Name: Is Trump’s Manufacturing Comeback Real?
Uploaded: 2026-02-15T21:53:05.000Z
Duration: 10 min 28 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

President Trump campaigned on returning manufacturing growth to United States and the White House.

I looked this up, says that they are surging forward with unprecedented momentum.

Manufacturing output had been declining, actually quite steadily, going back to even before Trump.

It did go up in January, but that's one month.

And I don't think we can draw any conclusions from that.

But essentially our manufacturing continues to go down, and for the most part, manufacturing employment goes down.

Productivity has been bouncing around a bit.

And to be fair to the president, I think you have to say not yet.

Any sign that his policies have changed the trajectory of manufacturing in the United States?

It takes a while to build a plant, to get up and running.

What kind of time horizon, you know, manufacturing.

Well, are we looking at to really grow manufacturing?

But the question is, is anybody actually doing, and

I don't know, I would say anecdotally, I haven't heard anybody say any CEOs that they're rushing out to build plants here because of all this.

There's obviously a huge boon in construction going on in data centers, which don't manufacture things.

But it's a capital investment in the US But I don't have any sign or any idea that the number of car plants in this country is increasing because of what Mr.

An important tool for President Trump in his toolbox on manufacturing are tariffs, and

he certainly has imposed a lot of tariffs.

Can we bring back manufacturing through tariffs?

Even Alexander Hamilton advocated for tariffs in a different set of circumstances.

The idea was to nurture young industries in the US by using tariffs to protect them.

And so there was something to be said of it.

Keynes actually advocated, surprisingly, for tariffs in the Depression, but

partly because the pound was so overvalued, it was the only way Britain could end up not being flooded with imports.

So there are places and roles for tariffs, but

you really want to use them to protect an industry that would ultimately become very competitive globally, not as some kind of permanent way to offset the fact that other countries can perhaps make things cheaper and better.

There's another function that President Trump seems to be using tariffs for, which is to extort or command negotiations with foreign countries to make investment.

I mean, if we have Stellantis saying $13 billion, they're going to invest, Japan is saying $500 billion, they're going to invest.

Is that a way to bring manufacturing back by basically getting countries and companies to agree they're going to come invest in manufacturing plants here?

I have no particular reason to think it is because the tariffs are imposed on companies.

The companies are separate from the countries.

So the countries can't really say to the companies, go build a plant.

The companies might do it if they felt that the tariffs drove them in that direction.

But I don't see any real evidence that that's having much of an impact.

I mean, we've talked about automobiles before.

What is the prospect of having more automobiles manufactured in the United states, either by U.S.

We've kind of put a bit of a speed bump in front of automobiles.

And we backed it up with tax credits, and they all rushed around to build them.

Now you can see them all taking these large charges to essentially either get out of or modify their EV business because the Trump administration is anti ev.

So we haven't really done the auto industry any great favors.

There's also a story this week about Ford, I think, losing $900 million because of Tarif.

I'm not sure whether Trump understands this or not, but

when you put a tariffs on auto parts, you're actually hurting what we call the OEMs, the original equipment manufacturers in the US because the parts become more expensive.

We're seeing auto manufacturers overseas struggle, particularly in the UK and Germany.

Does it matter whether the company is owned by a foreign country?

I mean, why don't we just let BYD come and manufacture automobiles in the United States?

The first part of the answer is, do we think they want to?

It's like Apple moving iPhone assembly out of China.

They can do it, but it's much more expensive.

I would think from our point of view, you're right.

People sometimes get confused between companies and jobs.

I mean, if you want jobs, then you want the plants to be built here.

And conversely, having a US Company build a plant in some other country doesn't help us in terms of jobs.

If we want to talk about how do we get more economic progress here, the idea would be to make more things here rather than somewhere else.

When we talk about tariffs, it may have effects on companies or even potentially on countries in negotiating.

I mean, what is the price to American consumers?

Of keeping out very inexpensive BYD automobiles.

Well, this is something that has not gotten the kind of attention it should get.

And the rough math is we sell 16 million cars here a year.

So it'd be EVs here at, I think conservatively at $10,000 less than a comparable US car.

And so you're talking about $160 billion a year that consumers in the US are paying because we feel it's important.

I'm not meaning at all to be sarcastic about this, that we feel it's important to have an auto industry in the US we could just open the doors.

We have 100% tariff on them now, as you probably know.

consumers would be amazed at how inexpensive and how good these cars are.

So that would be great for consumers, at least in the short term.

What are the strategic disadvantages to the United States, either economically or even in terms of national security, of doing that?

It would be great for consumers in the short run and the long run.

And I don't think that the economic impact of all that would be a negative for the US Might even be a positive.

But I do think there's a really important question that I don't have a great answer to, which you alluded to, which is the strategic imports.

Obviously, everybody knows that In World War II, we took these auto plants and they started making planes and tanks and all this other stuff.

I don't think we're going to be fighting a war like that again, hopefully at any time in the foreseeable future.

But the question is, do you want to have that kind of industrial capacity in case we have another Covid and we want to make N26 masks or whatever?

How much do you want to pay to have all this manufacturing capacity here in case we need it someday?

As you probably know, manufacturing jobs now pay less on average than service jobs.

So the idea that these, you know, the romantic idea that these are good jobs and so to lose these manufacturing jobs would be bad for America.

You know, the everyday Americans is false.

We would need to replace them with other jobs.