In a vacuum, if I’d never even heard the word “tariff” murmured by anyone, a look at the April sales estimates would have me Super Stokered 3000 (the one with the backpack). Shouldn’t the market selling more cars be good news? In normal times the answer is yes, but these are far from normal times.
The biggest threat to the industry has less been specific tariffs and more the uncertainty around them. This uncertainty has driven sales higher in March and April, which isn’t necessarily good news. My efforts to keep every Morning Dump from being dominated by tariff news have been mixed, at best, though I’ve tried to keep some stories in reserve as I waited until something concrete happened.
Two things have happened worth talking about. The first is that automakers, like many other companies, have withdrawn their guidance for profits and sales in 2025, as no one is sure what’s going to happen. The second thing is a Wall Street Journal report that the Trump administration, having touched the stove, is pulling its hands rapidly back with a somewhat complex way to give automakers time to transition manufacturing here in the United States.
Will Congress do the same to help automakers transition to a more electrified future by blocking California’s ability to set its own environmental policy? Will the Supreme Court? That’s the $10,000,000,000 question.
SAAR Hits 17.4 Million As Americans Scramble To Buy Cars
The feeling going into 2025 was that with economic and political uncertainty having been settled, car sales would ramp up while pricing stabilized or even dropped for consumers. Right now, it seems like we’re headed for the opposite happening: Sales dropping and prices going up.
In the interim, though, sales are way way up as consumers rush to get cars before they potentially get way more expensive. Car sales are highly seasonal, and the industry uses a figure called the Seasonally Adjusted Annualized Rate (SAAR) to show how the market is moving. After a sales blitz in December, SAAR dropped to 15.6 million in January before rebounding to 16.1 million in February.
And then the tariff announcement arrived, and consumers quickly tried to liberate reasonably-priced cars from dealerships. A total of 1.6 million vehicles were sold in March, for a SAAR of 17.8 million. In April, the market slowed a little with 1.49 million cars, which is still good for a SAAR of 17.6 million. By comparison, Americans bought about 1.1 million vehicles for a total SAAR of 16.0 million in April of 2024.
Car sales being up is good, right? Right?
These estimates come from S&P Global Mobility, which points out the problem with these sales being pulled forward:
“Consumers contemplating a new vehicle purchase are rushing to dealers before potential vehicle pricing implications take hold,” said Chris Hopson, principal analyst at S&P Global Mobility. “The March and April sales surges have the potential to set up for future volatility; within the next three months, automakers will have to contend with new inventory and production levels subjected to tariffs, in addition to volatile economic conditions.”
The April S&P Global Mobility US auto outlook for 2025 reflects auto tariff assumptions on imported completely built-up units and imported auto parts. Consequently, compared to previous forecast settings, our calendar year 2025 volume expectations have been lowered by approximately 683,000 units for the year, down to a level of 15.4 million units, a result that would be 4% below the calendar year 2024 total.
If sales are way up at the beginning of the year but forecast to be lower by 683,000 cars because of price increases and market uncertainty, that’s going to mean a lot of cars stuck on dealer lots at the end of the year. Even worse, when that normally happens, automakers and dealers slash prices, which is good for consumers. If those prices are inflated because of tariffs, that’s going to be much harder on everyone.
GM, Porsche, JetBlue, Withdraw Guidance For 2025
If you’re a trade lawyer, then you’re probably part of a private company and therefore not expected to release guidance on expected financial performance for the fiscal year. Which is really too bad, because trade lawyers have to be making bank this year. You know who is going to be buying a new Porsche? Some trade lawyer.
You know who isn’t going to be buying a new Porsche? People with many other professions if the automaker has to raise prices, which is why Porsche is pulling its guidance for 2025 according to this Reuters article.
In April, Porsche said it had shipped added inventory to the United States to get ahead of tariffs.
It said late on Monday that the tariffs, in place since April at 25%, weighed on its business and that its adjusted outlook did not factor in their future effects beyond May.
Porsche said it now expects revenue of between 37 billion euros ($42.1 billion) and 38 billion euros in 2025, down from its previous forecast of 39 billion to 40 billion euros. Its profit margin is forecast to drop to 6.5-8.5%, down from a previous forecast of 10-12%.
General Motors has plenty of North American production, and it still has to revise its forecasts. From The Detroit News:
General Motors Co. on Tuesday reported strong first-quarter results thanks in part to car buyers scrambling to avoid potential price hikes due to tariffs — a wild card causing the Detroit automaker to warn its previous guidance on profits this year should be ignored.
GM’s initial guidance projected profits of $13.7 billion to $15.7 billion this year. But those estimates do not factor in tariffs, Chief Financial Officer Paul Jacobson explained: “You shouldn’t rely on that.”
Thanks for the advice, Paul! It’s not just automakers. JetBlue, my airline of choice, also had to withdraw its annual forecast as recessionary fears have reduced business travel. Something has to give, right?
President Trump Reportedly Softens On Auto Tariffs
Every administration wants to bring more jobs back to the United States, and, in particular, the idea of automotive jobs seems to be fairly bipartisan. The difference is that President Biden’s plan was to incentivize future development with the Inflation Reduction Act, which encouraged companies to build battery plants and new car manufacturing facilities in the United States by offering the carrot of tax incentives.
Automakers did announce a lot of plans to bring jobs to the U.S. during this period, although some of those plans had already started to change before the last election due to demand projections. President Trump’s goal is to bring as many jobs here with protectionist trade restrictions, and he’s either indifferent or hostile to those jobs being in the service of EVs, depending on the week.
The problem with the stick approach is that automakers simply cannot change production to the United States with the snap of a finger. Production lines take years to set up as carmakers carefully choose suppliers based on complex factors having to do with currency, trade barriers, quality, and logistics.
A 25% blanket fee on imported cars on top of other stacking tariffs was causing chaos in the automotive industry, with many wondering if the President might modify auto tariffs like he suddenly did with other tariffs. According to this Wall Street Journal report, confirmed by The White House, some relief is coming. How this works is a little complicated:
The administration will also modify its tariffs on foreign auto parts—slated to be 25% and effective May 3—allowing automakers to be reimbursed for those tariffs up to an amount equal to 3.75% of the value of a U.S.-made car for one year. The reimbursement would fall to 2.5% of the car’s value in a second year, and then be phased out altogether.
Trump is expected to take the actions ahead of a trip to Michigan for a rally outside Detroit on Tuesday evening, marking 100 days since he took office.
Asked about the coming relief for automakers, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said at a White House briefing on Tuesday that the decision shows the president’s commitment to bringing manufacturing back to the U.S. “We want to give the automakers a path to do that quickly, efficiently and create as many jobs as possible,” he said. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump will sign an executive order on auto tariffs later Tuesday.
I am sympathetic to the fact that our current legislative branch is painfully slow, and there are times and places where the executive must act faster to address an emergency. At the same time, the deliberateness of the legislative process has its benefits. An Executive Order to create tariffs, followed quickly by an Executive Order to reverse and modify them, is hard to plan for and extremely uncomfortable for both carmakers and consumers.
It will require people smarter than I am to make out exactly the impacts of a 3.75%-by-value reduction on varying cars. For American automakers and producers like Honda or Hyundai, it’s probably a big deal. For companies like Porsche, which makes no cars here, that’s possibly less helpful.
Automakers Want Congress To Kill California’s EPA Waiver
Hey, look at this, a group that wants to change an actual law. The California of the ’60s and ’70s was a wild place. The air was filled with a mix of smog, cheap skunk weed, and the sounds of Toto. Hoping to combat at least the first thing (there is no legal remedy for Toto), the Clean Air Act was passed, and it gave California specific power to set its own stricter air quality standards.
Making things more complicated, a bunch of other states signed on to doing whatever California said it wanted to do. Because those states buy a lot of cars, California essentially gets to set the nation’s environmental policy.
Is that fair? A group of oil producers is trying to sue to remove this ability and has gotten clearance from the U.S. Supreme Court to at least go forward with its lawsuit. The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, which represents most automakers in the United States, told lawmakers that they either needed to repeal that waiver or expect fewer cars.
Here’s the main argument from the letter to lawmakers:
Allowing these gas vehicle bans (something never attempted before in the United States) to proceed will increase automobile prices and reduce vehicle choices for consumers across the country at precisely the same time they are adjusting to the marketplace shock of 25 percent tariffs on imported vehicles and auto parts.
In turn, this will increase the overall age of the U.S. vehicle fleet and keep higher emitting/less fuelefficient vehicles – that lack the latest safety innovations – on the roads for more years.
[…]
If automakers cannot sell the required number of electric vehicles in ‘California’ states, they will be forced to substantially reduce the number of overall vehicles for sale to inflate their proportion of electric vehicles sales. We’ve said these electric vehicle mandates will distort the marketplace, depress economic activity, drive up vehicle prices and decimate customer choice.
President Biden granted the waiver as he was rushing out the door, and there’s already a proposed law from Republicans to reverse it, which would almost certainly be signed by the current President if it could make it through Congress.
What I’m Listening To While Writing TMD
Canada voted yesterday and selected interim Prime Minister Mark Carney to continue to serve, which means I’m going to reach for some music of the North. Here’s Snotty Nose Rez Kids with “Damn Right.”
The Big Question
What car not made in America would you like to see built here?
Top photo: Crowd via stock.adobe.com
At this point, Made in the USA has become a negative selling point to me unless it’s one of the few things made in New England. Doesn’t mean I wouldn’t buy MIU, but it’s at about the same level of appeal to me as Made in China.
They are trading on the market that they have the power to manipulate while hiding in a cloud of incompetence. It works for them because their supporters are either in on the scam or truly too stupid to understand.
And I agree with many others. I 100% won’t buy a car built in this country no matter the price.
It’s a pretty great plan. First term, there were plenty of people in the administration that too obviously knew what they were doing. This term, by surrounding the president with complete imbeciles it appears to be a circus at all levels. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, all of the billionaires and hostile foreign governments that funded the
get out of jail pass2nd term are instructing exactly what to do.“No one in this world, so far as I know … has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.”
This is especially true of Americans who are more wrapped up in the fiction they believe to be their history than most.
The instability caused by pull-ahead auto sales is never a good thing financially, not only for the automakers, but for anyone who is directly or indirectly affected by the financial health and stability of the auto industry.
…”allowing automakers to be reimbursed for those tariffs up to an amount equal to 3.75% of the value of a U.S.-made car for one year”. Reimbursed by this administration? HAHAHHAHAHAHA!
“What car not made in America would you like to see built here?”
None because that car should be built in Canada because ‘fuck Trump’.
Where I live, in the Atlanta area, we have the NA Porsche headquarters and the Mercedes Benz (not sure if it’s headquarters but a large facility) offices. There is manufacturing in GA, far to the south of Atlanta.
I’d love to see Porsche bring something here. We are already building battery plants for Rivian, if it ever starts up again. Seems like Porsche could build the Tacan and Macan EV here perhaps. If I get to pick though, bring the 911 or some variant here. Hell, make it a special, US only version. They love special editions, right?
Not that I ever think it would happen. Porsche is still stuck in thinking it all has to happen in Germany. I get it, don’t like it. Bring it here.
Thank you for yet another entertaining daily update Matt! 😀
I forget, but think/thought that 16 states had (currently) adopted the California rules re: emissions on vehicles, or maybe my premature senility is confusing it with something else?
Though today’s pick wasn’t amazing (to me) I also wanted to thank you for the daily music suggestions. If it weren’t for you I’d probably never have known that Peaches exists, and be a poorer man for it. 🙂
“Everything could get mega fucked economically so we’re going to rush out and buy extremely expensive stuff now” is such a uniquely American response. We do love being in soul crushing debt to keep up with the Joneses. With what interest rates look like and the average price of cars right now I can’t imagine that many of the folks who were a part of the April rush got screaming deals either.
I get that sometimes you need a car urgently and in that case you have to do what you have to do…but if you can afford to hunker down with what you’ve got for the next few years I think that seems like a wiser move. But I’m a dude who drives an alien looking hatchback that makes fart noises posting on the weirdest car blog on the internet (said with affection) and not an economist. None of this is financial advice.
Agree, seems like a wild time to be taking on a car note. I’m closing in on 200k with my 4Runner and am now planning on keeping it to 300k.
I’ve thought about buying a high mileage Tacoma to ride out things with. But, the money spent would buy a ton of parts for my aged BMW. But less headaches, theoretically.
2nd gen Tacos are pretty much bulletproof. Only Achilles heel is frame rust, if you live in a road salt area.
I’m starting to wonder if I should stock up on any parts for the 4R.
I’m also thinking of doing something dumb like buying a 35–40-year-old K5 Blazer just because.
I got a ’22 Tacoma with 60k miles on it last fall. Largely because I figured that the fascists would get elected and do all the stupid stuff they had promised. Keep in mind, the parts for your BMW are likely to get awfully expensive as well.
I do wonder how many of these sales were for fleets that need to replace long-used vehicles in their service. Because it really makes no sense for a regular person to buy right now.
If you find yourself in emergency need, just buy used. Used cars may be going up in price but at least are not affected by the tariffs so just calm down and focus on your needs here folks.
Yeah, that would make sense. If you know you’re going to need to replace X vehicles within the next couple years, buying now would be an acceptable acceleration of that investment.
Have you seen interest rates on used? They’re even worse. Unless you’re talking a shitbox show down car.
edit:spelling
The wife’s Mazda3 was suffering numerous issues so she pulled the trigger on a Civic hybrid for $33k out-the-door. We’re fortunate that she got a promotion recently and had planned to purchase later this year so it wasn’t that big of a stretch to pull it to the left. But yes it was far from a screaming deal; Honda did a great job with that car so you weren’t getting one much below sticker if at all, and an interest rate just over 6%. And that’s with a damn good credit score!
I think a lot of people feel like they have to do something proactive when they see trouble coming. My family is going to hunker down and hang on to what we already have paid for as much as possible. Our vehicles are set for years unless one gets totaled. The big ticket item we have looming is the eventual need to replace the furnace and air conditioner in our house. How might tariffs affect that? Who the fuck knows, we have a dementia patient and a swarm of his enablers making those decisions.
Yep. Sometimes the right move is to do nothing, or as little as possible.
Instructions unclear, now holding 10,000 shares of Autopian bought with a credit card
I agree with you, but want to point out that current interest rates might seem like a screaming deal in just a few years. In the mid 1980s, 18-20% interest rates on car loans were not uncommon.
Especially since DOGE slashed all of the consumer protection agencies.
If you have the liquid assets, buying before inflation is a good thing. Has inflation ever gone down in the long term? Once prices go up on the USA, only the portion sizes will go down.
The chances that cars will be thousands of dollars more expensive in three months compared to now is more likely than not.
You’re correct, but how many Americans are sitting on enough liquid to go buy a $50,000 (roughly the average price of a new transaction) car in cash? Statistically speaking not very many, so I can’t imagine they made up a significant portion of the data here, but I could be wrong.
True. If you need to take out a loan, the formula gets more complicated.
Sure, but if inflation skyrockets, interest rates will too. If you take out a loan now and inflation jumps back to 8% not only will you have saved on the purchase price, but you’ll have saved on the financing too.
I’m not usually one to try to time the market, but this feels a bit like having the opportunity to short the housing market in 2007. Even if Trump backs off every stupid thing he’s done so far (which he won’t because he’s categorically incapable of admitting fault) a lot of the damage is already done.
I’m curious what the mix was for this particular sales boom. Were a lot of these purchases King Ranches, or a bunch of Civic and Trax(es?) and the like? I can understand why someone looking to replace their failing budget commuter could rationalize pulling the trigger now. Though I’m sure plenty of these purchases were “gotta buy a new car because the news told me it was smart” sort of rationalization. Which yes, very American indeed.
For folks who don’t NEED a replacement car right now, I really recommend holding tight to whatever you already have.
STARIA
Honda N-Van, especially the new EV version
The obligatory Toyota HiLux vote, but really Subaru Levorg.
This year’s SAAR is going to be another great bit asterisk, just like the Covid era. That is, year over year numbers are going to look wildly skewed without some normalization or smoothing (which is probably obvious) but the more cynical side of me is wondering how certain CEOs or politicians are going to spin this like it’s good news.
Think about it: We didn’t see Covid coming; or the Great Recession (at least not clearly). There aren’t many events in life where the demand can be shifted forward like this, so it’s almost uncharted waters for data analysis. It’s sort of the “reverse of Covid” where the pent-up demand comes early rather than later.
I will defend Toto. The core of the band met in high school, and became session musicians for Boz Scaggs, Steely Dan and Michael Jackson. Toto’s drummer, Jeff Porcaro, became one of the most prolific session musicians in the 80s appearing on many top-10 albums in that decade.
I think Toto gets a bad rap because of the lyrics to Africa, which only make sense while sung with drunk friends.
That documentary on Yacht Rock was fantastic and I recommend it to anyone with at least a passing interest in music. So much talent everywhere.
Agreed, watched it on a recent flight. Except I had What A Fool Believes stuck in my head for a solid week.
Also agree on the documentary. And thanks for getting What a Fool Believes stuck in my head.
I’ve had worse stuck in my head.
Some good deep tracks in early Doobie Brothers albums.
Obviously, the Doobie Brothers sound changed some with the addition of Michael McDonald. My personal taste favors the earlier stuff.
Uh, Let It Go?
Dog, yes; band, no. “Hold the Line” isn’t so bad if your interests lean yachtward (and as an adult I’ve indulged occasionally), but “Roseanna” and “Africa” trigger PTSD.
GAAAAAHHHH!!! The earworms!!!
Maybe fewer cars is a good thing.
Maybe some good infrastructure projects, build for improving the mobility of the people, would be a useful place to get people employed.
It would certainly make the existing roads, especially those in California, a bit more drivable if there weren’t so many cars on it.
Believing this current administration would invest in public works and infrastructure? Oh you sweet summer child…
My mistake.
Forward thinking to the betterment of our citizens in my politics?
But… they might just have the right kind of connections to know a guy who can bore some holes for subterranean rail transit. They couldn’t possibly bungle that by thinking they should just drive more cars in tunnels, could they? That would be absurdly stupid.
Don’t worry, driving the cars in the tunnels will be temporary. We’ll talk about building a “hyperloop,” make sure no other form public transit gets any funding, then abandon the tunnels and create even more surface traffic.
Man who has embodied economic chaos for 50 years and who spent all of 2024 promising to create economic chaos somehow takes everyone by surprise. Again.
I am shocked.
Not surprised at all. Just exhausted.
Well, it was a little different when he was just a tabloid king playing with bank money in Manhattan like a stupid game of Monopoly that we could all laugh about from a distance. That’s the Donald Trump I grew to know and love!
I certainly liked him more when he was a C list celebrity I could laugh at (and even occasionally with!) in a macabre way and not the president of the United States
Someone said back in the day (maybe on the old site) something along the lines of “the celebrity apprentice is the reason he became president” with the explanation that for millennials and younger, that was our introduction to Trump. GenX knew him as a scumbag businessman bankrupting companies and being in tabloids, and Boomers didn’t know or care about him at all.
America voted for this guy, so it deserves everything it has coming as a result. To avoid this problem, American voters should be less dumb the next time around.
Don’t be too tough on some of the swing voters. The media they were exposed-to in this past election are owned by Musk, Bezos, Fox “News”, Zuckerberg, and several other Trump supporters. (Thanks for deregulating the media, George W. Bush.) Even stalwart news organizations like the Washington Post were hindered by their rich owner influencing their reporting.
To be honest, if we had ranked voting, I don’t see Trump ever winning. Just like his first term where splitting the Hillary/Bernie voters was the difference.
Giving the swing voters a big benefit of the doubt, there.
I’ll absolutely be tough on the swing voters, it’s Trump lol. We had 4 previous years of this, the information was there.
When I’m evaluating a pair of campaigns, I ask “Which one are the Nazis backing?” And then I vote the opposite. It’s really not that difficult.
What car not made in America would you like to see built here?
Ranger Super Duty.
8 lug Ranger FTW
I am disappointed that Toto wasn’t the band of the day.
Their pivot from making Yacht Rock to making fancy toilets is quite remarkable though.
There’s nothing a good session musician can’t cover
“And your little F-minor mixolydian scale, too!” –Wicked Witch
Why aren’t there more CKD facilities here? Mercedes has one in SC at the old Americal Lafrance factory, where they assemble Sprinter cargo cans (they did the same with the Metris) (passenger vans are imported from Germany as-is)
The cool small trucks could be CKD’d in the US or Mexico…
We should accept UNECE standards as well as the existing US standards. repeal CAFE, or at least the stupid footprint rule.
This complete obsession with bringing back manufacturing jobs that Trump, and Biden, for that matter, have is just wild to me. Unemployment is, and has been, very low on a national level for a long time.
I know, and have seen, that companies shuttering factories has hurt a lot of small towns, but even if you bring back a lot of those factories it’s not like people’s quality of life is going to drastically go back up. Workers will still be prevented from unionizing, wages and benefits will still suck, and the national cost of living is going to keep climbing higher. Add to that the fact that manufacturing is probably one of the most miserable jobs it’s possible to work – I get that some people can’t do desk jobs and prefer to work with their hands, but we just need to accept the fact that the US is not really set up to be a manufacturing hub.
You’re missing the point on the unemployment rate. For many Americans, especially in rural or long-forgotten Rusty areas, the selection of jobs is pretty weak. Wal-Mart, Dollar General, or drive a truck.
Folks in these areas look back fondly at jobs that almost no one would do these days, in manufacturing, agriculture, and food processing (like slaughterhouses). They don’t necessarily want those jobs, but if those jobs aren’t locally available, they’re in danger of falling to the bottom of the heap, socio-economically speaking, because there needs to be someone below them, someone to look down upon.
And they don’t like that.
I’ve lived in one such area for most of my life, and that is definitely true. It’s just sad that we’re trying to restructure the entire US economy so a few schlubs don’t have to move away from their dying shit hole towns to a bigger city that has scary immigrants in it.
I’d argue those towns do need some form of investment, whether it be in manufacturing of automobiles, computer chips, or some form of business. Making folks leave the country and come to the city for work is a fine idea, in theory. For once they sell their land to the highest bidder, when the cities eventually overflow again, they’ll come back to find cheap land and homes no longer exist.
I don’t think we’ll outgrow our country anytime soon, but local investment in business is just as important to you and I as it is the people living there. I’m not saying a town of 5,000 people needs a GM plant, but I will say that having local manufacturing and business would be a positive for the people there.
In theory I agree, but it’s not likely that any of those new manufacturing jobs would be getting anyone ahead in life – most would’ve been better off just working at Wal-Mart.
Trump is gutting the EPA and OSHA, along with basically every public health organization. Those factories would be torturous to work in.
Factory work has continued to change and adapt with the market, I think a lot of people hear the word “factory work” and assume the videos of production lines like at Ford or GM. Many places around the country have lots of specialized or relatively light work tasks that need to be done with humans that can pay competitevly and offer good benefits at the same time.
Is every place going to be better than working at Wal-Mart? Maybe, maybe not. That’s life, but I would say that many companies that are investing in America are keeping high standards and going above the EPA and OSHA requirements (in my personal experience) to maintain quality and reaffirm commitments made by the executive team or parent company.
Will that change? Maybe, but I’ll take a good job that could get worse over no job at all.
This post, and most in this thread, lead me to question if you’ve actually worked in manufacturing in a small town.
I did so for years, and while it isn’t perfect, it does let people get ahead.
If you have no drive or desire, and want to stay as a $12/hr grunt forever, then you might indeed have been better off working at Walmart. But I saw plenty of people rise into foreman positions, into management, into semi-skilled or skilled trades who started as grunts.
Just as the national economy isn’t that of 1925 anymore, neither are our factory floors.
I have not worked manufacturing but I do know many people who have worked manufacturing, and they haven’t had a positive view of it.
These are smaller factories in a town of about 40k people, and I heard a lot of tales of badly-run facilities with a lack of upkeep, uncompetitive wages, etc. GM/Chrysler/Ford factories, however, were much better places to be.
I know modern factories are better than they’ve ever been, but there is a real concern that conditions will get worse if companies no longer have to adhere to OSHA and EPA standards.
Our ancestors moved around constantly for economic opportunity. Go West Young Man, people moving from farms to cities, etc. If you look into your family tree, pay attention to the birth/death locations- so many started in one place and ended up in another.
We need to get over the idea that all towns must be saved, all ways of life must be preserved, and everyone deserves to have things exactly how they want them. None of those things is congruent with the free market or capitalism.
People are still moving for opportunity but the people I know who are the most nostalgic for a time that never really was are the ones who didn’t make a real effort to find the greener grass.
I grew up in a town of less than 1000 people in eastern Iowa, my parents grew up in a town of less than 3000 people about a five hour drive away in northern Iowa.
One of our last family vacations included stops at several towns in upstate NY where ancestors from 4-6 generations back were buried to confirm family history my aunt was working on.
I am now sitting in my office on 38th Street in Manhattan and my brother lives in DC.
It honestly doesn’t take much industry to support a town as small as my hometown so it is hanging on but I think my brother and I knew from a pretty early age we wouldn’t be moving back after we left for college.
Interesting point about the lack of congruency with capitalism.
I don’t know if this is true or not, but growing up, my dad told me way back when, towns were all about seven miles away from each other because that was as far as you could reasonably go in a day by horseback. Each town would have a saloon/hotel, general store, post office, etc.
Then the steam trains came along, and could go about 20 miles before running out of water. Two thirds of the towns withered away and died, and the remaining lucky third were spaced three times farther apart. A town’s survival had more to do with the logistics of supplying water to the trains than it had to do with anything else.
Skipping over the early transition from trains to automobiles (thru the era when gas stations had repair bays and mechanics on staff), and now we all drive cars that go hundreds of miles on a tank (and thousands of miles between needing service). Out here in flyover country, it sure does seem most of the of the major growth is happening in urban centers located hundreds of miles apart.
The Interstate system has helped pick the winners and losers, much like the train tracks did for the generations before (though in both cases, there was also some chicken-and-egg stuff going on there).
Regardless, in the western states, something like 90% of the population lives in a band twenty miles either side of an Interstate, just like our train hopping forefathers lived close to the railroad tracks back in that era.
One could try to argue good vs bad, but the takeaway is more like “inevitable”.
That a town existed in the first place was actually a result of capitalism, and all the way through, the same forces have been at play, causing towns to disappear and favoring fewer and fewer others with wider spacing, due to technology.
Wow, you might have read “Nature’s Metropolis”, which talks about this same concept.
There is a major distinction to be made IMO between bringing back jobs vs bringing back manufacturing.
COVID as a foretaste, and now I fear trade wars even more so, show our weakness in the face of outsourcing. Stuff like the CHIPS Act was bipartisan, and rightly so. We need more of that.
If we don’t make plastic toys or clothing here, that may be no great loss.
You’re right that a “jobs program” in a time of low unemployment makes little sense. And that traditional manufacturing jobs probably aren’t worth bringing back in any major way, even if we could.
There is however a case to make more electronics here, make more steel here, make more cars here, make more microchips here, etc. It’s likely the case that many of those “jobs” will be taken by robots, but if “creating jobs” needs to be the political slogan to sell the investment to voters, then so be it.
It just bums me out that there’s so much talent in this country, across almost every field, and we could really become a global leader in so many different areas, but Trump et al. are throwing all of that potential away in favor of manufacturing. Like yes, I agree that we should make stuff here, but we can’t ignore the fact that a lot of other places are much better suited.
I just wish the populace at large was bright enough to see all of this.
The brainwashing worked.
There was a war fought against student loan forgiveness and free college, and collateral damage was the fucking boomers (who 10 or 15 years ago would have lost their goddamn minds if their millennial kids didn’t go to college) becoming suddenly anti-higher education. The “American Dream” generation consigned us to dropping from a number top player in science/technology/medicine because of the threat that some poor kid might go to school for free.
American anti-intellectualism is far from recent. It dates back to the early 19th century and has reared its head regularly. And this Boomer and all I know bear no resemblance to your rant.
Hmm.. not sure about ‘so much talent’, we’re a distant third worldwide in yearly STEM grads after China & India, and in like 9-10th place in STEM percentage of grads at about 20% (China in 1st is at 40%+)
The sistematic defunding of education for decades is finally culminating with the dissolution of the Education Dept., so the future doesn’t look very bright.
Why bother throwing money at schools here when other countries are perfectly willing to fund free education there? American companies can then recruit their best and brightest. This has several advantages:
It drains other countries brains while increasing ours.
High quality education and training of applicants by foreign universities costs nothing to American taxpayers nor American companies.
Rejects are easier for Americans to ignore thus helping fuel the STEM shortage myth.
Supporting the rejects is SEP. They’ll probably have families over there, again on someone else’s dime, to continue the cycle.
Non citizen workers can be deported so they are easier to retain, control, treat poorly, extract more work from and get rid of when they’re all used up.
Higher education here is in some ways an extension of this. Lots of foreigners are educated at American universities where they can provide ultra low cost labor as graduate students and the top performers are hired while the rejects are sent home.
We don’t need to be a hub, and we haven’t been for decades. However, having a robust manufacturing ability is a sound idea for lots of reasons.
There are thing – such as pay and workers’ rights that you mention – should be addressed at the same time that we try and reshore some manufacturing. However, knowing the way our government works, especially with this administration, I’m not holding my breath that we can do this the “correct” way.
That’s why I’m not on board with the Trump plan whatsoever. If I knew that the fed would be pushing companies to provide fair wages, world-class benefits, etc. then sure, by all means open more factories. I feel like their general plan, though, is to just make everyone’s life so miserable they’re basically forced into working a shitty factory job.
If I’m so lucky – pundits are saying my programming career will be over in 2 or 3 years, replaced by AI.
In a van, by the river, might be my future as I’m over a decade away from Social Security. (Oh, right, maybe I should give up on that dream too… How’s my 401k looking? Crap… Hope there’s fish in that river.)
The GOP-lead state legislatures passing ‘right-to-work’ laws that basically made impossible for workers to unionize and ‘at will’ employment where you can be fired for no reason with no recourse, all but guarantee modern factory serfdom.
There’s also a renewed push for repealing anti- child labor laws, so we can return to the good old days of children working in factories.
This is what I’ve been saying. There’s nothing inherently “good” about manufacturing jobs. people just have the notion of the 1950s/60’s when strong unions and the stars were correctly aligned for working class to achieve prosperity. That’s not coming back, the era they’re pining for is the turn of the century sweatshop era, such as in Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle”, when the owners held all the power and you had disasters like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory.
People also conveniently gloss over the income tax rates of the 1950s when they’re waxing poetic about 1 income households and people with brown skin knowing their place.
The point for Trump is not and never has been to actually bring back jobs. The goal is to say that is what you are going to do, conduct some over-blown, dick-swinging theatrics to make it look like you are trying, then blame “them” (Democrats, Chinese, immigrants, minorities, Methodists, etc.) for not allowing it to happen. Whine about how “they” are persecuting him and making life worse for all of “you” and you just need to further commit to the cause. Its a fucking cult and nothing more.
I would like the Suzuki Jimny to be built here. though I also would like to see the Roxor be made road legal without adding all the unnecessary ADAS stuff to be mandatory.
Some of the fun Chinese things, kei vans/pickups, Hilux, Jimny.
Pretty much anything that is prohibitively expensive to bring here otherwise.
Never thought I’d be sitting here jealous of all the cool, fun cars coming out of Beijing, but here we are.
Don’t be, initial quality and cool factor wears off when parts availability and long term reliability fall off the cliff.
“Seasonally Adjusted Annualized Rate (SAAR)”
I sure do appreciate you following the convention of spelling out these acronyms, even though you probably feel like you write about them all the time and we should know them by now.
Wait, you’re telling me this whole needless tariff nonsense [gestures broadly] is turning out to be a calamity? Who could have guessed!!!??
I can only speak for myself, but Mr. Saber Rattler has a habit of talking a lot of sh*t and then backing off at the last second and taking credit for avoiding calamity. I still think that version is coming soon, but right now he’s playing a game of chicken with the world, and he just got his learner’s permit.
America might still have a shred of respect from a country somewhere in the world. Gotta destroy that, first.
The Ora Ballet Cat, if VW won’t do it then somebody should to maintain the levels of punch buggy hitting among America’s youth.
Easy question:
Suzuki Jimny!
Nissan eNV200