> The tariffs will create more jobs in the US (and in other economies due to retaliatory tariffs there) and so there will be more people in the market who will be able to afford to pay 10% more.

This isn't backed by evidence, it's at best speculation for some potential future at least 4 years, but probably closer to 10, in the future. Most industries cannot simply just spin up new factories at the turn of a switch.

> This isn't backed by evidence, it's at best speculation for some potential future at least 4 years, but probably closer to 10, in the future. Most industries cannot simply just spin up new factories at the turn of a switch.

There are two arguments in favor of free trade:

1) We don’t want to spend expensive american labor building X.

2) We don’t have the industrial capability to build X anymore.

The latter seems to be a damning indictment of the former. It’s one thing not to build X domestically to save money. It’s another thing to lose the capability to feasibly build X in the US because you have outsources that capability and lost it.

I’m sure if we ever got into a war with China, they’d wait for us for a decade to rebuild our manufacturing capacity.

#2 is basically the whole justification for the military industrial complex. We don't generally lack strategic manufacturing capabilities outside of state of the art chip designs. Even then, it doesn't justify blanket tariffs on entire countries, it would justify tariffs on specific industries that are seen as strategic, which is not what's happening.

> Most industries cannot simply just spin up new factories at the turn of a switch.

Particularly given how wild this administration is. Who knows what the situation will be tomorrow, even! America is increasingly perceived as a wildly unreliable partner.

It’s a temporary pause presumably so they can figure pricing out. Doesn’t seem unreasonable to take some time to determine what the new price should be. Maybe they get a good deal on shipping and came only raise prices by 5% or it’s worse and they need to raise by 15%. Who knows right now there’s a lot in flux.

> This seems political.

Say it ain't so - tariffs are now being used for political reasons instead of economic? I hope the administration gets word of this.

With how unstable the situation is and Framework being a small outfit shipping out of their processing & QA center(every unit is hand assembled and tested before shipping), it makes far more sense to just pause it all than risk tariffs being raised to 104% arbitrarily before they can process an order.

I’m not sure if you’ve been a part of any company that are depended on supply chains, but the problem is, planning is hard-to-impossible right now. My friend explained to me how he just doesn’t know how to price products he’s importing. Between the time he orders the products, and the product reaches the port of the export country, he needs to know how much duties he has to pay at the port. He just doesn’t know that, so he can bake it into the price of the product.

> The tariffs will (in the medium and long term) create more jobs in the US

No, they won't. The tariffs and the responses to them, if maintained, will replace existing jobs with different, lower-value ones, working a durable contraction of the production possibilities curve vs. what it was would have been without them.

Framework is a tiny company in the grand scheme of things, they aren't going to be able to fund their own US operations. Larger computing companies might be able to but smaller companies are dependent on existing supply chains of subcontractors and contract manufacturers that don't exist in the US.