(CNN) In attempting to justify his decision to raise tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars of Chinese imports into the US, President Donald Trump has suggested that paying the tariffs is a voluntary decision by US consumers and businesses, and that the best way to avoid them is not to buy Chinese-made products. In other words, just buy American, Trump argues.

On Monday, Trump tweeted : "There is no reason for the U.S. Consumer to pay the Tariffs," and that they can be "completely avoided if you buy from a non-Tariffed Country, or you buy the product inside the USA (the best idea). That's Zero Tariffs."

Facts first: Most of the Chinese products subject to tariffs simply aren't made in the US, including apparel and electronic components. For those few items where there is an American made alternative, there is also the problem of scalability: US companies simply lack the capacity to create the number of products that come from China. In that regard, Trump's suggestion that there is "no reason for the U.S. Consumer to pay the Tariffs" is false.

"That's misguided," said Greg Daco, chief US economist at Oxford Economics, on Monday of Trump's notion that US companies can produce the same products at the same scale as China. "The type of imports that we bring in from China and the scale of the imports ... make substitution, at least immediate substitution, nearly impossible."

Part of the problem is that the US no longer has the manufacturing base it once did. According to Robert E. Scott, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, over the past two decades, the US has lost roughly a third of its manufacturing capacity, as more than 90,000 factories have closed and 5 million manufacturing jobs have been lost.

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