Trump Believes Apple Could Manufacture iPhones in the U.S.

[AppliedMicro]

The reason there are not any American cars on EU roads is simple: tariffs and non-tariff barriers. Trump is no fool when he screams they are ripping America off, this is true. They can basically say something like “oh, your American trashcan generates more CO2 than ours. You get a ban!”

…and American car manufacturers are free to produce cars that emit less CO2 and other greenhouse/poisonous gases to conform with EU regulation. Just as European manufacturers have to comply with U.S. regulations.

This is good for the planet, public health and the environment. And don’t forget that the U.S. fined German car manufacturers for billions when they did not comply.

But you’re missing a major point: it’s not only about emissions - it’s also about fuel economy (for which Trump is rolling back U.S. standards).

Automotive fuel is more expensive in (most of) Europe - and most fuel-efficient cars tend not to come out of America.

 

[Dark_Omen]

"Record"
"First ever"

View attachment 2500707

Umm... The military budget has been at 800 billion for a while. Adding 200 billion when you're cutting back hundreds of billions elsewhere probably isn't a bad thing.

USAspending.gov

USAspending.gov is the new official source of accessible, searchable and reliable spending data for the U.S. Government.

www.usaspending.gov

 

[BuddyTronic]

The reason that there are hardly any Chryslers, or Ford F150s, etc. driving on German Autobahns - or any Highway outside America - is that the cars are not suitable for respective markets. Too big and not economical. Simple as that. There are plenty of Teslas on Autobahns, though.

I asked you not to tell me that

 

[Dark_Omen]

Trump and those he's empowered are fiercely anti-union
You're not getting union negotiated "excellent pay and benefits" back by supporting him or his ideology.

Beyond unions, they are gutting all forms of worker protections from health consequences, discrimination and working condition deterioration.

Nothing about this is pro normal person/worker

It doesn't matter what Trump wants regarding unions. Private sector jobs and their employees choose whether or not to have them. The fact is, many manufacturing jobs have unions.

 

[AppliedMicro]

Imagine not even being a U.S Citizen, and yet, injecting your pointless input in on U.S politics without having a clue about the way of life we want here.

What benefit do we have by allowing businesses to operate overseas with little resistance?

Since you asked:
You enjoyed the benefit of cheap, plentiful consumption of foreign goods.

And you are probably the great consuming society on this earth.
Just need to come to terms with the fact that you’re not the greatest manufacturing nation on earth anymore. You haven’t been since at least the 1980 (Japan’s emergence).

I agree that tariffs, if kept long enough, may successfully (at least partly) restore “healthier” trade balance.
At a lower level of wealth and consumption.

Just don’t expect every American voter to like it.
And neither expect the rest of the world to pay for your tariffs.

I DO feel that the EU has so many regulations to draw from that it grabbed Billions of dollars from Apple by putting it under the magnifying glass a bit too harshly.

The EU just put an end to Apple’s playing tricks by funnelling money through companies claiming to be tax resident nowhere.

As for their fines on anticompetitive grounds, Apple has had ample opportunity to play fair on the market for music streaming.

 

[cflem]

He's an idiot.

 

[Dark_Omen]

Since you asked:
You enjoyed the benefit of cheap, plentiful consumption of foreign goods.

And you are probably the great consuming society on this earth.
Just need to come to terms with the fact that you’re not the greatest manufacturing nation on earth anymore. You haven’t been since at least the 1980 (Japan’s emergence).

I agree that tariffs, if kept long enough, may successfully (at least partly) restore “healthier” trade balance.
At a lower level of wealth and consumption.

Just don’t expect every American voter to like it.
And neither expect the rest of the world to pay for your tariffs.


The EU just put an end to Apple’s playing tricks by funnelling money through companies claiming to be tax resident nowhere.

As for their fines on anticompetitive grounds, Apple has had ample opportunity to play fair on the market for music streaming.

I'll gladly pay a little bit more for goods if it means there's more jobs here. Can't rely on dying retail and fast food jobs as a method to pay the bills.

 

[Karma*Police]

There will be no market beyond domestic for anything that is "drilled for" and how on Earth can you be worried about debt when Trump is proposing a TRILLION dollar military budget and a massive tax cut targeted to benefit everyone but those who actually need it?

Actually, there’s a huge market for American oil and gas. Did you know that many of our allies rely on Russian oil? In fact, NATO countries gave Russia more money to buy their oil than they gave to Ukraine. Think about the idiocy of that.

Drill baby drill will mean America will become a major exporter of energy, which will bring billions in tax revenue and create thousands of jobs while ensuring the safety of this nation and our allies.

Trump’s ultimate goal with that military spend rhetoric is to reduce military spending by 50%. He did it many times. He knows Russia and China can’t compete so if he can get those two nations to agree to cut military spending in half and spend that money on more productive things to help the citizens, that’s a win for everybody.

 

[Karma*Police]

Oh he’s made a lot of noise and kicked up a stink for sure, but let’s not confuse that with anything useful.

I don’t disagree with many of his broad goals, but the man has neither a clue, nor the patience, nor the work-ethic to achieve anything durable. It’s all just flash and sizzle.

Sure, if you’re living in a bubble and refuse to acknowledge reality, he didn’t accomplish anything. For mainstream Americans, he accomplished tons (it’s so long I know you won’t read it all then still claim he did nothing) :

- closed the border in a few weeks… something Biden and Kamala failed to do in 4 years
- arrested and deported thousands of illegal criminals
- eliminated DEI from federal govt (private sector following suit) so there’s no more discrimination based on race or sex or any other immutable characteristic
- eliminated Dept of Education which has contributed to the soaring cost of higher education and has seen test scores go down since its inception
- cut $150 billion in waste and fraud from federal govt (and growing)
- freed American hostages from Russia, Hamas, Afghanistan, etc.
- arrested the terrorist responsible for the death of 13 American servicemen in Afghanistan
- Got Mexico and Canada to secure their borders against illegal and drug trafficking
- $5T in US investment commitments and counting
- Restored maximum pressure on Iran after Biden gave them billions which allowed terrorist threats to grow in the region
- Houthis are in retreat and for the first time in years, the Suez Canal can be navigated by commercial ships without fear of piracy
- opened the door for more oil and gas production which will impact us in a huge way in a couple of years
- signed EOs to protect women against men in sports (80% of the country agrees with this, btw)
- withdrew funds from universities that allowed anti-semitism and violence to run rampant and deported anti-Americans who incited it

The list goes on and on and he hasn’t even been in office 100 days.

 

[AeroEd]

Yeah, unions would totally extort Apple into paying and treating their workers fairly...

That's the Catch-22 here, people. These things are made overseas because workers are unprotected and can be exploited. Make them in America, and expect the price of labour to increase. Pay the tariffs or pay the workers, either way the price goes up. There's no fantasy option where products are made in the U.S. at the same cost at which they are produced in Asian factories, unless worker's rights and minimum wage are abolished.

You just explained beautifully why capootalism doesn’t work, thanks

 

[vantelimus]

“Orwellian capitalist doublespeak”

Now there’s a contradictory statement if I’ve ever seen one.

I brought up unions because others did. Unions are anathema to free market beliefs and as a free market libertarian, I know they generally do harm to workers while benefiting the union leaders. In a true market economy you dictate the value of your labor, not through collective bargaining, so Floyd, the shiftless, lazy bum of a coworker of yours doesn’t get the same wage as you do, when you bust your hump daily. Unions have killed companies and almost single-handedly brought down the US auto industry. California has insane amounts of debt it owes because of public sector unions.

California's leaders still ignoring state pension debt

California has just 72 percent of the assets needed to make payments to retired public workers, many of whom get to collect six-figure annual payments.

reason.com

It isn't a contradictory statement because you demonstrate it. "Unions are anathema to free market beliefs" is absolute nonsense and false. Truly free markets allow people to work together in collectives. Some of them are called companies. Others are called unions. Preventing people from forming collectives is not a free market. It is just a different government regulation. Or, are you really advocating that freedom is only free when you get to restrict the way others sell their labor? If so, it's quite Orwellian of you.

 

[vantelimus]

It's going to take time to reverse 40+ years of outsourcing manufacturing. It can't be done with a snap of a finger

2.84% of Chinese GDP comes from exporting goods to the US. China has approximately 215.4 million people working in industry. So, roughly .0284*215,400,000=6,117,360 workers are needed to move Chinese factory work back to the US.

US unemployment is 4.2%. That works out to about 7,014,000 unemployed.

If Trump could snap his fingers and move everything back. Unemployment would be 7014000-6117360=896,640 people, or about .5%. The labor market would be extreme tight, with shortages across all sectors. Wages would rocket. Demand would rocket. Both cost-push and demand pull inflation would create upward spirals. The Federal reserve would have to raise interest rates to cool the economy and get it back to the natural unemployment rate between 3% and 5%.

The reality is that we likely could not meet the labor demand with the current population. We would have to stop deporting the Latin Americans, who would be the ones most likely eager to take the jobs. Of course, that would hurt MAGA heads.

Maybe the solution would be to keep “those people” in their own countries. We could move the factories to Mexico. Maybe we could even move some to the far east.

DOH!!! We just brought them back!

Here’s an idea. Maybe we shouldn’t break the current world economic system in the first place since it actually is working about as well as we could expect it to.

 

[tonywalker23]

Please feel free to comment on subjects you know nothing about. It just might land you a lucrative career with the current administration.

no not someone as lowly as myself. it would only add to the division in a tiny slither of the internet ive been a part of for a couple of decades

 

[vantelimus]

I think a closer figure might be at least 30 years (though probably longer), if we're talking about parity with China's manufacturing capabilities.

That’s not an unreasonable swag given that China has been building factories and manufacturing expertise for the last 30 years since Clinton normalized trade with them.

 

[th0masp]

Apple tried assembling the MacPro aka trashcan in the US but how long did that happen? I don't know because no one seemed to talk about after it was announced, I suspect it didn't work out financially and the job went back overseas.

AFAIK it happened for the entire production run of the Trashcan. They stopped selling them in 2019 or 2020 when the updated tower arrived and surely ceased making them a good while before that. I'm not really sure on this but it is possible that all the Trashcans were put together in the US in that one facility.

Posting this from a 'Assembled in the USA' one with a mid-2018 production date.

 

[tonywalker23]

Well you do know about bibles. Schuyler Bibles posted on their FB account that these tariffs will cause their prices to increase. While we preachers are certainly not experts on everything, it doesn’t take an expert to understand increased cost is always going to be passed down to the buyer. That’s how businesses keep their profit margins and stay in business.

I know a tad bit about the finished physical construction of the Schuyler, RL Allan, Cambridge, and Crossway Heirlooms lines. What all has to take place for it to be designed, planned, made, shipped, and stocked is what I know nothing about. If I were to think I did, I would be like a 20 year ago version of me thinking I had solved the free-will debate because I read Romans one time.

 

[tonywalker23]

…do you think politicians have special insight into manufacturing and supply chains?

I am sure the most ignorant politicians still know 100s of times more than I do since it comes across their desk every day. For me, it only shows up in Macrumors headlines.

 

[vantelimus]

EU cars are pretty much garbage.

That's the kind of opinion that gets people rightfully ignored. Sure, you can find EU cars you wouldn't want. I'm not rushing out to buy a French or Italian car. But, are you really going to say Volvo, BMW, Audi, and Mercedes are pretty much garbage? Wow! That's a level of nationalist delusion that's only possible in MAGA.

 

[macfacts]

Got Mexico and Canada to secure their borders against illegal and drug trafficking

Trump doesn't care about illegal drugs and overdoses, he pardoned Ross Ulbricht on Jan 21,2025. Ross Ulbricht was already in jail on a life sentence. Ross Ulbricht was running the silk road, an illegal website selling drugs and using the USPS to ship them out.

 

[BuddyTronic]

Since you asked:
You enjoyed the benefit of cheap, plentiful consumption of foreign goods.

And you are probably the great consuming society on this earth.
Just need to come to terms with the fact that you’re not the greatest manufacturing nation on earth anymore. You haven’t been since at least the 1980 (Japan’s emergence).

I agree that tariffs, if kept long enough, may successfully (at least partly) restore “healthier” trade balance.
At a lower level of wealth and consumption.

Just don’t expect every American voter to like it.
And neither expect the rest of the world to pay for your tariffs.


The EU just put an end to Apple’s playing tricks by funnelling money through companies claiming to be tax resident nowhere.

As for their fines on anticompetitive grounds, Apple has had ample opportunity to play fair on the market for music streaming.

Well, I'm guessing Apple has a different perspective and opinion about music streaming regulations. There would be no money for streaming music if it was not for Apple connecting the iPod to the iTunes Store stuff way back when. The Napster stuff was just piracy. My personal feelings are that Apple put so many things together in order to make a market, and I do not think the EU should be throwing its weight around. This has been demonstrated by Trump how the USA feels about such interference to US companies. You can have the EU be correct and right, but they will still have to suffer the consequences of the new Maga world order I think. Does that make some sense?

The tariffs have 2 sides - the USA pays the tariff on the import, the exporter suffers the reduced demand.

Anyways - still waiting for the "bye" for AAPL on the Tariffs. $500B promised USA investment, it should mean no tariffs for AAPL.

 

[BuddyTronic]

Trump doesn't care about illegal drugs and overdoses, he pardoned Ross Ulbricht on Jan 21,2025. Ross Ulbricht was already in jail on a life sentence. Ross Ulbricht was running the silk road, an illegal website selling drugs and using the USPS to ship them out.

That does not in any way tell us if he cares about those things. Bad Logic.

 

[jarman92]

I am sure the most ignorant politicians still know 100s of times more than I do since it comes across their desk every day. For me, it only shows up in Macrumors headlines.

No, they don’t. They may have staff members who do, but your average politician doesn’t know much about anything.

 

[jarman92]

That does not in any way tell us if he cares about those things. Bad Logic.

It tells us he doesn’t see massive drug dealing as an offense worthy of prosecution and punishment. And his gutting of federal health agencies and funding for addiction treatment and overdose prevention tells us he doesn’t care about those things either.

 

[It’s always something]

Trump doesn't care about illegal drugs and overdoses, he pardoned Ross Ulbricht on Jan 21,2025. Ross Ulbricht was already in jail on a life sentence. Ross Ulbricht was running the silk road, an illegal website selling drugs and using the USPS to ship them out.

He also pardoned drug dealer Jonathan Braun.

 

[Jonnod III]

Sure, if you’re living in a bubble and refuse to acknowledge reality, he didn’t accomplish anything. For mainstream Americans, he accomplished tons (it’s so long I know you won’t read it all then still claim he did nothing) :

- closed the border in a few weeks… something Biden and Kamala failed to do in 4 years
- arrested and deported thousands of illegal criminals
- eliminated DEI from federal govt (private sector following suit) so there’s no more discrimination based on race or sex or any other immutable characteristic
- eliminated Dept of Education which has contributed to the soaring cost of higher education and has seen test scores go down since its inception
- cut $150 billion in waste and fraud from federal govt (and growing)
- freed American hostages from Russia, Hamas, Afghanistan, etc.
- arrested the terrorist responsible for the death of 13 American servicemen in Afghanistan
- Got Mexico and Canada to secure their borders against illegal and drug trafficking
- $5T in US investment commitments and counting
- Restored maximum pressure on Iran after Biden gave them billions which allowed terrorist threats to grow in the region
- Houthis are in retreat and for the first time in years, the Suez Canal can be navigated by commercial ships without fear of piracy
- opened the door for more oil and gas production which will impact us in a huge way in a couple of years
- signed EOs to protect women against men in sports (80% of the country agrees with this, btw)
- withdrew funds from universities that allowed anti-semitism and violence to run rampant and deported anti-Americans who incited it

The list goes on and on and he hasn’t even been in office 100 days.

The MAGA list goes on and on...