PCB mfrs & the tariffs

Macrofab is one we’ve used recently, but only for USG work. Otherwise it’s all PCBWay, tariff or no tariff.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

For the tariff to be "working" you've got to an have idea what it is intended to do.

The original merchantilist justification of tariffs, was that they protected your manufacturers from foreign competition, and allowed small-scale domestic manufacturing to get started and develop into large scale - thus cheaper - manufacturing, even though the foreign competition had got started first.

About fifty years ago, somebody noticed that the international market was even bigger than the biggest national market, and that getting rid of tariffs meant that high volume goods got even cheaper.

What Trump sees in tariffs is a regressive tax, which means that rich people like him can be freed from paying out a higher proportion of their income in income tax and other progressive taxes.

He doesn't admit it, and claims the original merchantilist ideas are still valid. He may even believe it. He does lie a lot and this probably means that he lies to himself as well.

For domestic, investigate 3W

I priced out some US manufacturers and at least in quantities of hundreds to low thousands of two-layer boards, even assuming a 30% EU tariff it was still a toss up between them and Aisler.

Even most conservative economists seemed to more quantitatively math out a while back that some domestic manufacturers doing better at the expense of other domestic manufacturers getting kicked in the teeth doesn't tend to end up a net win..

Incidentally some buyers of Chinese PCBs on Reddit noticed that some US courier companies (ahem, UPS) are charging substantial additional fees on top of the tariffs to do the customs clearance paperwork, that the shippers aren't doing.

Probably not a big deal on large runs but a couple hundred extra in fees on small batches is galling. All US citizens are entitled to clear their own shipments but AFAIK it's not made obvious how to go about it.

If you buy foreign products cheaper than they can be had domestically, the nett national wealth goes *up*, not down. DT & Co don't seem to understand that.

Jeroen Belleman

Just use DHL.

cheers

Phil Hobbs

DT & Co see tariffs as a tax they can collect from everybody, so they can reduced the progressive taxes which fall more heavily on the rich - which is to say - them.

This isn't what they tell their supporters, whose hip pockets are going to be hit, but Trump has been liar all his life. It's hard to say what DT & Co do understand. Trump does seem to be pretty clever, but he's also pig ignorant and has no interest in becoming less ignorant.

As an egomaniac, he's not going to be willing to realise quite how ignorant he is.

If a country imports everything and produces nothing (because the imports are cheap!) it will eventually turn into Sudan.

Yeah, they seem to know how to not do that if you pick the all inclusive shipment package, but unfortunately in my area DHL tends to have the worst drivers and last mile customer service of all of them..

Actually, creating a mess like the Sudan does take a war or two.

No country is going to import everything and produce nothing - if the don't produce anything, they have nothing to sell and won't be able to pay for any of their imports.

Trump does seem to working on getting the US into something approaching that state - if the people who used to sell their products into the US haven't got a reliable market, because Trump keeps changing his mind about tariffs, they will sell their stuff elsewhere, and won't have any US dollar income to pay for imports from the US. In theory the US could gear up to manufacture the stuff they used to import, but that takes time, and in the meantime the US won't have the income to buy the stuff they need from overseas.

It won't be a mess like the Sudan, but it won't be fun to live through.

You sound like my late father, who would also always try to counter my theses by going to absurd extremes. Surely the US can sell things it can do better and cheaper than any other country? Surely it has industries that actually produce something that other countries want?

DT's fallacy is that he thinks money is the goal rather than the means.

(I note that Switzerland may abandon its project to buy F35s, as a retaliation against DT's tariffs. Other countries also actively shun US products. This is bad for your economy, but alas, the US is not currently a reliable trade partner.)

Jeroen Belleman

Presidential immunity sure beats going to prison for screwing kids

This may be more related to the substantial price increases in what the Swiss believed was a fixed price contract. John

DT seems to know how to make deals. And he's on our side.

Am 14.08.25 um 05:03 schrieb john larkin:

Don't make me laugh so hard early in the morning!

When the two of us buy the same boards at JLCPCB's, you have to pay +35 % to +135 % compared to me, depending on the moon phase.

It escapes me how you can see that as an advantage for you. Do you think you can inflate YOUR prices in proportion? Why didn't you do this already in the past?

That is nothing but a flat rate tax on YOU, designed to replace the progressive taxes on the really rich.

Cheers, Gerhard

I don't like him, but it is refreshing to have someone with common sense in charge.

They are still crazy cheap. And the deal with China ain't done yet. The 135% is a threat, and China's economy (and indeed China's society) is fragile just now.

Free economies have this nice habit of adjusting themselves.

Somebody was just dumb, I guess.

We need independent rich people because they can invest, or they got rich by creating wealth. Look at Russia and Cuba and N Korea.

The Laffer Curve is real, and it invoves decades-long causalities.

What do the progressive Democrats stand for? I don't think even they know.

I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat.

- Will Rogers