Comment Masterful Gambit! (Score 2) 102
It's not a surprise but this sort of thing (along with the less consumer-facing; but also pretty serious, tariff burdens on obtaining manufacturing equipment) really emphasizes how counterproductive the "announce huge blanket tariffs based on some mixture of nonsense and a quasi-mercantilist-with-a-heap-of-bitterness theory of balance of trade" 'strategy', if you can call it that, really is.
If you want American greatness generally, or onshore manufacturing in particular, you are making things vastly harder for yourself by just abruptly making more or less anything that isn't already domestically manufactured harder and more expensive to get. Does Adafruit or Sparkfun's catalog run a bit into fairly casual nerd toys at the shallow end? Arguably. Does it also include a wide variety of bits and pieces that people who are most likely to be interested in entering the engineering pipeline as they grow up, along with people who are doing engineering and need a given bit or piece quickly and reliably, would definitely want? Indeed it does.
Are you going to win the future by making it harder for someone interested in robotics to get a PWM/servo driver board because it's on a Chinese PCB? Even if your desired end-goal is a 100% vertically integrated mine to customer production chain it's absurd to think that the most efficient(or even possible) way of doing that is by blanket restrictions on basically everything all at once. If anything (not unlike we've been accusing China of doing for some decades) you'd presumably want zero to effectively negative tariffs/other regulatory incentives on certain things precisely because you wish to develop capability in areas downstream of them.
It's only really in more or less purely frivolous consumption goods where just flatly increasing the cost of the foreign stuff isn't obviously self-destructive(still not necessarily good policy; but if football-watchers went from 65in TVs to 45in ones and more tailgating it wouldn't cause obvious injury to the football industry; while someone doing boutique electronics for specialist applications could easily go from viable to out of business if they can't get a PCB spun quickly or get some test leads nice and fast).
If you want American greatness generally, or onshore manufacturing in particular, you are making things vastly harder for yourself by just abruptly making more or less anything that isn't already domestically manufactured harder and more expensive to get. Does Adafruit or Sparkfun's catalog run a bit into fairly casual nerd toys at the shallow end? Arguably. Does it also include a wide variety of bits and pieces that people who are most likely to be interested in entering the engineering pipeline as they grow up, along with people who are doing engineering and need a given bit or piece quickly and reliably, would definitely want? Indeed it does.
Are you going to win the future by making it harder for someone interested in robotics to get a PWM/servo driver board because it's on a Chinese PCB? Even if your desired end-goal is a 100% vertically integrated mine to customer production chain it's absurd to think that the most efficient(or even possible) way of doing that is by blanket restrictions on basically everything all at once. If anything (not unlike we've been accusing China of doing for some decades) you'd presumably want zero to effectively negative tariffs/other regulatory incentives on certain things precisely because you wish to develop capability in areas downstream of them.
It's only really in more or less purely frivolous consumption goods where just flatly increasing the cost of the foreign stuff isn't obviously self-destructive(still not necessarily good policy; but if football-watchers went from 65in TVs to 45in ones and more tailgating it wouldn't cause obvious injury to the football industry; while someone doing boutique electronics for specialist applications could easily go from viable to out of business if they can't get a PCB spun quickly or get some test leads nice and fast).
