It would be “impossible” to move 40% of Taiwan’s semiconductor capacity to the U.S., the island’s top tariff negotiator said, pushing back against recent comments by American officials who called for a major production shift.
In an interview with Taiwanese television channel CTS that was broadcast late on Sunday, Taiwan Vice Premier Cheng Li-chiun said she had made it clear to Washington that Taiwan’s semiconductor ecosystem, built up over decades, could not be relocated.
“I have made it very clear to the United States that this is impossible,” she said, referring to the 40% goal the U.S. has floated.
That ecosystem will continue to grow in Taiwan, Cheng said, adding that the semiconductor industry would keep investing at home.
Everyone seems to have thought that is was a great idea to let pretty much every core manufacturing competency die in the US over the last 30 years or so. How’s that working out for us now?
The blame is at least as old as Reagan, really accelerated with Clinton (NAFTA, China entering the WTO) and only got worse from there.
As much as I hate to admit it, tariffs are the answer. I also think that it’s important to understand that Trump’s tariffs exist only for extortion and bribes that benefit him personally. Tariffs can be used to encourage domestic production of goods and services that are clearly not something that we want to depend on other countries for merely for the sake of enriching the same circle of already rich assholes in perpetuity. Rich assholes would just have to keep resorting to pumping up immigration to suppress wages for these domestic goods, like they have always done for hundreds of years at this point.
Tariffs are not the answer, they are part of a reasonable answer. By themselves they’re not going to being back the tech manufacturing industry. You also need incentives on multiple levels, government funding into relevant education, etc.
You also need time. All the money in the world won’t cause a world-class industry to spring up overnight; you need sustained investment over years, if not decades.
We’ve already been providing direct subsidies and tax subsidies for all of these companies for decades. Nothing comes from it and as a member of the tax bracket that actually pays taxes I am not willing to keep doing it. If we need to nationalize truly mission critical companies I would rather just do that instead of continuing to privatize profits and socialize costs.
Those investments should definitely come with strings attached. But there’s a lot you need to invest into.
You’ll need to keep (some amount of) the money flowing at least until the industry can be independently competitive on the world stage. Mishandling your burgeoning industry can mean that all that investment money and a large number of jobs suddenly go up in smoke.
Note: All of this assumes that you’ll buy your manufacturing equipment from established, potentially foreign companies like ASML and Zeiss. If you want to make that stuff domestically as well you can probably add another hundred billion bucks and a decade or two of very dedicated catch-up to the bill.
We should have tarriffs on goods to make up for labor and environmental costs that are cheaper in those other countries, to compensate to offset the race to the bottom.
That was a union issue, the republican nominee just co-opted it, because the democrats became more conservative than Bush Senior let alone Nixon, while the rest of the republicans are like Henry Ford, veritable nazis.
He was never going to do it well, he’s too corrupt and greedy and mean spirited, it was always going to be more of a shake down racket and a cudgel to use against our allies like Canada and Europe that do not undercut us on labor and the environment and therefore should not be tarriffed at all.
We shouldn’t be rejecting everything about something because it was co-opted by the president, like rejecting pressuring drug companies to offer us good deals because the president has some half baked website for that purpose. Just as we shouldn’t support everything about something they attack unfairly. Ie a government agency, any of them, attacked for not being bad enough, say the fda, then we support everything about them, as if they aren’t run by drug companies and failing in their statutory duties.