The trend of moving manufacturing to countries like Mexico or Vietnam to avoid China tariffs is often driven by Chinese companies themselves. They establish clone factories abroad, sometimes with Chinese labor, meaning the economic benefits largely still flow back to China.

Data reveals a paradoxical trend: US manufacturing output is growing, but the number of manufacturing jobs is shrinking. This suggests that any reshoring or new production is being accomplished through industrial automation, not by bringing back assembly line jobs as policymakers had hoped.

Despite tariffs making imports more expensive, moving furniture production back to the US is seen as unrealistic. The primary obstacle is not financial, but a critical shortage of trained workers who can and want to do the work, a deficit that tariffs cannot fix.

The feared global economic damage from U.S. tariffs was muted because trade flows proved highly adaptable. Companies circumvented tariffs by rerouting goods through third countries, like shipping from China to Vietnam before exporting to the U.S. This demonstrates the "whack-a-mole" challenge of containing trade in a globalized system.

Despite US tariffs, China’s trade surplus reached a record high. This is because China diversified exports to emerging markets, utilized transshipment through other countries, and key allies have not joined the US in a broad trade war.

A flat tariff on imports makes complex manufacturing with numerous cross-border steps prohibitively expensive. It becomes cheaper to move domestic production steps out of the tariff zone and import the finished good only once, leading to the deindustrialization of high-skilled jobs.

Flexport CEO Ryan Petersen argues that tariffs targeting a single country are ineffective because trade simply reroutes. For example, the U.S. might buy from Peru instead of China, but Peru then uses that income to buy from China. A blanket tariff, applied globally, is more effective at making domestic goods competitive.

Despite significant US tariffs hitting labor-intensive goods, China's overall export volume remains strong. This resilience stems from a structural shift towards high-tech sectors like semiconductors and autos, combined with strategically rerouting trade through intermediary ASEAN countries to circumvent direct tariffs.

Despite the stated goal of reshoring, data shows that observed increases in domestic production value are largely nominal. This means prices have risen significantly while the actual quantity of goods produced has seen very little increase, undermining the core economic argument for the tariffs.