No. of Recommendations: 2
Needed to pick this one:
We can try to encourage domestic reshoring of strategic industries, a la the bipartisan CHIPS Act and similar types of proposals.Tariffs are another way to do that, btw. They do that without incurring the fiscal burden that a direct subsidy incurs. If you want to say "tariffs are inflationary!" you can...but so are things like the CHIPS Act.
We can negotiate free trade agreements with our allies countries so that we are importing more from friendly nations than potential adversaries (our increased imports of Canadian oil, for example).We don't import Canadian oil because we need oil, btw. We import it to refine it and ship it elsewhere.
We can strengthen the federal government's role in setting national industrial policy (which requires beefing up, not DOGE'ing down, its capacity)No. We don't need to over-regulate or have government people involved in every. little. thing. DOGE isn't just about reducing the size of the government but also about making it vastly more efficient that it is.
Here's an excellent example:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/taxes/new-change-t...On Wednesday, DOGE announced via a post on X that the login button on the IRS website, previously located in the middle of the page, has been repositioned to the top right of the navigation bar. This adjustment aims to enhance user experience and streamline access to IRS accounts.You might say, "Wow, Dope. They moved a button! Wow, that's just awesome, like they invented antigravity or something!" And it sounds trite and silly until you read...
An IRS engineer collaborated with DOGE to expedite this change, initially projected to take up to 103 days. However, the task was completed in just 71 minutes, showcasing the potential for efficiency when bureaucracy is minimized.That's just to move the login button a few hundred pixels up the screen. Now imagine the delays and structural nonsense built into much bigger projects and programs. If we want to compete at a global scale we have to do much better.
We can coordinate both trade and diplomatic policy with nations around the world to try to cabin China's influence, by offering both our allies and developing nations compelling alternatives to trading with China and joining their bloc. We've been doing this for decades, pretty much since the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union dissolved. How's it going for us? The Chinese have their tentacles in literally everything and the Europeans are playing right into theirs and, ironically, the Russians' hands by
de-industrializing and
increasing their dependencies on cheap Chinese goods and Russian energy.
The Europeans need to grow up, and fast.
As for Asia, do you really think the Japanese don't know exactly who they're dealing with in China?
What we don't have is a magic button labelled "TARIFFS" (that most beautiful word in the English language!) that we can push to solve all these problems without having to do any work or compromise or form coalitions. That's a recipe for failure - we alienate the nations whose help we need, we reveal (very quickly) that we have no tolerance for pain in the bond markets or in our producers' supply chain, and we "declare war" against China without having done any of the work to be prepared to win that war.You're assuming that our friends and allies have been dealing with us straight this entire time. You know who is one of the worst industrial espionage outfits on the planet?
France.
