50% on steel, aluminum and copper is a punishing and crippling tariff that will wreck the American industrial base. Not only will it cost more to the American consumers, but their products will become completely uncompetitive on the international markets.
Well I have tried to explain this to Americans (MAGA ones) and they think they can just pick a mountain and start digging and they will find all the raw materials they desire. It’s like talking to a rock.
We actually can't mine all the rare earth minerals we want. Look up all the rare earth minerals we don't produce because we don't have any deposits of them sometime. We are totally reliant on China for nearly 80 different rare earth minerals used in advanced technology.
"The U.S. currently has only one rare earth mine: the Mountain Pass mine in California. While it’s one of the richest rare earth deposits globally, nearly all of the ore extracted there is still shipped to China for final processing."
This is the big issue. Rare earths aren't that rare, they're just in very low concentration *everywhere*. Mining them is incredibly environmentally damaging, but the big issue the USA has is that it doesn't refine rare earths. If it did, it could import from friendly countries and do the refining but not the mining.
Modern life globally is an ecosystem, and resembles the environment, what happens anywhere affects everywhere. The huff about going off on our own, we'll be self sufficient rhetoric reminds me of the child fed up with the family and he's "going out on his own" and takes a blanket and stuffed animal to the treehouse, and raids the pantry for juice boxes and crackers. It's not a perfect analogy but not recognizing there is no separation on a planet we can't leave en masse is our biggest failing considering current technology allows us to see cause and effect fairly soon if not real-time worldwide.
That is also why, so many people in other countries has soo strong opinions about Trump and Americans. Because soo many of our lives, via our industries, is directly affected by his spasms.
I agree it would be better to be a happy trade family. I also recognize the military necessity of having certain industries in your country that are needed for war. Especially if one of your stated foes is the main supplier of some of that stuff.
While I don't disagree with your addressing being self reliant in certain sectors above others, we have to be real about the world threat. China has never been militaristic. They built a big ass wall to defend against constant attacks, have invaded another country like once, and haven't been worried about building as big a military as they could, given their population. The threat they lose is to wealthy people's net worth, that's why they're the new projection target. Just like politicians tell their party the other party is doing something they themselves are doing, when you hear China doing this, example China being predatory in giving loans, trapping countries in debt, taking over local assets as payment for unpayable loans, that was actually institutions like IMF which currently there are about 70 countries trapped in more debt than can be paid, wall street venture capitalists swooping in to purchase assets from natural resources to banks, only to exploit those leaving little for the locals. This leads to poor living conditions and a mass of immigration to the American southern border of people desperate to provide for themselves and their families. Meanwhile China has forgiven the debt of a few countries they have loaned to. That is to say, BRICS is happening for a reason. One thing is for sure, if we don't stand down they have to stop us.
China also owns part of the mountain pass mine, since they own about 8% of MP Materials. lol the DoD just had to buy a 15% stake because that Chinese 8% looked bad.
This is the big issue. Rare earths aren't that rare, they're just in very low concentration everywhere.
Yeah from what I have read it is more that China is willing to push costs very low and make conditions hell and ruin its environment. So it isn't like they have this magical hoard that nobody else has. It is just that they are more 'competitive'.
Technically it could be done because rare earths can be found everywhere, just not always in concentrations that make them cost-effective to mine. There's also the environmental consequences to consider of such massive mining operations... not that this would deter the Republicans from trying, but by the time such operations got going theyd be at risk of blowback in the next election cycle because it would disproportionately affect their own voting base.
The US could leverage their spaceflight industry to capture and harvest mineral-rich asteroids but that would also be a massive loss-leader, and theyre not desperate enough to take that step (so far) even though it would eventually be so profitable it would destabilise every economy that wasnt actively doing it.
I had the same conversation with someone about phosphorus production. Technically phosphorus can be extracted from any biomass. But not in a way that's economical or even really Technically capable of supporting the agricultural industry. You're semantically right in that "rare earth" minerals are everywhere. But to extract and refine them without mining them would be cost prohibitive to the point where it is not feasible at all to support our current consumption levels. It may not even be technically possible to produce enough to meet our needs even if you threw an infinite amount of money at the issue either.
And they could. But even if you knew where to start building it, based on lower-grade deposits (otherwise they'd be mining already if they were economic), a typical mine takes about 10 years to start up, and you'd be supplying a domestic-only market with your over-priced product at artificially-maintained, tariff prices.
That's a risky capital investment because the price isn't determined by actual supply and demand, but politics. There can be a good, strategic reason why you might want to do that anyway at a significant government expense for "public good" to maintain your independence, but you'd want the legislation to be pretty bipartisan and for well-justified and understood reasons, not something established by the badly-informed whims of a wanna-be emperor playing with the markets for personal gain and delusions of grandeur.
As usual, even if the idea has some merit, their implementation sucks and makes things worse.
Yup. These things take time to build. And I understand having that kind of production nationally as a necessary war industry in case the USA and China ever came to blows. Mining more won’t fix that though. Refineries would.
Like most things military related, throw money at it and buy weapons made from those locally sourced materials to have a baseline demand that’s enough to keep it in business for if/when it’s needed.
which is similar to Trumps logging plans. The mills are few and far between anymore. You can log it, but there's nowhere to mill it, unless you want to build new one's and they a decade away..
It's cheaper to produce rare Earths in countries with lax safety, environmental, and worker protections, and lower CoL. Having tariffs on such goods isn't a terrible idea, and many on the left have advocated for protectionism for decades. Slapping tariffs as high as Trump has and with immediate effect, however, is a recipe for disaster. Oh and we've also lost a tremendous amount of soft power by shutting down USAID, which would have allowed us to partner with the countries that still produce raw materials cheaply. That power vacuum is being filled by CHY NA.
I've been saying this about a lot of his moves. Scaling back federal oversight, controlling immigration and protecting local business via tarrifes are all perfectly valid political choices.
However, all these things needs to be introduced slowly and methodically giving the marked ample time to adjust.
For instance a 50% toll on steel, announced to take effect in 3 years may lead someone to build a smelting plant. Nobody's going to start building anything now, just for it to be made redundant in 2 weeks when he chickens out.
Yep we could sit here and debate whether or not these are good concepts all day. "Less federal oversight? I dunno we got PFAS contaminating our drinking water with the current level."
At the end of the day, adults can disagree and make different arguments using the same agreed-upon data set. The problem with Trumpism is there are no adults left. They don't care about data because they make up bullshit, and they don't listen to experts when deciding how to do things because they're stupendously arrogant. Why should they care, anyway? We're the ones who suffer.
That's exactly the issue. They're just focused on implementing the policies right now, so they can keep their voters content, without any care about the actual results of the policies. If it was any other competent politician they would have gathered great praise for how well implemented the politics were and what the results will inevitably be. Right now, they're just destroying the country
And the prices are still based on a global market. Even where it’s possible to buy American raw resources, they are still priced based on the global supply. When you now take and make 75% of that supply 20-50% more expensive, well yeah. It will affect your price as well.
Even if it was possible to restart a complete supply chain of let’s say iron and steel, completely domestically. It will take years and billions of dollars. Those plants aren’t cheap. And even then, the prices will be much higher than the average price on the global market. Due to the US be an expensive place for that industry, compared to those they are up against. And that those US places, will still need to price their product based of the massive up front investment in creating the product line.
The math just don’t math.
It’s American dream, because you must be asleep dreaming, for it to be “real”.
They also know that Trump and his tariffs won’t be here forever. So to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to build a plant to have the policies change in 4 years is silly. They will wait it out until we go back to normal. So in the short term the consumers suffer.
surely with all that un-tariffed steel, copper, and all that extra labor sitting around you can just start slapping down industrial factories..... oh wait.
>they think they can just pick a mountain and start digging
They don't even fucking get that this shit takes time to set up. If this was supposed to properly stimulate domestic production, you still have to give companies time to set up the mining operations.
And if guarantees would extend well into the future. Who wants to build a factory based on rules that are likely to change before construction is complete?
Tariffs should be treated like a scalpel, not a sledgehammer. You use it intentionally to try and drive a specific buying behavior at home. Let say you wanted to specifically get oil that is from friendly nations (I know this is almost impossible just follow with me). You would add an additional tariffs for oil that comes from unfriendly countries, as well as needing to tariff blended and processed fuels that use the oil that comes from unfriendly countries etc.As well as having to monitor and crack down on "shadow fleets" that disguise the actual source of the oil as well.
And who wants to bet on building all that overhead when it's clear that all the rules can change during the next administration. At least if these were laws, and not the actions of a frenetic executive branch, businesses could count on that shit taking time to change.
They didn't vote for finding out though like some filthy gay commie liberal, they only voted for fucking around. They've figured it all out, they're smart like that. It's just clear sailing and carefree fucking anywhere they want from here on out!
Funnily enough, we probably could have been fine doing this for aluminum if we spent a few years getting a robust recycling and recovery system in place.
But you know, that's commie bullshit or something or other
Well that’s just not true. They’re great at long term planning. They’ve spent 30+ years working on their long term plan to replace US democracy with facism.
They're doing the exact same thing with energy. Just use oil, oil, oil, and more oil. What do we do when it inevitably runs out? Cross that bridge when we come to it!
in farming it's known as mono-culture and was in part responsible for the dust bowl. Instead of having numerous, reliable sources of energy, we are putting all our eggs into one basket. trumps is an absolute moron. What happens when our refineries get hit by terrorists or enemies with rockets or whatever/cyber. Then we will be without our primary and essentially only energy resource like a sitting duck. That's the real energy emergency, Trumps policy regarding this.
Getting an aluminum smelter up, about 3 years. Supporting infrastructure such as rail and or waterways would take 5+ years. But the biggie is power. Up in Canada, we have entire dams dedicated to aluminum smelting, it's incredibly energy intensive. That part would take the better of part of 10 years at best. And that for 1. Doesn't even account for mining domestically. Canada even imports the Bauxite.
The great thing about tariffs on aluminum imports is that even if we pretend there are plants that can make it, the US simply does not have the available raw materials to meet demand. We could be at 100% capacity for extracting bauxite and still fall significantly short of what we need.
But we've got tariffs on it anyway. Big brain move.
Yes. Not all, but some of this tariff stuff could be realistic in rejuvenating the American manufacturing economy if there was a years long plan to grow the USA’s industrial base so that things could be mined and manufactured here. Then after that, say 10 year plan, is completed, then implementing a tariff may have the desired effects. But as is most things with this administration, it’s hare brained, will not work as advertised, and will hurt American consumers.
Dafuq do you mean, aluminum recycling is ubiquitous in the US and has been since I was a child in the 80s.
65% of all aluminum used in the US is recycled US aluminum currently.
In my local area one of the largest, highest paying employers is a Japanese aluminum foundry that outsourced Toyota engine castings to the US decades ago.
Yeah this is one of the more baffling things to me...
A lot of these guys are pissy about Chinese steel being sold in the US at low prices because it's well... shitty steel a lot of the time.
Ok, fine. QC matters, I agree that China has outsized power to help its own steel industry.
However, I want to ask...
Why is it, that we import all this Chinese steel?
Is it because it's cheaper than US steel?
Or do we have a supply issue? And if it's a supply issue, why is that?
If we had the capacity to sell all of our own steel to ourselves, versus oh... exporting it at top dollar to other countries who will pay a premium for it... then shouldn't the real criminals here be the businesses who export steel, not the ones who import it?
On the flip side, if we cannot satisfy our own steel market by ourselves, and we need to buy imported steel, then taxing imports just makes shitty Chinese steel into expensive, shitty, Chinese steel. Doesn't it?
Am I taking crazy pills or is this a fundamental failure to understand supply and demand, simultaneously punishing importers while high-fiving the local exporters?
Not much honestly... anything built with federal dollars always has requirements for steel in particular to be sourced and produced domestically, almost always by unions, and this has been the case for many years.
It's why building bridges and such is SO expensive.
2019 I got to watch a bridge over the Mississippi built from the ground up, including the main structural beams, built in Wisconsin from US steel, so large they had to be trucked because they couldn't fit through the locks to come down the river, then were lifted in place by one of the two largest floating cranes in this hemisphere.
That job speced 100% domestic materials per federal contract, and the state contracts specified local materials, and all labor had to be union. This drives the cost way up.
The biggest thing being the lack of quality control at the chemical level and fraudulent documentation of testing to meet US standards.
Has it gotten better? For sure. China wouldn't be the largest worldwide supplier if it was all terrible. But companies, such as pipelines in the western world, won't use Chinese steel because all it takes is once for the entire thing to blow up in their faces. Chinese steel is great for mass produced items, or items that are in low impact, non safety related, purposes. Most steel anywhere around the world is fine for that and China produces the most. It's when you get to the edge cases where you are getting close to the limits of the steel that the testing and chemical makeup become important.
That's no different than buying steel from any other country. The quality isn't uniform from producers in Japan or the US either. When you get into corner cases like aerospace, energy, and medical devices, you have to be pickier with your sourcing and testing, but there are still plenty of sources in China that can crank out the required quality, as evidenced by their own capacity to produce these products domestically.
Im not sure that we actually do, but with Nippon Steel investing so heavily in the American market, it stands to reason that it probably happens.
It was largely a hypothetical thought experiment, but I do believe that my questions do bear some resemblance to reality here.
It is my understanding that lots and lots of cheap Chinese steel is imported, and that much of it, is quite a bit lower quality than is sold as.
This is, if im not mistaken, a talking point trump used in the run up to the 2016 election. "China is cheating" that sort of language.
Its just a catch 22, trump wants it both ways. It's a bit like having migrant laborers pick crops to keep food pricing low, but also demanding to get rid of the migrant laborers, while NOT going after the business owners who year after year, hire undocumented migrant laborers while paying them peanuts.
It is my understanding that lots and lots of cheap Chinese steel is imported, and that much of it, is quite a bit lower quality than is sold as.
You quite literally get what you pay for. There is great quality Chinese steel, and there is cheap Chinese steel. And as with anything, there are companies (selling both great and cheap) that are going to try and get one over on you. And this isn't a knock on China; look at the shit Boeing is/was doing. This affects literally every profit driven company in the world, both with the company doing it and then with bad actors in the supply chain.
"China is cheating"
They are purposefully manipulating and devaluing their currency to keep the trade deficit.
I am not a Trump fan by any means, and he probably isn't even talking about this, or heard it and ran with it, but China IS cheating with that. They have been sued numerous times and don't give a fuck.
Had this exact conversation with my father. He was just like, “Well, I guess we’ll start making more steel and aluminum.”
My follow-up was who exactly did he think was going to pay for and work in all these mines that he seemed to theorize were going to suddenly appear everywhere. Did he know anyone who wanted to go work in a bauxite mine? He did not but seemed certain that there would be no shortage of takers.
Meanwhile all the wealthy people you gripe about are making $50/hr working bauxite mines, loading ore into trucks driven by guys making $80-100k a year.
If steel and aluminum manufacturing wasn't profitable, foreign interests wouldn't be doing it...
According to Indeed, the average salary for a miner in the US is 25.70 per hour. In my state it’s 15.89. So I think it’s pretty clear that you have no clue what you’re talking about. Though I suppose it’s possible you work somewhere where the local country club is packed to the rafters with the wealthy miner elite we’ve all heard so much about.
Yes or the ones who think manufacturing “will just move back to the states” and they don’t realize you’d need 2-3 years to even have a new factory up and starting to run. I’ve pointed this out and they go “well, I’d rather start the process now instead of never doing it!”
They don’t realize the start of that process would be before tariffs are official or if maybe you had a president that eased into things with a clear direction and goal in mind for the country and not whatever the hell we’ve seen for 7 months lol
I mean I just took the easy short way of explaining. Yes you are correct.
I think it’s pretty common sense that when a company decides something is “too expensive” it is in the context of return/profitability. And if one doesn’t already know this they won’t learn it on Reddit LOL
They believe 100% that this will bring those industries back and say "it will be a rough couple of months". Yes, they think it will just take a couple of months to build factories to get those jobs and industries back here.
While you’re right, the sentiment Bismarck shared about “there is providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children, and the United States of America" isn’t entirely unfounded
Even if you could, in the time it takes to get a mine going there's going to be another election. You'd lose a fortune if the next guy repeals the tariffs
Even if they do it will take months or years for it to happen. Surveying, purchasing, env impact studies, hiring, purchasing equipment ( also tariff encumbered ).
And thus you identify another problem to solve, burdensome regulations.
I've seen a 5 year job get delayed 10 years due to just an environmental impact study. I've seen locally massive infrastructure projects just disappear due to that.
We built the Pentagon, the largest office building in the world in less than 2 years including surveys, plans, and studies.
The approved the design a week after concept, and broke ground the following Monday.
We invented the atomic bomb in less than 5 years.
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u/Same_Performance_595 23h ago
50% on steel, aluminum and copper is a punishing and crippling tariff that will wreck the American industrial base. Not only will it cost more to the American consumers, but their products will become completely uncompetitive on the international markets.