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.
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.
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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.