BIG

For the week’s focus, I’m going to look at the inability of the U.S. to make what it needs, and the two different approaches unveiled this week to address it. The first approach is Trump’s 25% tariff scheme on automobiles, as well as his April 2nd “liberation day” of trade barriers. And the second is the promotion of a new book called Abundance by Ezra Klein of the New York Times and Derek Thompson of The Atlantic, a revamped version of 1980s-style supply side politics. What do these moments tell us?

Let’s start with the problem of production. Whether good or bad, it’s quite clear at this point that the U.S. has a serious deficit in producing physical things. We all remember nurses wearing trash bags during the pandemic, and the pervasive shortages of key goods. Even today, we have shortages in baby formula and pharmaceuticals, not to mention infrastructure and housing being wildly expensive. Moreover, the U.S. is getting killed globally. The Chinese car industry is going exponential in exports, Airbus is taking market share over Boeing, and the U.S. military is sounding the alarm on production of artillery shells and missiles. If you look at the U.S. trade deficit, it’s a massive trillion dollar plus set of imports over exports.