy to define, go look at how many different kinds of murder are defined in the US legal code and how every country defines it differently. And military kills are excluded even though definitively I fail to see the distinction between a war and political violence - it’s just external instead of internal. What is and isn’t murder is surprisingly hard to define and you’re either using a legal definition that’s a political compromise of different ideas or your own value judgement which is your opinion and not necessarily one shared with others. Seriously - try writing down what you think murder is in 3 sentences or less and see how far you are away from the legal code in your country.
Basically every big tech company engages in much worse forms of government manipulation. At least this one aligns with citizen interests.
IMO, if gov manipulation benefits citizens; e.g. creates meaningful jobs or opportunities for citizens, then it's not corruption. The difference is night and day. Where was the outrage over massive government contracts handed out to Oracle, Microsoft, etc... under previous administration? What about all corporate tax breaks? These are purely self-serving and the magnitude of the harm done to citizens is far more significant. It's dishonest to turn a blind eye to those and to focus on trivial policies which actually work in the interest of citizens. Here, the benefit to Tesla is just a side effect.
And the evidence that SpaceX is in the interest of American citizens is...?
Neuralink existed for years before Musk. If it weren't him, the researchers would have continued with other investors or govt grants (Trump gutting the NIH recently notwithstanding).
Compare this paltry evidence of benefit with the massive damage being done by the Musk-directed DOGE group, and it's clear billionaires being able to use their money to buy influence over govt is a net negative for US citizens.
> And the evidence that SpaceX is in the interest of American citizens is...?
Starlink. The one that connected the N Carolina hurricane victims when FEMA failed, and then again in Los Angeles.
NASA can now launch missions at 10% of the cost, due to SpaceX.
> Neuralink existed for years before Musk.
According to Google: "Neuralink, an invasive BCI company with a short-term goal of treating various neurological disorders such as quadriplegia, was founded by Elon Musk in 2016 with the intention of creating another “layer” to the brain to complement the functions of existing layers like the limbic system and the cortex."
It's now working on restoring sight to the blind. What a monster Musk is!
BTW, the value of his companies is what investors value it at. Surely they think they are worth it.
I think many people find cheaper launches for NASA very cool, but things like handing over restricted government data to Russia or throwing out vital medication in areas where its already been deployed vastly outweighs saving the federal government some bucks.
You know all those things would happen without Musk, right?
A funny thing about SpaceX: I used to work around the space coast in Florida, and the scuttlebutt there was how often the employees had to work around Musk.
Apparently he would breeze in, make uninformed suggestions, and the employees developed processes to limit his damage.
Go outside, touch some grass, and contemplate that Musk is just a dude with a lot of money, not some singular genius or the savior of humanity. Once you do that, you can ask yourself if he's even the best billionaire to be running these companies.
I disagree. I agree that the system shouldn't be creating so many billionaires. It's a flaw in the system. But Musk is among the best of them IMO and his contrarian position makes him essential, even if you disagree with him and his politics. There needs to be opposing forces among the elite or else we're sure to walk down the path of totalitarianism.
I generally agree with Musk's politics but I wouldn't want all billionaires to share his politics because that would be dangerous. Unfortunately those on the left do not seem to understand this; they keep trying to force total consensus. Which is the biggest evil, total consensus is more evil than any idea you could come up with.
Most ideologies are distractions to get people upset over specific unimportant ideas so that they don't get upset over the massive evil, creeping ideology; the ideology of "total consensus over important ideas."
Full consensus is evil incarnate, no matter the specifics. Its stickiness; inability to adapt to reality is what makes it evil. Without opposition, there is no room for independent thought.
No, they're dying because of a global financial system which systematically steals from them by corrupting their governments into making decisions which benefit large western corporations at their expense, while depriving them of resource royalties and opportunities to work for themselves.
International trade agreements and political over-engineering of the global order are to blame.
Where are all the other concerned countries stepping in to help since the US has left? Why is the US the only country that is considered responsible for the problems of foreign countries while every other country is given the luxury of focusing only on their domestic affairs?
If that's what you want to happen, you say "in a year, we're going to cut off this aid" so that there is time for someone else to step in.
But they just cut it off from one day to the next in a place with challenging logistics, ensuring that some of the world's poorest people are likely to die so the world's wealthiest man can muck around in politics as a hobby.
The desired outcome isn't capturing hearts and minds, it's preventing easily preventable diseases and deaths for what amount to pennies in the federal budget.
No, we've been hated since Vietnam. There was a brief period after 9/11.
From my prospective everyone hates America, but weirdly wants to migrate here at he same time. (Except for the online minority who threaten to leave but never do)
Why should we send $240 million to Zambia? Is it the United States taxpayers' responsibility to treat all of the developing world's problems? How much foreign aid is enough?
The United States is approaching 37 trillion dollars of debt. There will be no aid to Zambia or any other country if we default on that debt.
I’m struck by how some still seem unable to grasp the power of soft influence. Africa now has even fewer incentives to side with anyone but China. America’s strength has long rested on its deep alliances and its knack for creating prosperity abroad—but that advantage is eroding fast.
Are you struck at the possibility of a inner-city family on welfare, or poor rural areas thinking that the US should be spending fungible dollars on them and not someone half way across the world?
They do by lowering taxes. This money can be used to keep local communities funded.
We will probably never be in agreement with government having more money to inefficiently distribute vs keeping it in the pockets of the earners. Sorry.
Well they are not doing that they actually planned to cut local welfare even more. So you make your poorer people poorer and lost influence over the world. I'm honestly struck with that.
Politicians which are drastically cutting foreign aid usually doesn't increase it locally because they do not agree with the whole concept.
They do by lowering taxes. This money can be used to keep local communities funded.
We will probably never be in agreement with government having more money to inefficiently distribute vs keeping it in the pockets of the earners. Sorry.
Your link does not say that. It says that there have been models predicting an increase in deaths over the next 'x' years while giving stories of numerous people who are facing bureaucratic hurdles moving over to the alternative clinics. The death projections assume there will be no replacement for USAID which is not a reasonable assumption. As the article emphasizes, they are already being replaced - though it's taking some time to get over the hurdles and get the bureaucracy working more effectively.
But this is part of the reason I am quite happy with USAID being ended. The goal of effective charity should be to make itself obsolete. We can see both that that was entirely possible here, but also in no meaningful way pursued at all. They could have spent those years and millions of dollars funding the infrastructure and other pipelines necessary make sure people were aware of and could easily access these state (or other private charity) clinics. Instead they just acted as a dependency creating drug distributor. In one case having a guy literally just handing out drugs, at his discretion, at a truck stop.
You mean fascism? Absolute control over media and speech? Racism? White supremacy?
And what is your definition of consensus? If everyone strikes a compromise, is that evil ? If majority strike a consensus, is that not consensus; that is, does it have to be total in order to be called consensus?
Is majority a consensus? Of course people agitate for getting full victory
So when there’s broad agreement that something is a good idea like, I don’t know, making sure the water is drinkable, your reaction to that is it’s “evil incarnate”?
> There needs to be opposing forces among the elite or else we're sure to walk down the path of totalitarianism.
This is false dichotomy. Our only options are not either a single consensus, or a balance between good and evil. We can have a balance of reasonably good intentions, too.
Most billionaires are pretty bad, and Musk is among the worst of them.
I had a think for a while about the least bad billionaire, and I'm going to go with Taylor Swift. The worst thing she does is have an astronomical personal carbon footprint, which is true of all billionaires.
So if a full consensus says that Nazis are bad, then they are themselves bad, not the Nazis ? And if Musk is the best of the billionaires, that says an awful lot about the others, which paints a very, very hideous world that I definitely don't want a consensus on.
The guy paves the way towards totalitarianism, but please, tell me about we should have people like him because it prevents totalitarianism.
> The change will allow carmakers with US factories to reduce the amount they pay in import taxes on foreign parts, using a formula tied to how many cars they sell and the price.
Tesla has been one of the best selling car across the world. I don’t think it’s just the parts alone.
As someone who works in the industry, "where" something comes from is an inherently fuzzy concept. Different parts of the government use radically different definitions. For example, under NAFTA "domestic" parts are usually things manufactured anywhere in North America. This was done to onshore automotive manufacturing that wasn't realistically going to come back to the US, but political leaders didn't want to stay in Asia. One result of these tariffs may actually be that more auto manufacturing moves to Asia as the advantage of North American manufacturing is lost.
[0] https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/2025-04/MY2025-A...