Here is more information on the "reshoring" of American jobs trend.

[marketwatch.com]

The post can be dismissed without being finished. Anybody can rant these days. Very very little of it merits reading, much less reposting. This one earns neither.

I appreciate how nobody has confused me with the author of the facebook post; or assumed I agreed with it or ridiculed me for soliciting opinions.

The author claims that...

"In fact the average large ocean container ship burns through more fuel everyday than more than one million cars do."

This claim is patently false. A large container ship burns between 150 and 225 tons of fuel per day. One million automobiles burn about 7,500 tons of fuel per day, assuming average miles driven to be 60, and average mileage at 30 miles per gallon, and the weight of a gallon of gasoline or diesel fuel to be about 7.5 pounds.

I have not had time to analyze the many other claims, but I think the author's focus on trade is a bit misplaced. The most grievous injury that Trump does is to delay our total engagement with the climate issue. The uncertainty he foments holds back investment in green technology. Talk about jobs! There are many millions of potential jobs there. And the more we delay, the worse will be the effects of climate change. We need to act NOW.

Tariffs suck - that's all bullshit. We've already lost thousands of jobs and billions of dollars to tariffs. Take soybeans, instead of selling them to China, China started buying from Brazil(?), Trump spent billions to compensate the farmers and our crops rotted in the fields or were plowed under. Even if we get that business back, China now has an alternative supplier which will drive down the price.

Keep in mind, fb is the platform of choice for the manipulation of public opinion... Don't believe what you see unless you verify it (at real news sources like NYT, Snopes, WAPO, NPR, CNN) and don't forward around things that you aren't sure are true.

Really that whole statement didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Canada actually already has a higher minimum wage than America. 45’s big new trade NAFTA agreement if you read it is not all that revolutionary. He just wants to make it sound good.
Tariffs are not good for America.. look at the stock market and there’s been a number of small companies that make nails, etc that have let a lot of people go.
Ford, GM, Harley Davidson are in trouble along with others. Many others are shifting more business overseas.
As noted, no economist will ever say tariffs are good for the economy. It’s been tried before, it was a huge failure.

Yeah nah that sounds like this guy thinks manufacturing unsubstantiated conclusions from whole cloth is going to put a factory back to work. China has already found alternate sources for the crops they previously bought from us and we borrowed more money from China to bailout our own farmers that were hurt by the tarriffs we placed on china. That'll teach em. We are an economic charicature of Elmer Fudd firing his bent shotgun into his own face at the moment.

I have a hard time believing Trumps tarriffs will do anything of the sort that he claims, especially in the long term, when he's demonstrated a clear unyielding misunderstanding of the short term consequences and who he thinks pays the price for tarriffs already. These tarriffs have already cost too many batches of jobs in the 10s of thousands for me to recall the list of companies. Google "how many jobs have been lost to trumps tarriffs" and "how many jobs created by trumps tarriffs." Youll find every reputable news source in America has written articles detailing the job losses and only one random steel CEO claiming that itll eventually rebound, along with Breitbart and some similar coalition of right wingnuts claiming that we've gained 20x as many jobs as we've lost ? that would be incredible, we must be at 100% employment if thats the case. Oh not anywhere close? Cool.

Tarriffs are TAXES. The Republican business model shipped our jobs away long ago and these tarriffs will not bring them back. No matter how high the tarriff, it's not going to be enough to make manufacturing jobs in the US economically viable again when our corporations can continue manufacturing elsewhere, save their money and raise prices to cover their extra importing costs. Corporations do not pay for tarriffs any more than they pay the rest of their taxes. We, their customers, do.

I am a firm believer in free trade. When goods and services are swapped everyone benefits.

We need to get away from the idea that jobs ought to be created. Goods and services (wealth) needs to be created. Work is a liability, not an asset.

For social parity and human wellbeing, I think we need to adopt state capitalism.

It seems to me that a lot of the claims in this post are [citation needed]. Where is the figure coming from on 20k jobs, for example? Is that figure looking entirely at hiring in an economic sector that benefits directly from tariffs (steel) while ignoring associated job losses in sectors which are hurt by tariffs (manufacturing that depends on steel)? That's a genuine question, I don't know the answer, but I would expect the answer to require careful analysis.

Similarly, I don't think many economists agree with the claim that tariffs will "eventually" restore jobs. As an example, here's one recent study that looked at causes of manufacturing decline in the US: [bfi.uchicago.edu]

The authors write that "our results also suggest that imposing trade barriers against the rest of the world is unlikely to substantially increase the employment prospects of workers with lower levels of accumulated schooling...." (p. 63)

I believe the general consensus is that a trade war is likely to cause a small decline in GDP growth overall, and it's hard to believe that a policy which makes a negative overall contribution to the economy will increase employment. (cf. [bloomberg.com]; you can find other discussions)

You can also find thoughtful economists having discussions about policy with regard to China (e.g. between Tyler Cowen and Scott Sumner: [marginalrevolution.com] ), and in one of his Bloomberg pieces Cowen even suggested Trump deserved some modicum of credit for bringing up important issues. So it's not as if all of this is motivated strictly by partisanship. But even so, Cowen thinks Trump is essentially incompetent to really address the issues, and tariffs are not a good solution.

My understanding is basically just that the aggregate benefits of globalization to the US are too high -- despite the real downsides associated with sectors like manufacturing -- to correct them purely through economic isolation.

Any economist worth his/her salt would tell you that tariffs are bad for an economy. When the US puts a tariff on an item, it is a tax on the US population. It may force some to purchase things made in the US, temporarily keeping jobs in the US, but in the long term (not very long), it hurts everyone else in the US. The best policy for the US would be to have zero tariffs.

Tariffs will hurt the poorest people the most...the ones you claim are going to get big-bucks manufacturing jobs....except shoes will cost $700 vs. $80....how high are those wages going to be? And all those abandoned factories can spring into life overnight, I guess, with no capitol outlay or retooling of any kind. Just in time for Mr. Average Worker to send his kids to college, right!?
Foolish dreams!

Your opinion is noted.