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He 14 reasons why the Trump tariffs won’t work.

Lots of dire warnings in this. Again, lots of good fine grain details on a complex subject.

Having the inside knowledge Molson has is important to understanding this issue. I think one can also rely on their own ignorance (cope) in a scenario like this by thinking about how possible and likely all of this “reshoring to bring back the jobs” really is.

Meaning, it is generous to say that I know nothing about manufacturing, supply chains, and the like. I do know, though, that it takes like 6-9 weeks to get a passport in the U.S.

It seems unimaginable to me that it wouldn’t take YEARS to move buildings, train workers, and build do the work efficiently, all while we’re saying it won’t cause a recession and don’t look at the stock market folks because it doesn’t matter.

Because it’s so possible to wrap my head around it, I can only chalk this up to grift. EDIT (4/7/25): Or, that he really might go hard psyop on the 3rd term talk and this is all pretext.

Here are some highlights for the Twitter article:

4. The effective cost of labor in the United States is higher than it looks

“In China, there are no people who are too fat to work. The workers don’t storm off midshift, never to return to their job. You don’t have people who insist on being paid in cash so that they can keep their disability payments, while they do acrobatics on the factory floor that the non-disabled workers cannot do.

Chinese workers much less likely to physically attack each other and their manager. They don’t take 30 minute bathroom breaks on company time. They don’t often quit because their out-of-state mother of their children discovered their new job and now receives 60% of their wages as child support. They don’t disappear because they’ve gone on meth benders.

And they don’t fall asleep on a box midshift because their pay from yesterday got converted into pills. And they can do their times tables. To manufacture, you need to be able to consistently and accurately multiply 7 times 9 and read in English, and a disturbingly large portion of the American workforce cannot do that.”

This tracks, relatively, with anecdotes from a friend who works in manufacturing and has talked about the quality of the workforce.

5. We don’t have the infrastructure to manufacture

“When you start manufacturing, every single component, from factory to factory, needs to be moved, increasing the number of trucks on the road many times.

Paving more roads, modernizing our seaports, improving our airports, speeding up our train terminals, and building power plants in the costliest nation in the world to build is a huge undertaking that people are not appreciating when they say “well, we’ll just make it in America”.”

6. Made in America will take time.

“It takes at least, in the most favorable of jurisdictions, 2 years (if you can get the permits) to build a factory in the United States. I know because I’ve done it. From there, it can take 6 months to a year for it to become efficient. It can take months for products to come off the assembly lines. All this ignores all the infrastructure that will need to be built (new roads, new power plants, etc.) to service the new factory.

By the time “made in America” has begun, we will be electing a new president.”

This isn’t a totally quack conspiracy, because Trump’s already floating a third term, but part of me wonders if they just know they’re gonna try and blow right into a third term and so it wouldn’t hold that a this all can’t be accomplished in his “last” term.

8. Most Americans are going to hate manufacturing

“Americans want less crime, good schools for their kids, and inexpensive healthcare.

They don’t want to be sewing shirts.

The people most excited about this new tariff policy tend to be those who’ve never actually made anything, because if you have, you’d know how hard the work is.

When I first went to China as a naive 24 year old, I told my supplier I was going to “work a day in his factory!” I lasted 4 hours. It was freezing cold, middle of winter, I had to crouch on a small stool, hunched over, assembling little parts with my fingers at 1/4 the speed of the women next to me. My back hurt, my fingers hurt. It was horrible. That’s a lot of manufacturing.

And enjoy the blackouts, the dangerous trucks on the road, the additional pollution, etc. Be careful what you wish for America. Doing office work and selling ideas and assets is a lot easier than making actual things.”

9. The labor does not exist to make good products

“The United States is trying to bring back the jobs that China doesn’t even want. They have policies to reduce low value manufacturing, yet we are applying tariffs to bring it back. It’s incomprehensible.”

12. Enforcement of the tariffs will be uneven and manipulated

Imagine two companies which import goods into the United States. One is based in China, while the other is based in the United States. They both lie about the value of their goods so that they have to pay less tariffs.

What happens to the China company? Perhaps they lose a shipment when it’s seized by the US government for cheating, but they won’t pay additional fines because they’re in China, where they’re impervious to the US legal system.

What happens to the USA company? Owners go to prison.

Who do you think is going to cheat more on tariffs, the China or the US company?

Exactly.

So, in other words, paradoxically, the policies which are designed to help Americans, will hurt them more than the competition these policies are designed to punish.

14. Michael Jordan sucked at baseball

America is the greatest economic power of all time. We’ve got the most talented people in the world and we have a multi-century legacy of achieving what so many other countries could not.

Michael Jordan is arguably the greatest basketball player of all time, perhaps even the greatest athlete of all time.

He played baseball in his youth. What happened when he switched from basketball to baseball? He went from being an MVP champion to being a middling player in the minor leagues. 2 years later, he was back to playing basketball.