And that isn't going to last, take advantage of it while you can, America.
You can build domestic industry and jobs without this dumb shit. It's just going to reduce the purchasing power.
this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2024
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chapotraphouse
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It would be very funny to see Americans mald over rising treat prices, except...
This shit never seems to catch the biggest fish. They just send everything to a big warehouse in some exempted country (Indonesia, Korea, Canada, wherever) and have people put stickers on the widgets as part of the "final assembly process", then insist that's the country of origin.
People will pay $1500 for a "next gen" iPhone that has a slightly nicer camera and a chromium finish. The tariffs don't seem to meaningfully impact our import rate.
Insourcing production to the US (assuming this is ever actually going to happen) is technically good for the American economy. Trump's methods are ham-fisted and ill-conceived, but re-capitalization of the American economy would be an unmitigated good and would strengthen this cursed white supremacist state.
The whipped dog of the American proletariat only ever knows how to lash out at weaker and more vulnerable people around them. They continue to lack any revolutionary character that might actually harm the foundation of the bourgeois dictatorship.
re-capitalization may seem alluring to American nationalists but its actually dumb as hell. Capitalism is a world system lubricated by USD, which americans send abroad to pay for imports. Its not a competition of discrete national economies, capitalism is global and totalizing. Everyone else in the world does the actual work, Americans just need to do their part: consume to provide high-end demand. Trying to go to protectionism now is like trying to make the oil pump in the opposite direction, your gonna break the motor and probably set something on fire.
China and India are recapitalizing to good effect. Russia is recapitalizing, and that's why the country hasn't collapsed under the weight of their stupid war. Germany is capitalized, and that's why it can bully everyone else in the EU except France.
Meanwhile, the UK is just six banks in a trench coat and their economy is disintegrating underneath them. Saudi Arabia is trying to build out capital in excess of its oil drilling and desalination systems, but all MBS knows how to do is build Monaco over and over again in a big line. Hong Kong has fucked itself, because all the business assets are in Shenzhen and western nations no longer need a UK-backed financial bridge into China. Japan is increasingly just Tokyo plus Alabama, as all the capital wealth concentrates in a handful of metropoles.
So much of what gets "consumed" from abroad is waste. Wasted textiles. Wasted foodstuffs. Disposable packaging and one-use commodities. Wasted energy from A/C cooling empty buildings and cars lined up in five mile long traffic queues. Technology that's run at high capacity solely to put up fake shit on the internet. Technology that's designed not to last longer than the next marketing cycle. It isn't even stuff Americans get to enjoy. It's Instant Trash that just molds in a factory somewhere. Grain during the potato famine. The Grapes of Wrath.
Americans have a bunch of jobs that desperately need doing - education, health care, infrastructure maintenance, logistics, waste management - that they don't want to pay anyone to do. Consequently, everyone runs off and gets jobs in finance and advertising, because that's the only shit that pays. So we have more and more of Graeber's Bullshit Jobs putting up numbers on the domestic economy while fewer and fewer people know how anything in the country actually works.
But to say Americans aren't "doing work" is absurd. Americans are chronically overworked. They're perpetually exhausted. They're a miserable, wrung out, and depressed. They're not idle. They're wasted. Americans are working overtime to produce excess waste.
Replying rather than editing on extra to my comment but- very simplified (and with the disclaimer that I'm no scholar and I'm literally typing on my phone):
Capital =/= production or the real economy.
Capital =/= value (though it is a unit meant to approximate value and transfer it)
Imagine if the US creates a missile. Let's say the production cost and valuation is... Uh, 100$usd. Let's say that Russia produces the exact same missile, functionally and materially identical (though in reality Russian missiles are better than western crap because of capitalization, lol). It's valuation and production cost is.. 25$usd.
What is the difference, exactly? What is the 75$ difference? As a really shitty and lazy and probably somewhat flawed simplification- this is the "capital," the "capitalization" you're talking about.
This is how you get wonderful capitalistic... Capitalizations, like say, the US army spending over 36$k per garbage bin (look it up... Lmao). This is how you get the world's most expensive and certainly the least cost-efficient healthcare system on the planet (and probably in all of history). This is how regurgitated capital ("capitalizations" or "financialization," if you will) in the form of money lending, then interest paid to service the loan, and so on and so forth- metaphorical circlejerks of debt and transactions ("services")
get measured as """productive economic activity.""" 
Anyways yeah, that's about it (heavily and shittily simplified). Once again I heavily recommend looking up prof. Michael Hudson, prof. Richard Wolff, and the Geopolitical Economy Report.
I think someone else referred to this definition before. But
"Capital (goods)" = "those durable produced goods that are in turn used as productive inputs for further production"
No, that's the marginal cost.
What's more, a Marxist "all else equal" analysis would say the $75 difference in cost is ultimately a labor cost + profit. One big reason why Russia can build artillery cheaper than the US is simply due to its limited number of middle men between raw materials and deployed weapon.
That inflates the raw labor cost (the US MIC procurement system is a jobs program that rewards inefficiency) and extracts an admin fee at every step.
But that price differential isn't capital. It's cost.
Am example of capital would be the mineral gathering operation used to create explosives. Another would be the machinery to create the bomb housing. Another would be the training school for the engineers who assemble the bombs.