They could build new factories and take manufacturing jobs back from foreign competitors as well as expel every person who, in their view, didn't belong in the United States. They could live in a golden age of plenty and seal it away from others outside the country with a closed, hardened border. Trump told Americans that there were no trade-offs.
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.
