It would be “impossible” to move 40% of Taiwan’s semiconductor capacity to the U.S., the island’s top tariff negotiator said, pushing back against recent comments by American officials who called for a major production shift.
In an interview with Taiwanese television channel CTS that was broadcast late on Sunday, Taiwan Vice Premier Cheng Li-chiun said she had made it clear to Washington that Taiwan’s semiconductor ecosystem, built up over decades, could not be relocated.
“I have made it very clear to the United States that this is impossible,” she said, referring to the 40% goal the U.S. has floated.
That ecosystem will continue to grow in Taiwan, Cheng said, adding that the semiconductor industry would keep investing at home.
Everyone seems to have thought that is was a great idea to let pretty much every core manufacturing competency die in the US over the last 30 years or so. How’s that working out for us now?
The blame is at least as old as Reagan, really accelerated with Clinton (NAFTA, China entering the WTO) and only got worse from there.
As much as I hate to admit it, tariffs are the answer. I also think that it’s important to understand that Trump’s tariffs exist only for extortion and bribes that benefit him personally. Tariffs can be used to encourage domestic production of goods and services that are clearly not something that we want to depend on other countries for merely for the sake of enriching the same circle of already rich assholes in perpetuity. Rich assholes would just have to keep resorting to pumping up immigration to suppress wages for these domestic goods, like they have always done for hundreds of years at this point.
Tariffs are not going to encourage local producers. They’re just going to make the products more expensive for the consumers. If you want to encourage the industries to be built here, then subsudize their development.