Those companies came and it gave us a completely different type of industry and manufacturing for our community, suggesting the transformative potential of these investments.
"What I see two years out is low-cost will once again drive demand in this market," says McDaniel, general manager of Bila Solar. He adds, "That's going to be a hard road for some of us who have [higher costs] than panels made over in China or Southeast Asia."
We should not let the follies of Trump's tariffs overshadow the follies of the gung-ho globalization that preceded them. So said the award-winning economist James K. Boyce in a recent interview. In 2022, the most recent year that data is available, the US trade deficit totaled $971 billion or 3.77 percent of the GDP. The last US trade surplus was in 1975.
The Trump administration's nostalgic desire to revive factory jobs reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of modern economic realities and the impossibility of returning to a golden past.
"It's hard to imagine American workers wanting to sit at a sewing machine and repetitively sew for $7.50, $8 an hour, and even that's going to drive up Nike's production costs such that a pair of Nikes will go through the roof," said Betsey Stevenson, a professor of public policy and economics at the University of Michigan.