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The chicken shredder, tariffs, and self-sufficiency

The chicken shredder, tariffs, and self-sufficiency

Last updated on: November 29, 2024 at 11:10 pm by Jane the Actuary

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The chicken shredder, tariffs, and self-sufficiency 2024-11-29T23:10:02-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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chicken shredder

What, you may ask, is a chicken shredder? And why do I have a photograph without a carefully sourced caption indicating the usage rights for the picture?

This was a rare instance of purchasing a product advertised on Facebook, not necessarily this particular version of it but I was intrigued by the general concept of a “chicken shredder” which actually is pretty nifty: cook your chicken breast (I used the instant pot) then place it on top of the spikes, put the top on and use the knobs to rotate and shred the chicken. It worked very nicely, not quite as perfectly as in the video but fairly well.

And I thought I would try to find a version sold at a local store or at least manufactured by an American company. Nope! These are only available at Amazon, with several different sellers, all of them Chinese brands. Why “Trust Win”? It was a couple dollars more than the cheapest alternative, and they spent the extra bucks hiring a fluent English-speaker to write the text on their listing on Amazon, and I figured they deserved a reward, and might possibly make a marginally better-quality product if they put in that bit of extra effort.

Another observation: this is not a knock-off of an American product, and there is no indication that there is any patent on it even though it seems to me like the sort of thing that would be very worthy of a patent, and it would fit right in on Shark Tank with Kevin O’Leary asking about it. (Do the Chinese even have a patent system? I don’t know.) Presumably that’s why there are multiple sellers with essentially the same product, and I imagine that it was actually a Chinese individual who invented this, but can’t benefit from the intellectual property rights in the same way as an American can.

Which brings me to tariffs.

It concerns me a great deal that we have lost manufacturing capacity in fairly substantial ways in the United States. After all, when the Kamala Harris campaign ads wanted to tell voters that Trump’s proposed tariffs would trigger inflation and would be a “sales tax,” one of the items listed was drugs — because, though it’s hard to come by solid data, Americans have become dependent on China for our medicines. In 2018,

China accounted for 95 percent of U.S. imports of ibuprofen, 91 percent of U.S. imports of hydrocortisone, 70 percent of U.S. imports of acetaminophen, 40 to 45 percent of U.S. imports of penicillin and 40 percent of U.S. imports of heparin, according to Commerce Department data.

However, I can’t figure out what percentage of ibuprofen, acetaminophen, or the others are actually imported in the first place, vs. manufactured here in the U.S. or in other “Western” nations (meaning other countries which are democratic, follow the rule of law, and respect human rights, so that we needn’t worry that they will become aggressors in military conflict, and which are unlikely to find themselves on the receiving end either).

Separately, another recent report writes that

The U.S. ranks as the 5th largest manufacturer of antibiotics, holding approximately 4.5% of the export market. The U.S. accounted for 7% of antibiotics imported by all countries in 2022.

All major American and European drug manufacturers have ceased production and development of antibiotics. Antibiotics are particularly unprofitable due to multiple regulatory and market factors, such as regulation-enforced low pricing and expensive scaling of production.

Now, what exactly this means isn’t clear – if we manufacture 4.5% of the export market but at the same time no “major” American drug manufacturer produces antibiotics, does that mean there are still “minor” drug manufacturers doing so?

And a Council on Foreign Relations report from 2019 stated that

about 80 percent of the active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) used to make drugs in the United States are said to come from China and other countries like India.

So when we speak of tariffs and inflation and how much applying tariffs to imports might increase the cost of consumer goods, well, there isn’t really much justification that I can tell to adding a tariff to a chicken shredder, or any of a long list of consumer products which are nice to have but not truly essential for well-being. If China were to cut off our supply of chicken shredders or rubber duckies or, really, probably any number of children’s plastic toys, in order to stop us from intervening in an invasion of Taiwan, say, we’d survive.

You could probably also add to that list items where a basic manufacturing capacity remains in the US, though primarily for high-end versions of the product. That used to be the case for items such as furniture, or even clothing or shoes – but I’m not sure that’s even true any longer. Perhaps it might be true that these items are manufactured, at least some of the time, in countries which are poor but neither at risk of engaging in economic warfare nor with much of a chance of being victims of instability and crisis.

But what about food? We can snark about protectionism and how bad price supports and farm subsidies and sugar tariffs are from a high minded economist’s point of view, but it would in fact be a bad thing for American farmers to shut down because they can’t compete with low wages elsewhere, and for know-it-alls to claim that “it’s just the free market at work,” and have farmland lie fallow and Americans dependent on the decisions of other countries..

And in the meantime, items like medications, or anything similar where pure market forces have driven manufacturing outside the U.S. leave us exposed and at risk. And that worries me a great deal, and a policy that attempts to resolve this would be worth the cost in terms of higher consumer costs.

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