China has become a powerhouse in electric vehicles. Its automaker BYD recently topped Tesla in global EV sales, with Elon Musk warning of Chinese carmakers, “If there are no trade barriers established, they will pretty much demolish most other car companies in the world. They’re extremely good.”
On Friday, the Alliance for American Manufacturing sounded the alarm, issuing a report entitled: “On a Collision Course: China’s Existential Threat to America’s Auto Industry and its Route Through Mexico.”
The report, which lists policy recommendations to combat overcapacity and unfair trade practices, notes that BYD is building factories in Thailand and Hungary designed to be regional export hubs. It then adds:
“More alarming, however, are Chinese firms’ heavy spending on plants in Mexico, through which they can access the United States by way of the more favorable tariffs under the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA). This strategy is, in effect, an effort to gain backdoor access to American consumers by circumventing existing policies that are keeping China’s autos out of the U.S. market.”
Ok…but a trade war doesn’t fix either of those things. That’s not my opinion. Trump tried the trade war route with China. We didn’t start building more here; we switched to more expensive imports. I agree about the tax system generally, but I don’t see how it relates to a trade war.
Of course we didn’t start building stuff here with what trump did. Everyone knew it would be temporary. Odds are it would be over quicker than you could build a facility. Let alone make a profit back on it.
You want something real to stick in a trade war, you’d have to make it last at least 20 and not possible to have undone.