> We don’t have the infrastructure to manufacture

That's trivially false given we're the second-largest manufacturer in the world. We just don't want to employ people, hence why we can't make an iphone or refine raw materials.

The actual issue is that our business culture is antithetical to a healthy society. The idea of employing Americans is anti-business—there's no willingness to invest, or to train, or to support an employee seen as waste. Until business can find some sort of reason to care about the state of the country, this will continue.

Of course, the government could weigh in, could incentivize, could subsidize, could propagandize, etc, to encourage us to actually build domestic industries. But that would be a titantic course reversal that would take decades of cultural change.

Corporate culture in America is definitely broken. I'm not sure how we can fix it.

A way to fix that would be to e.g. issue student loans for the training and then forgive them over time if the employee continues working there. But that's rather disfavored by the tax code when forgiving the loans is considered taxable income, and you would have people screaming about "abusive" companies sticking you with $200k in debt if you quit right after they give you $200k worth of training.

50+k of training over a 40 year career requires salary bumps for retention, but the first set of training should have paid for itself before you’re offering the next.

Nope. Keeping the same person for 40 years saves far more than 50k of onboarding costs over that timeframe. Employee churn is really expensive but if it’s not coming out of your budget middle management doesn’t care.

Companies do all kinds of objectively dumb things due to poor incentives.

Could you please inform my managers who keep pestering me about career growth of this shift so I could just focus on the work? ktnx

On the contrary, from the 40s to the 70s (possibly well into the 80s) the corporation was heavily invested in your career. Employees were expected to dedicate their lives to the firm, and the firm, in turn, was expected to take care of them. This "free-for-all" employment model is fairly recent.

Edit - added source (1993): https://www.pmi.org/learning/library/employers-employees-no-...

(So the same sort of mercenary treatment that employees get)

Buildings are often leased and are therefore not capital at all.

Your mentors are your peers at work which can include your manager. Career growth is the accumulation of both knowledge and experience which is beneficial to both parties so I dont understand how those are misaligned unless fraud is involved.

I don't know how you could believe that career growth interests are aligned between employees and their managers. For the majority of employees, their optimal career path will involve changing companies at some point. This is generally not in their current manager's best interest.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43698197 ("The best advice I ever got was from a mentor who told me: Your network is your net worth but only if you give more than you take.")

I think you're exactly right there.

>> We don’t have the infrastructure to manufacture

> That's trivially false given we're the second-largest manufacturer in the world.

I want to quibble with that a little bit. I don't have the numbers, but relative position matters to. The US could be "second-largest manufacturer in the world" if it only manufactures Dixie cusp, other countries manufacture nothing, and China manufactures everything else.

My understanding is Chinese output is so huge, that even if the US maintained stead manufacturing output from the 70s or whatever, it would be dwarfed.

If we want to strengthen America (military & economy) immigration reform is needed! This could be unpopular but such reform could be ...those who want to come here must serve in our armed forces for x amount of years and can bring two to four family members here that are able to start working and contributing to the economy immediately (pay taxes). Rounding up and getting of rid of these eager want to be Americans when we have adversaries with larger armies and we bang the drum on beefing up defense (and our economy) doesn't make sense to me.

I don't think it's a matter of willingness, but simple global geo economics.

There's places where producing A, whatever A is, is economically more efficient for countless reasons (energy prices, logistics, talent, bureaucracy, cost of labor, etc).

That's not gonna change with whatever investment you want or tariff you put.

But the thing I find more absurd, of all, is that I'd expect HN users to be aware that USA has thrived in the sector economy while offloading things that made more sense to be done elsewhere.

I'd expect HN users to understand that the very positive trade balances like Japan's, Italy's or Germany's run are meaningless and don't make your country richer.

Yet I'm surrounded by users ideologically rushing into some delusional autarchic dystopia of fixing american manufacturing for the sake of it.

I don't see a difference. If we want local industry, we must address the global geo economics.

I'm not sure this is a meaningful point of differentiation.

Literally forced labor camps. Of course, the PRC denies these allegations, but it certainly seems like there's some forced labor due to the numerous reports across many years of a variety of forced labor operations from these camps.

https://www.walkfree.org/global-slavery-index/country-studie...

This idea that “labor is cheaper elsewhere” is simply a neutral statement of economics — but it’s not, it’s a political statement . The US and by extension the “western capitalist world” has been exploiting labor since day 0 with chattel then later globally slavery.

The reason Japan was the biggest manufacturer to the US post war is because the SCAP forcibly rewrote their constitution to be explicitly capitalist. Read “Understanding Defeat” for detailed proof of the 7 year occupation in the Japan, to destroy any semblance of Japanese imperial/keretzu culture and replace it with explicitly capitalist structure. To be fair to MacArthur, they did suggest labor practices like unionization but it was a thin veneer suggestion, not forced into cooperatives and syndicates.

China moved into that position because Japanese labor began getting “more expensive.” Nixon and Kissinger saw an opportunity to exploit “cheap” labor because there were no protections for workers or environmental protections - so “opening up china” plus the Nixon shock and floating of interest rates allowed for global capital flight to low cost. This is why labor and productivity began to separate in 1971.

NAFTA made Mexico and the southern americas the agricultural slave countries etc… On and on just moving the ball until there’s nowhere else to exploit.

It’s not a conspiracy to demonstrate that capital will move wherever it needs to in order to exploit “arbitrage opportunities.” Its good business/MBA capitalism 101.

Just like #2 in Austin powers said:

> Dr. Evil, I've spent 30 years of my life turning this two-bit evil empire into a world-class multinational. I was going to have a cover story in "Forbes". But you, like an idiot, wanted to take over the world. And you don't realize there is no world anymore. It's only corporations.

Just need to make steady progress each year with incentives that encourage large leaps in progress.

Its a terrible state and situation to invest in a business doesn't benefit anyone. My hometown had a large cultural center built by the mayor, he couldn't run for reelection again, new mayor is elected, completely ignores the whole thing was built and lets it rot. Everything is only done for an election cycle, the next cycle could bring something else entirely.

Its terrible to live in a place like this, Americans have no idea how bad this is going to be for the country.

This appears to be completely wrong? All the stats I can find say that the US has about 4x the per capita electricity generation of China.

Other than that it seems to be mostly good points, especially the overall one: you cannot do this overnight.

> If you’re building a new factory in the United States, your investment will alternate between maybe it will work, and catastrophic loss according to which way the tariffs and the wind blows. No one is building factories right now, and no one is renting them, because there is no certainty that any of these tariffs will last

Policy by amphetamine-driven tweeting is a disaster.

> 12. Enforcement of the tariffs will be uneven and manipulated

Yup. The 145% level seems designed to create smuggling, and the wild variations between countries to create re-labelling. It's chicken tax trucks all over again.

> This is probably the worst economic policy I’ve ever seen

Per Simpsons: this is the worst economic policy you've seen so far. The budget is yet to come.

> If American companies want to sell in China, they must incorporate there, register capital, and name a person to be a legal representative. To sell in Europe, we must register for their tax system and nominate a legal representative. For Europeans and Chinese to sell in the United States, none of this is needed, nor do federal taxes need to be paid.

This is .. not a bad idea, really. It would probably be annoying for small EU and UK exporters but less so than 10% tariffs and even less so than random day of the week tariffs. Maybe one day it could harmonise with the EU VAT system or something.

(also I think the author is imagining that sub-par workers, crime, and drugs don't exist in China, when they almost certainly do, but somewhere out of sight. Possibly due to the internal migration control of hukou combined with media control?)

It's annoying Americans were given only two choices - offshoring is great and let's keep doing it, and, as you say, the opposite, meth-fueled let's bring back manufacturing overnight. The kind of slow and steady protection and promotion of home-grown industry that China and most of Asia so successfully used to grow their economies was completely absent as even a talking point.

But the administration attack is so ridiculously egregious and demands an even worse, government-imposed ideological alignment, that making logical arguments in this environment feels almost pointless.

Your comment evoking a victim complex on the other hand I find a far more annoying element of online discourse.

Unfortunately this is the culmination of social media as a controversy machine, that promotes the worst arguments.

> ideological purity tests like required DEI statements

Example?

There's a controversy industry that cherry picks the worst examples of student-politics excess in these regards and then carefully conflates it with university policy.

As well as the sad truth that as soon as you take away "DEI" requirements the segregationists come back and purge the library, delete all the black Medal of Honor recipients from the website, etc.

Diversity statements were widely suspected of being a smokescreen for racial preferences. Much like the "personality score" Harvard used to curate its desired racial makeup in its student admissions.

A total of 993 applications were received, of which 893 met basic qualifications. The LSI Committee conducted a first review and evaluated candidates based solely on contributions to diversity, equity and inclusion. Only candidates that met a high standard in this area were advanced for further review, narrowing the pool down to 214 for serious consideration.

Of course. The point of this kind of propaganda is to have you reacting so negatively and emotionally that you don't examine the claims calmly and rationally. Emotions > facts. If no-one appalled, then it isn't doing its job.

The other issue is that many of these schools have not been expanding enrolment numbers to population growth. Less seats per-capita mean more exclusivity over time.

Get rid of them both (DEI and legacy admissions) and the government should create a policy that those endowments need to be used to expand the size of the schools.

I literally linked an article in my comment that had an overview, but here is a more specific one that addresses diversity statements in particular:

https://reason.com/2022/09/30/mandated-diversity-statement-d...

> As well as the sad truth that as soon as you take away "DEI" requirements the segregationists come back and purge the library, delete all the black Medal of Honor recipients from the website, etc.

This is literally my exact point. There absolutely should be a rational place that denounces both these diversity statement ideological requirements and the egregious memory-holing that the current administration is implementing.

https://www.thefire.org/research-learn/fire-statement-use-di...

https://www.wbur.org/news/2024/05/07/massachusetts-institute...

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/03/us/harvard-diversity-stat...

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/20/us/diversity-statements-u...

https://www.bestcolleges.com/news/diversity-statements-are-g...

Diversity Statements Required for One-Fifth of Academic Jobs - https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/2021/11/11/study-diversity-...

More examples: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43692945

There is no requirement on the race of the applicants.

If you look at one example of the actual assessment criteria [1], merely teaching without discrimination or exclusion earns the lowest possible score.

[1] Only mentions activities that are already the expectation of faculty as evidence of commitment and involvement (for example, "I always invite and welcome students from all backgrounds to participate in my research lab, and in fact have mentored several women." - https://web.archive.org/web/20200302212643/https://ofew.berk...

> Basically these are statements where you note that you support teaching all kids

Do you really feel today's university professors need to write an essay saying they support teaching everyone?

> will make efforts to be inclusive and ensure your class has an inclusive environment

Again, say someone is teaching calculus, what does this exactly mean?

It's absolutely makes sense to me that a university has policies in place to ensure classrooms are inclusive and that discrimination does not occur. But these statements are nonsense.

I went to school in south Atlanta, where both student body and teaching staff tended to be overwhelmingly Black. The school had a policy of hiring a certain percentage of non-Black teachers, including white teachers, and it had programs designed specifically to attract students from white and Hispanic communities.

The goal was not to give non-Black students and teachers a leg up; it was to promote diversity and ensure students graduated ready to meet all kinds of different people in the workplace. These policies were popular and uncontroversial, at least while I was there — though I dare say they would be deemed illegal now.

You can't stake out a position without getting called some name somebody invented to denigrate that position. Welcome to modern politics on the internet.

Over time, China also developed mid/high level skills, complemented their low-skill production offering with it and now competes in new industries, new tech, etc.

So...to compete with China, the country with 4x the US-population, the solution is that low-skill labor needs to return to US....?

Shouldn't instead the focus be to again foster mid/high-skill labor, moving the part that is offshored again towards low-skill labor...?

It's not impossible to build back, but it would require long term stable policies to favor it at more levels than just tariffs.

One of the foundations of conservatism is the priority of hierarchy over effectiveness. In a conservative culture it doesn't matter how well things work as long as the right people in charge.

We're seeing the limit of this now, where it's literally more important to maintain hierarchy by denying facts and rationality than to "lose face" by admitting that power isn't absolute.

You can't run a modern country like this. You can't plan for the future, make effective decisions, govern, have a working legal system, build housing, create health care - anything at all - when all decisions are made according to the whims of a despot.

Power and resources - including wealth - have to be distributed. Or at least there has to be the illusion they're somewhat distributed. Anything else guarantees terminal contraction and decay.

(tariffs do nothing to address labor shortages in healthcare, teaching, and other domestic service based sectors, for example)

No, just no.

There is a high variance in job qualities beyond pay.

Work hours, over time, outside vs. office jobs, repetitive Vs. varied, physical and psychological impact, etc.

But the conversation here has he orthogonal goal of being competitive with China as well. I can assure you just paying everyone living wages is one of the main reasons why we are not competitive with China. It’s the main reason why China is beating us today.

So paying everyone living wages doesn’t really do anything to solve the problem because the products created by people who are paid living wages are by definition more expensive due to labor costs.

What tariffs do is they allow us to pay people living wages and sell expensive products and still be competitive because products from China are tariffed to be the same price.

They aren't though. In America, "Paying living wages" always means "pay way more", because America underpays labour and overcharges for literally everything (products, services, basic cost of living -- every product on American soil has a insane profit margin on it)

In China, "Paying living wages" doesn't necessarily mean "pay labor more", because they have stronger control over pricing and margins, so it often actually means "make orgs charge way less".

You end up with Chinese folks living in a major city in China, with a 2bed apartment that costs $200USD/month, and a meal out cost $2USD/each, cars that start at like $6k, and they get paid $5USD/hr, but they feel like they're living well, despite only making around $640USD/month, because they can save 10% of their income each month, and have like 40% of their income as discretionary spending, and still get to own their apartment.

But in the US, a 2bed apartment in a big city like that costs at least $2,000/month or more, a meal out there costs at least $20/each, and a basic starter car starts at like $26k, so you can pay someone in a ostensibly-"high labor cost" job of $20/hr, and they feel like their constantly underwater, and have zero chance of ever owning a home, because they only have like 20% of their income as discretionary spending, and they can't save anything at all. (and that's before we even mention differences like how you don't have to worry about being hit with a crazy bill for an ER visit or an Ambulance in China, but Americans have to worry about that 24/7/365).

(It's the same reason many American's dream of getting a job in Europe and leaving the US, because despite making less money-on-paper, you get to generate more real wealth and do so with less life risk and life stress)

The Factories and the labor pool and the infrastructure being absent in the US is hard to solve for, of course -- but it isn't even the hardest part of any of this. The American view of capitalism would have to be completely rewritten to be more diverse, more equitable, and more inclusive to Americans who do actual labor, before Americans could be anywhere close to competitive with most of these Chinese industries.

Instead, the offshore-destinations kept offering more and more services in the value-chain, until the entire skillset to actually create the low-skill labor processes to offshore was replaced with "let the offshore company manage".

See a list of leading US companies that are off of being king of the hill - Boeing, GE, Intel, ... leading industrial US companies continually divested from manufacturing, or shorted long term investment, not because it wasn't profitable, but because it wasn't profitable enough in the moment. It took decades, and many dividends and stock growth was taken in the middle, but the shortfall manifests in time.

Uber still hasn't managed to make a net profit over its lifetime as a company, by the way.

I agree with the rest of your comment, though. The US public markets reward creative accounting and mortgaging the future for quarterly gains. GE and Jack Welch are a great historical example.

I also think a significant influence on the Fed was a financialized business community demanding 0% interest.

This is the one upside of chaos monkey crashing the economy. They aren't going to be able to drive rates back to zero in the next four years.

>Many US business elected to chase short term growth, and short term and higher margins and minimize long term investments.

I would like to add that this was due to the influence of Milton Friedman. He put the emphasis on shareholder returns being the most important, without considering the survival of the company itself.

Yes, more evolved financial markets provided easier access capital, but, as it so happens in those types of situations, access to capital and enjoyment of said (liquid/financial) capital became a target in itself, the rest of society didn't matter. In fact, the whole (Western) society was moulded around (liquid/financial) capital, it became its raison d'être.

We don’t want the Chinese making high value goods at slightly lower prices. We want Americans making high value goods and we want to push cheap stuff as cheap as possible. Next step is enforcing environmental rules on Chinese goods and requiring escrow of the funds to pay the Chinese in American accounts until the goods are inspected and pass.

Not disagree with your main points, but labor inputs are still very much a huge part of product costs, and often the biggest driver of where to build a new factory when a company is scaling up. Companies aim to build their new factories wherever there's a sufficient pool of cheap labor with the necessary skills.

Of course, even where labor cost is truly inconsequential, you would still do that as all the correlations that come alongside cheap labor are still very attractive to manufacturing.

Assuming there is no embargo by then.

The obvious answer is this:

1. it doesn't matter if our t-shirts are made in Bangladesh.

2. it does matter if our stuff is made in an enemy nation (china).

3. U.S. labor is too expensive to move back to mass manufacturing the way we used to do it, c.f. baumol's cost disease.

4. offshoring and illegal labor have suppressed investment in automation and manufacturing technology for decades, which will be painful to undo.

The sensible outcome of these facts is

1. Focus on moving everything out of china to other cheap countries with reasonable levels of human capital.

2. Focus on re-shoring critical industries.

3. Launch moonshot investments into robotics and automation. Bringing back a big chunk of manufacturing is sustainable; bringing back jobs is not.

4. Invest in large-scale roll-out of SMR energy so we have reliable power for this new industrial build.

I do disagree somewhat with point 4. I think this is frequently overstated:

Building and operating automated factories is just as wage-dependent as anything else (just the coefficients are a bit smaller). You still need engineers, construction crews, supervisors, repair crews, etc. (and those could all be doing something more profitable as well).

You can see this very clearly in the EU, where there is a pretty smooth wage-gradient, and even the super highly automated automotive manufacturing has moved down that gradient towards Slovenia, Slovakia, Hungary, despite language/culture barriers.

> Bringing back a big chunk of manufacturing is sustainable; bringing back jobs is not.

I think a decent sized manufacturing industry is a realistic goal long term. But longer term US global supremacy in it is not even a realistic goal to begin with, because not only are you gonna fight against the wage gradient now, you are also gonna face the fact that the US is only ~5% global population, and manufacturing will naturally drift towards the very biggest markets for its goods, which the US probably won't be in half a century or so, simply because of demographics and economical growth in China/India generally.

Though after this administration I'm not sure we'll have any allies left.

Just goes to show the administration isn't working with facts and doing the hard-nosed analysis required to drive effective policy.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/tags/series?t=manufacturing%3Bou...

I'm looking at the first chart, "Manufacturing Sector: Real Sectoral Output for All Workers" [1]. It grew until Q2 2000, when it was at 97.2. In Q4 2024 it was at 98.6. And let's not ignore how almost all leading semiconductor manufacturing (which are in and required for nearly everything) has moved to East Asia.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OUTMS

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHMFG

Labor Productivity (Output per Hour) for All Workers

You're mistaking the rhetoric he uses to sell this idiocy to the rest of the country for a good-faith argument.

I would not object to a tariff on shitty IoT devices, with the level determined by things like if the default password is "admin".

Apparently the US doesn't need allies anymore against China...

agreed but Trump just gutted the CHIPS act for no other reason than because it was enacted by Biden (the typical "undo everything the last prez did" just like Trump 1.0).

You can argue that Intel is a badly run company, not worth saving etc etc, but if want to save US manufacturing, then Intel, and its ecosystem, would be the first place to start. Otherwise, TSMC, Samsung and China (still playing second-fiddle but investing billions to catch up) will dominate. Certainly better than trying to keep coal plants open.

Ideology aside it's really hard to find _any_ rational thought behind these moves.

The US faces a much tougher hill to climb though in regards to bringing manufacturing back. China had it easy because they had most of what you could want; a huge labor force that could upskill to manufacturing (the rural poor population), cheap labor (kind of an extension to point 1 but also includes their lower COL and wage expectations over all), and low environmental barriers.

To bring manufacturing back to the US is a way harder lift; we have a lot tighter labor market, if we shift a lot of people to manufacturing someone needs to take the jobs they leave. We (well I at least don't enjoy the idea of going back to when rivers caught fire on the regular) don't want to strip environmental protections back to a level to make it cheap to dispose of waste. The best targets are low labor, high price, high skill goods, like, I don't know, chip manufacturing!

I saw a headline yesterday that says there are more pets than children in Japan. How long until this is true in the US? The truth of the matter is that there is no workforce left in the United States, and will be less of one by the time manufacturing does spin up. In WWII, the Army was happy at how many of the young men there had come from farms and were familiar with using/driving heavy equipment, how many knew some welding, etc. Then after the war, that translated right back into mnufacturing there these now older men were familiar with "making things". They could do actual labor. How well will the part-time baristas and Uber Eats delivery drivers and Dollar General shelf stockers do on the assembly line?

>if we shift a lot of people to manufacturing someone needs to take the jobs they leave.

If we could bring back manufacturing, then we would need to restructure our society such that those jobs lesser/menial jobs could go undone (or be automated). But we can't really bring it back, and they will bring in others on any number of weird visas no one has really heard of to do the lesser/menial jobs which are the only ones left. The people who set this in motion aren't even just retired, they're already dead of old age and there's nothing anyone can do about what's coming.

I know a lot of people in the Bay Area with serious fabrication skills (mainly applied to art), who would love to have a stable job using those skills in a factory setting, but who are constantly looking for gig work instead.

There were two different fabrication jobs I nearly took the last time I was looking for work. I have what amounts to a second job as a creative producer and art fabricator, but it doesn’t pay the bills, so I need a day job. All else being equal, if factory work was enough to pay the bills, I’d choose that over a full time job with a heavy mental load.

It’s easy to dismiss factory work as menial, but like, seriously watch Starbucks baristas working during a morning rush, when there are tons of mobile app orders and also tons of people in line. It’s an assembly line. Different technical skills, but similar structure and pace. And at least in a factory you can sit down.

tl;dr I think we’re vastly underestimating the capabilities of our existing workforce, and unfairly dismissing factory work as a viable replacement for certain kinds of jobs.

I think this is because China is an autocracy, so they can make long-term plans. Democracies that swing as wildly as the US currently does is no place for that, and that's not limited to the new administration.

There isn't anything physically stopping America from doing what China is doing. We literally did it first (in modernity)! Albeit for too short a time before the robber barons and foreign interests retook control.

> Democracies that swing as wildly as the US currently does

It's not "robber barons" etc. It's just two very different worldviews existing in one place that cause big swings in policy when the other one is elected.

There were a lot of slower manufacturing on-shoring incentives during the Biden administration that would have presumably continued under the Harris administration. Mainly around green energy and electric vehicle manufacturing incentives - which have successfully resulted in new auto, battery, and supply chain factories being built mostly in red states - and semiconductor manufacturing. The Biden administration also maintained and increased tariffs on specific types of products coming from China including EVs.

So I don't think your categorization of the two choices Americans were given is quite accurate.

Biden's infrastructure and funding bills were basically doing exactly this, and their foreign policy largely aligned with this goal as well.

I was not a huge Biden fan early in his presidency (Breaking the rail union strike and the complete lackluster response to actually prosecuting criminality in the outgoing admin were not my desired policies - democrats are markedly too corporatist in general).

But his infrastructure bills were sorely needed practical steps to doing a lot of good for a lot of folks in the US. There's a reason so many politicians then tried to take credit for them (incl Trump).

If you check the transcript of the confirmation hearing for the current Commerce secretary, practically every Senator brags about their state’s CHIPS funded R&D hub. Lots of growth in small and medium businesses there. And CHIPS incentive funding played a huge role in bringing the new TSMC fab in Arizona

https://www.azcentral.com/story/money/business/jobs/2024/04/...

I don’t believe that cost centers are a good example of returning manufacturing onshore. Or an example of a state using federal funding well.

Cost centers are not a good investment for federal funding, without a clear path to paying back our taxed dollars.

Can you elaborate on this? It was my understanding a company only pays taxes on profit. So isn't the revenue that goes into R&D effectively taxed at 0%, since at that point it's not yet profit? I.e. only dividend payouts get taxed.

On the other hand, keep manufacturing outside of US for cheaper labor to keep price low and having bigger margin. It's an easy choice to make.

And again this is not a US specific problem, it's almost all of countries nowadays have a massive wealth gap that makes people racing to the bottom of living / working standard.

People had the exact same concerns and fears when electronics manufacturing started shifting to Japan like 50 years ago-- they went in the same way up the value chain that China did, and they started losing a lot of the industry with rising wages, too, exactly like what we see with China => Vietnam/Indonesia/... nowadays.

I think 90% of the whole political debate about the economy is misplaced nostalgia combined with problematic local wealth inequality-- poor countries lifting themselves up by manufacturing stuff for low wages is how the whole system is actually supposed to work from my perspective; describing that as "ripping off the American people" is completely unhinged, misinformed self-delusion to me.

When Trump said that new manufacturing facilities would be fast-tracked to being able to build their own on-site power plants because the grid is "at risk of bombing", I've come to think that the whole political debate is really about: What the hell are we going to do if WWIII happens?

Manufacturing capability and capacity is an incredibly precious resource if you find yourself in a large scale war, and there is growing concern (realistic or not) that America has given it away/lost it. It makes no difference in peaceful times, but there is growing belief that the era of peace is coming to an end.

In fact, if you take a higher level view of what is going on, like the wanting to annex Canada and Greenland, it seems the entire motivation for it all is preparing for the possibility of war with Russia (and China).

I'm not buying that whole argument. At all. Because this looks too much like a "lets find favorable talking points for the middling plans we already put in motion"-exercise.

Can you honestly argue that current economic policy and decisionmaking was mainly driven by strategic military interests and planning, as opposed to Trump being a big fan of tariffs as a concept?

Because I don't think you can. And I think we don't need more than a glance at the liberation day proposals to identify this; if the aim was to war-proof US supply chains, then you would expect a big focus on military relevance of tariffed goods, coupled with long term investments into defense-relevant local industry and a glut of defense-spending in general.

Instead we got blanket tariffs that were so ill-conceived, they mostly had to be rolled back/suspended the next day, and generally pretty much no apparent guiding focus or much thought at all.

Concerning possible war: Russia is not a credible military opponent to the US and is not gonna be one within decades, either. Their land army basically got stopped by a country a fifth of their size on mainly donated (and frequently old) western equipment, and the Russian Navy embarassed itself even worse.

China is a somewhat credible opponent, but what would they even go to war over that would actually affect the US? Panama? They might be more serious about taking Taiwan back, but I honestly doubt that the US would involve itself in that business too much anyway; considering how the whole support for the Ukraine, whose territorial integrity it formally agreed on to protect, amounted to some military hand-me-downs and a bit of intel sharing (no longer even that from what I know?), I would NOT hold my breath waiting for US carriers in a Taiwan invasion...

Well, like we established in a discussion here yesterday, argument only takes place if you don't know. It is the mind's way to explore and learn. So, yes, obviously I could as I don't have enough information to know for sure. If I did, there would be nothing argue about, now would there? I'd already know everything there is to know. It would be a pointless endeavour.

But I don't think an argument is what you are actually looking for. It seems you're simply looking for someone to do free work for you. As great as that may sound to you, there is no reason for anyone else to cater to that. For the sake of good faith, I'll spare you anything more that would be serving to me.

On the other hand, I am a believer in the idea that voters get the government they deserve. So maybe we deserve this.

I'm not a fan of industrial policy or the chips act, but it seems to be just the choice you are asking for.

Excuse me, but I am old enough to remember Biden's program such as CHIPS, a slow and steady protection and promotion of home-grown industry.

America had the choice. It chose wrong. Are Americans going to assume the consequences of their choices or are they going to lie to themselves they weren't given the choice? That last option would fit more with the "character" of the America nowadays, the one who voted Trump: make mistakes and blame someone else for it.

What do Democrats have to do with Republican candidates in a Republican primary?

Addressing the primaries, no one was beating Trump, it has nothing to do with his closest but still far distant challenger being a woman.

Are you talking about Harris? I'm pretty sure she wasn't in the republican primaries so that isn't who the previous comment was talking about.

If you want to kick-start manufacturing, you're gonna have to attract people somehow initially, either through more money, or free education/training, etc

The message of "we're gonna find some way to undo some of the damage of off shoring and find some way to put heavy industry back to work" has been included in one way or another in every presidential candidates platform at least as far back as Obama's first term.

The specifics change from party to party and candidate to candidate but this isn't a new thing. The common man has been clamoring for some sort of change from the status quo for the better part of a generation now. It's only recently that the situation has become such a priority that elections are won or lost on it.

I fully expect that whatever administration comes next will continue on the path of on-shoring, if perhaps in a more reasonable way.

>It is also incompatible with the US since a lot of corporations made bank due to offshoring and will fight it every way they can since they don't want to deal with costly US labor who can unionize or sue you for millions if they break a finger at work

The people who actually run manufacturing and heavy industry really resent the current off-shoring status quo. They only do it because the sum total of other policy pushed by short sighted wall street financiers and/or environmental/labor advocates makes it the only viable option. I think they'd be happy to come back if doing so was financially viable, they just want it to be predictable (something current policy making surely isn't, lol) so they can plan around it because investments in those industries are made on decades long timelines.

I think we're at the point now where there's the political will to let the punch press eat some fingers to keep the factory open.

A good example is the general global approach to Net Zero. It's slow, methodical, science based, negotiated.

But if anyone brings up planning for 2050 it's usually in the context of "It's all bullshit, politicians are crap, they're just lying to you and kicking the can down the road till they retire" (and if you scratch the surface you'll have even chance that the person saying that has been radicalised into not even believing there's a problem to be solved).

But only the US is in and out of the Paris agreement etc.

It is irrelevant what other countries do.

What matters is whether or not other countries and industries trust that a country has sufficient stability to do business in and with. If there are actual or perceived signals that suggest chaos, rational people will not be interested to be tethered to that dispensation.

I believe the comparison is absolute production, not per person. Anything else would be odd. Considering China has 4x the capita of US it would mean that in absolute terms China is producing 8x the energy of the US. In reality it seems to be roughly 2x (although both sources are a bit outdated):

US 2023: 4.18 trillion kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity from utility-scale generators. Additionally, small-scale solar photovoltaic systems contributed around 73.62 billion kWh 1.

China 2021: 8.53 trillion kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity

--

But the staggering difference is how much of the electricity is attributed to the Industrial sector:

China: 70% (~6 trillion kWh)

US: 26% (~1 trillion kWh)

So overall China allocates 6x the electricity to production compared to US...

They are rapidly moving to renewable with grid scale BESS auctions avg $66-68/kw they are likely to have electricity prices at $0.01-0.02 over the next few years. I think it will be extremely tough to compete with China in manufacturing unless there is huge investment in renewable and storage systems to keep electricity prices competitive with China who are going to move on from coal over the next decade.

It used to be that the Chinese economy was based on just cheap labor. It's now increasingly based on cheap energy and automation. Replicating that elsewhere needs to start with modernizing energy infrastructure. Without that, there is no chance of competing. Manufacturing is energy intensive. So, cheap energy is indeed a key enabler.

The cost per kwh is a good one to call out. I think the medium term target for that should be < 1 cent per kwh. Effectively it trends to zero because there is very little marginal with solar, wind, and batteries other than the depreciation of infrastructure, equipment, etc. over time.

Original article definitely said "per person".

China allocates much more to industry and/because it allocates much less to personal consumption. Especially things like air conditioning. US per person consumption is still 2x that of EU average.

Yes, not your fault, I believe the AUTHOR meant to compare absolute production.

> China allocates much more to industry and/because it allocates much less to personal consumption

Let's not fall into the same hole: In relative terms, US residential is more than 2x of China's residential power use, but that's relative to the much larger production use. In absolute terms their residential power-allocation is not that different actually:

CN: 15% (1.2 trillion kWh)

US: 35% (1.46 trillion kWh)

Now, on a per-capita basis the difference is staggering, as China consumes 20% less to serve 4x the population...

Since 2000 they've gone from 10% of final energy being electricity to nearly 26% while the US has been basically flat around 23% and they are both predicted to grow (or not grow) at roughly the same in the next few years.

Sales tax as implemented in the US is not as tax efficient as VAT due to the impact of sales taxation on intermediate transactions during manufacturing. VAT only taxes the incrementally the value added at each transaction) whereas sales tax applies to the entire value at each stage.

VAT has basically the same effect as sales taxes with a much more complicated tax incidence.

If we had the same requirements here in the US it would likely become the same.

Crime really is much lower than it was a decade ago. People have more money, societal trust is higher. Drug use in clubs has always been a thing, but China differs from the USA in that their is no social support at all for addicts (so they either get clean with help from their family or they die).

Individuals (sole traders, contractors etc) can claim VAT rebates. You don’t have to have a lawyer or an accountant if you’re prepared to figure out the rules yourself.

It says "to sell into Europe" not "to buy from Europe". In first case I, the EU buyer, owe VAT.

In second case whoever buys may be owed a VAT rebate. But it's not selling any more.

That the official line from the CCP was that China had no drug problems, no prostitution, a variety of other things†, and that there were no gay people in China; That these were all Western ailments.

Urban China is a panopticon state not only digitally, but culturally. Housing is much tighter than the US, walls thinner. Your underwear is hung out to dry in clear view. "Privacy" in terms of politeness norms mostly consists of pretending you don't see or hear a thing. Neighbors generally know a lot about what each other are doing. 7% of the population are Party members, and in Marxist-Leninist systems this connotes something closer to earning a military officer commission; The Party is not trivial to apply to, the Party is strictly regimented, Party rules are held above and before the civil law, Party members are expected to be informers and have a strict lawful-good orientation from the perspective of the regime. Penalties for commerce in illicit drugs are even more extreme than the US, and due process is not bound by the same presumptions.

There are lots of factors conspiring against the sort of informal US inner city street drug distribution being as big of a deal in China.

Disclaimer: All my information is more than a decade out of date, and was only ever a thin slice of opinions from mostly Westerners in some first tier cities.

† From an academic paper: "2 The Six Evils are prostitution, drugs, selling women and children, pornography, gambling, and feudal superstition. Criminal gangs, or triads, are often counted as a seventh evil. These vices represent impediments to modernization and throwbacks to social problems that were present prior to the Communist takeover. Elevation of a problem to an "evil" symbolizes that the Beijing regime will mount a "campaign" or "struggle" against it."

Reminds me of a book I read years ago about the Soviet Union. Officially prostitution didn't exist there either, so there were no laws on the books about it. Enforcement usually was around various "antisocial" laws and usually for the street-walkers. Crime in general was mostly fine, so long as it wasn't a threat to the state, against well-connected people, or otherwise visible.

No wonder Russia got so bad after the strong state dissipated.

Most corporations will wait it out. Corporations that have an established interest (like Big Tech) will bribe Trump to get the exemptions they need to continue their business. Everybody else will have to decide how much they will want to depend on such an openly corrupt system. There industries that see no problem in dealing with corrupt regimes.

I'll charitably assume you meant first time in post-war history.

USA as "The Global leader" didn't emerge until after Europe was ravaged first by The Great War and then WWII.

No-one was looking toward the USA for leadership during The Great Game. Even by the time of the outbreak of WW1, the size of the USA's army was very small, half the size of the British army, which was itself considered small compared to the French and German armies.

US foreign policy was still inward looking, protectionist and isolationist until it could no longer ignore the case for war.

The foreign power projection really didn't kick into gear until 1945 onward and the determination not to let too much of the world fall to communist ideas.

This argument is based on experiences in WWII, i.e. the previous war. You need to be cautious about basing military doctrine on the previous war. I’m not sure the next war will be won by churning out aircraft carriers.

If not aircraft carriers then what sort of physical objects do you think will critical in winning the next major war?

What makes you confident that this could ever work on a longer term? The US is only ~5% of people globally, and I would expect any industrial/technological lead to melt over the years unless there is a monumental, continuous difference in spending (like what the US military did since WW2).

But I see no indication that you can keep that situation stable over the long term, and I honestly think that attempts like the current tariff approach don't help one bit in the long run while having massive harmful side effects (price inflation, loss of planning stability/soft power/productivity).

It at least stands a fighting chance if it wasn't the case that this alliance is being destroyed before our eyes.

I will admit that even an integrated alliance cannot push around China in the way it could decades ago.

    > America needs to increase manufacturing capacity if it wants to maintain hegemony and possibly world peace.

Low value manufacturing has been disappearing from the US for decades and arguably the US -- up until the recent turmoil -- has continued to maintain its hegemony.

America is the only country with the military capacity to take on China, and Europe isn't going to get up to speed in time to defend Taiwan.

It must be America out of necessity not preference.

Apparel, shoes, things you might find in a big box store -- zero sense. Low value manufacturing - leave it to China, Vietnam, India.

Jet engines? Advanced polymer materials? Batteries? All make sense! CHIPS act was intended to accelerate US IC R&D and manufacturing...which was cancelled.

And the boots, the uniforms, the helmets?

It is specifically "US hegemony" and not "western democracy hegemony" because the US is so extraordinarily powerful in economy and military.

Interests/culture with other democracies aligns well enough (and the power differential is large enough!) that US leadership is tolerated/supported.

But Canada, EU, Australia, Japan are NOT vasall states: If interests would clash and/or the US lose a lot of its relative power, those would cease being majority supporters and push for domestic interests instead.

Calling them "fairweather friends" might be too cynical but I think it's much more accurate than considering them integral parts of the US hegemony.

The United Kingdom of England and Scotland didn't exist until 1707, and even that was sans-Ireland until 1800.

And yet, even with the biggest empire the world had ever known, WW1 could only be won with the support of another huge empire (France) and the subsequent arrival of the USA; shortly after this, most of Ireland became semi-independent.

WW2 was "won", again with huge support, but a pyrrhic victory from the UK's point of view, and India soon after became independent. The Suez Crisis was 1956, and showed that the old empires of the UK (and France, Union française) were no longer economically hegemonic — even when working together — and the US had replaced them in this role.

Looking into the future, there's no way to guess. The more tech advances, the easier it becomes for a single person to cause enormous, world-altering impacts: hackers are already relevant on the geopolitical stage; there's good reason to think that quality of life is directly related to how much energy a person can process, but once you have sufficient energy per-capita, it's not hard to use a cyclotron to brute-force the purification of weapons grade uranium, or to transmute depleted uranium into plutonium; simple genetic manipulation has been a standard technique for first year biology students for at least two decades, and can be done in a home lab, and at some point we will have risks from someone trying to use this for evil rather than decorative bioluminescence. All these things can topple a hegemon that spends its tomorrows looking at yesterday's battlefield.

If an authoritarian country like China achieves hegemony the continued existence of democracy is at risk.

I want to live in a democratic world, not an authoritarian one.

America's democracy is a flawed one but of the two choices -- American hegemony or Chinese hegemony it is the best path to a flourishing global liberal democracy.

Can you foresee Chinese hegemony leading to increased democracy, individual property rights, due process, and rule of law?

My fear is that people will look at China's might and economic success and conclude that democracy is overrated.

If you don't -- Chinese hegemony and the path it will lead the world down is the one for you.

If you do -- Then American hegemony with all its flaws is something worth fighting for.

One note, some of the things you’ve listed has been proven as “mostly on paper, once people get their way, mental gymnastics will overcome the reason” in the past month. For a bastion of “freedom and democracy”, it’s really not looking like one from outside.

Stop and think about this for a moment -- do you think that China doesn't spread authoritarianism across the globe because they don't want to or simply because they can't do it yet?

Also, I am Canadian, but I could also be Panamanian, or Danish. Maybe it would be different if I were Taiwanese or Vietnamese or Japanese, but, China is far away and playing nice, and America is close and not.

They all most definitely did not stop existing.

Also I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about when you say the United Kingdom came really close to not existing.

Battle of Britain, Battle of France?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Britain

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_France

>They all most definitely did not stop existing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German-occupied_Europe

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_territories_acquired_b...

You didn't study WW2 in high school? It monumentally shaped the current world order.

To pick another example, Singapore was a crown colony before the war, then they were occupied by Japan during WW2, then they were a single nation with what is now Malaysia, then in the 1960s they two countries became independent from each other. They didn't under any reasonable reading of the situation cease to exist and they also have never been a hegemon of any kind.

So what's your criteria for existing, dirt in the same place? Their governments were dissolved. That means they don't exist anymore. Does the confederacy exist since the boarders are the same and the dirt is in the same place? I would argue not.

>Also lots of countries you listed definitely don't meet any sort of reasonable definition of "hegemon".

I agree, just pointing out countries that no longer existed.

Naval routes? Just negotiate and use money instead; it'll be cheaper than war.

Brainpower? Just offer higher salaries to come work in China.

Taiwan is a tiny island smaller than Florida with only 20m people.

2) Political legitimacy - successful unification would be a nationalist victory for the CCP

3) Strategic importance - key geographic asset. It lies in the first island chain, a line of US-aligned territories that can potentially restrict China's naval access to the Pacific. Control over Taiwan gives China more leverage over sea lanes critical to global trade and security influence in East Asia

4) Economic, technology bonus points - Taiwan is a global tech powerhouse, especially in semiconductors. TSMC is the world's leading chipmaker.

5) Global power dynamics - unification would weaken US influence in the region

If you want a semi-serious example, check the "Taiwan #1" gaming video on YouTube for a taste of Chinese nationalism.

Read certain declarations by Chinese ambassadors in Europe for more serious nationalistic takes.

If you don't believe the rational I sketched, informed by analyses such as that by the Council of Foreign Relations[1], you can also learn more by reading directly from China's Mission in the EU about the China One principle: http://eu.china-mission.gov.cn/eng/more/20220812Taiwan/20220...

[1] https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/china-taiwan-relations-tens...

Output in the US has been flat for some time, while China has been on a steady rate of climb for several decades.

1. They are not high enough: Correct. Raise them more.

2. America's industrial supply chain is weak: That is why we need to bring the factories and resource extraction home.

3. We don't know how to make it: Perhaps we can steal the IP like China? We will figure it out.

4. The effective cost of labor in the US is higher than is looks: Then raise the tariffs higher.

5. We don't have the infrastructure to manufacture: You have to build it first, This will get cheaper and easier as we continue to bring industry home.

6. Made in America will take time: Blaming permitting time and Bureaucracy is a ridiculous excuse. The federal government can override all state and local requirements here. Its a choice to slow projects down.

7. Uncertainty and Complexity around tariffs: Democrats will have a hard time undoing progress if there is movement to reshore industry. War over Taiwan seems basically inevitable and this will harden resolve.

8. Most Americans are going to hate manufacturing: Most (well a very large and non-negligible percent of) Americans are going to loose their jobs because of AI. Most of us hate our jobs already, manufacturing will pay better. There are always endless service industries...like delivering food, if they do not like supervising a robotics controlled factory. It is disingenuous to imagine a return of American manufacturing without Huge AI and robotics investments. More factories will be lights out than the alternative. The jobs will be in servicing the robots, computer systems and quality control. We aren't talking Rosie the Riveter and the author must know it.

9. The labor does not exist to make good products: This is why there must be some discrimination over tariffs and why they should not be a simple even percentage. We can choose to bring back GPU manufacturing but pass on fast fashion. And during the process of negotiation we can give up those industries we do not want in exchange for support of a China embargo.

10. Automation will not save us: The author cannot imagine a world where manufacturing is not motivated by global trade. They fail to understand that it does not matter how much more productive China is when protectionist policies prevent trade. The goal is to get America to a place where it can manufacture everything it NEEDS on its own.

11. Americans file lawsuits: Good- this will increase the quality of goods we enjoy and we can get past the disposable foreign garbage that floods our markets. 12. enforcement will be uneven and manipulated: so get on board and help to improve it, stop undermining the attempt to help this country.

13. tariff policies structured in wrong way: Really not a terrible idea to have a disparity in tariff between input goods and finished goods but it is a half measure. We need the entire supply chain from resource harvesting, to tooling, to components to final finished manufacturing if we want to ensure national security in a world post-NATO.

14. Michael Jordan sucked at baseball: Was there serious consequence to MJ trying his hand at baseball? We got through COVID. We have survived massive supply disruptions and the market has been pumping as hard as ever. If you are not currently retired it is absurd to worry about fluctuations in the stock market. And if you are, you likely invested in companies that sold out America.

In other words, people like the idea of this, but no one actually wants this.

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/845917ed-41a5-449f-946f-70263adba...

As others have pointed out, this is not a contradiction. (Read their reply.)

However, the question of 'Do YOU want to work in a factory?' is heavily influenced by the fact that we don't see factory work as a high-paying career, or a career at all. Part of the solution to the factory problem is enhancing the value proposition for the employees.

I am ambivalent toward tariffs, but the idea is that if we make foreign products more expensive then the higher price of domestic goods becomes more palatable by comparison. If paying domestic workers more raises the price of domestic goods, and if people are willing to pay that price for whatever reason, you will start to see growth in manufacturing.

It's also silly to reject long-term goals simply because achieving them is difficult.

We ran this experiment for decades. It turns out that Americans are not willing to pay the higher prices, which led to our manufacturing consolidating around higher-value items.

This notion that we should move Americans from high-productivity jobs to lower-productivity jobs, and that such move will somehow enhance our prosperity is nutty. Lower-productivity jobs mean less income for workers, means less income in the system, means lower prosperity for all Americans. Moving tens of millions Americans to higher-productivity jobs while maintaining relatively low unemployment has to be seen as one of the economic success stories of the modern age.

Separately, Americans do not feel like this happened. That's a different discussion, about allocation of wealth. Our poorest states have higher GDPs per capita than many "rich" western EU countries. Mississippi has a higher GDP per capita than the UK. The difference is that the US has designed a system where every citizen lives a precarious existence, potentially a few months from destitution while other rich countries have not done that. We are allowed to make different choices in the US if we don't like this outcome.

Why would you need to pay them more? Remove their legal ability to organize, cripple their social safety net, and they will either work or die.

I'm not advocating for that, but it does seem to be the path we're deliberately taking.

From the piece: "The people most excited about this new tariff policy tend to be those who’ve never actually made anything, because if you have, you’d know how hard the work is."

[1] https://www.agriculturedive.com/news/agriculture-shifts-farm...

[2] https://www.terrainag.com/insights/examining-the-economic-cr...

[3] https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-labor

[4] https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/agriculture/our-insights...

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6q_BE5KPp18

[6] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/11/there-are-a-...

I do find it interesting that a lot of these same people are against raising the minimum wage because "it will bankrupt all the businesses" but somehow think that bringing manufacturing for the goods they buy back to the US won't do the same. At best, going from off-shore labor costs of say $15/day to $15/hour (minimum for US workers) is an 8x multiplier and will somehow magically work but a 1.5 multiplier on minimum wage is just untenable for any business.

Honestly, it is mostly an emotional response around "fairness". They don't want others getting a "raise" when they don't "deserve it". However, everything they get is 1000% deserved. The greatest trick the rich ever pulled was convincing the middle class that all their woes are the fault of the poor. The political comic of "That foreigner wants your cookie!" captures it pretty well (imo).

It's not much different than how a young child will blame anyone else for something that's gone wrong / they got caught doing. Maybe our society should do a better job promoting responsibility and allowing parents to offer oppertunities for children to be responsible; instead of infantalizing everyone entirely until some magical number has passed and suddenly they're an adult who was never previously empowered to be responsible.

Currently less than 20% of Americans work in factories. All those 80% need to want is that the 20% of people who want to work in factories can do so.

From TFA:

> When I first went to China as a naive 24 year old, I told my supplier I was going to “work a day in his factory!” I lasted 4 hours.

Very soon we'll be forced to make shoes and other things behind bars. No trial needed, just indefinite detention.

"But if factory wages are good then products will be expensive"

No, because the wages for the factory worker is less than 1% of a products shelf price.

And then I remembered, oh yeah, the Great Depression happened when he was young and he was let go from his bank job — the bank folded. When the decent paying factory job at an auto assembly plant eventually came along he probably jumped at it.

Its always easy to expect other people to make sacrifices working these jobs, while imagining you and your kids working office desk jobs.

I absolutely would work a factory job if it paid 100k+ and meant owning a home someday.

Instead I got 100k student loans and make 60k at a desk and I'll never have a life outside of work because I simply can't afford it.

I'll be 35 this year after 12 years of working and just starting to have a positive net worth.

American dream my ass.

That is not going to happen.

People want to be sure that their success is protected and they love telling other people what they should do.

I agree with that sentiment. I would be better off if more of you, just not me, worked in factories instead of trying to compete with me for my non-factory work.

1. https://www.youtube.com/embed/pW-SOdj4Kkk

2. http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...

It's hard to quantify. E.g. the CHIPS act is a strategic thing in case TSMC is disrupted for some reason. How valuable is insurance? How much useful work (and skill) do you ship overseas in exchange for promissory notes[0]?

[0] https://www.grumpy-economist.com/p/tariffs-saving-and-invest...

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/u/unskilled-labor.asp

Working as a doctor takes 10 years of higher education on top of secondary school.

Calling McDonald's "unskilled labor" seems quite fair to me.

That doesn’t mean people who work jobs in the former category deserve ridicule or disrespect. But the distinction is important because finding workers to fill an unskilled role is just a matter of finding said able-bodied person, while for the latter you need some kind of system of education, training and/or apprenticeship (either explicitly or effectively) to be set up and functioning to even have an industry that depends on those jobs.

Not everything is some silly game of political fighting through language. Some things we actually need terms distinguishing “this” from “that” so we can have real world conversations about them.

Tech isn't winding down; tech, as the sector that draws the most investment based on long-term development, had the biggest response to tight monetary policy designed to slow the entire economy down, but that response demonstrates that tech is where most of the marginal dollar goes.

> Manufacturing could prepare us for the next wave, whatever that might be.

Trying to work our way down the raw materials -> manufacturing -> finance/services ladder that countries usually try to work their way up for maximum prosperity in globalized trade isn't going to prepare us for anything other than lasting economic decline. And why would “manufacturing”—which you can't build generically, but only by specific, usually impossible to reallocate to a different use that isn't closely similar without sacrificing most of the value, major capital investments in particular subareas of manufacturing, prepare us for anything else even ignoring that we’d have to regress to do it?

The American production machine (aka manufacturing) is a major component of what won WWII.

Just because we ended the era of cheap money to try and stop runaway inflation doesn't mean the tech boom is winding down.

Look at everything that's happening with gene editing, in physics, with the jwst, with LLMs and robotics and computer vision, with alt energy sources, batteries, in material sciences, etc.

I mean this is such a myopic take. We are in just now in an era where people are now capable of finding needles in needlestacks.

You are confusing easily manipulated economic vibes that feel bad right now with the rapid approach of a complete overhaul of the human experience.

The U.S. has basically supported the strip mining of our economy by value sucking predatory investment firms. There is a reason why China have more robotics per capita in their factories than we do and it has to do with a complete failure in strategic thinking, long term planning and ultimately a hatred for our youth.

These are tidal waves compared to the tech boom tsunami we experienced in the last 25+ years: enabling rapid communication of every human on the planet and democratizing access (anyone can create a app/website/etc to enable other people to communicate/make money/etc).

> where people are now capable of finding needles in needlestacks

Yes, exactly. all that is left is going after hard problems that impact the long tail.

I haven't met any injection molding shops in the US that do a huge amount of specialty parts like toys. The industry tries to get as many medical device jobs as possible.

Of course, the 3d printers themselves are probably being made in China.

Who cares about defense capabilities 10 or 50 years down the line? Lots of people in West had a good run outsourcing everything. But once there's nothing else to outsource and IP to sell... It's not gonna be pretty.

Next generations in West will have to work very hard to recover from this mess.

The problem with agriculture is you can't really „ramp up“ it on a whim. That's why you need to keep it going and you can't just kick start your food production when outside suppliers start to blackmail you.

Sure. But how much tax money do you want to throw at entire industries to hide the basic fact that wages are lower elsewhere? Where do you want to take the labor away from? And where do you draw the essential/wasted subsidies boundary line?

Because in my view, Trump tariffs just ignore those very basic questions and don't even attempt to answer them.

It's perfectly reasonable IMO to throw 20 billion a year to agriculture, because that is a very essential sector. But doing the same for the textile industry? Ore/Oil refining? Steelworks? Chemical plants?

I don't wanna subsidies 20 non-essential industries just so that some former fast-food worker can assemble overpriced shoes inside the US (and labor demand from all those industries would drive up wages/costs in the fast-food sector, too, thanks to the Baumol effect).

I'm not against nurturing some important local industries, but Trump tariffs are a complete failure at achieving that IMO.

IMO the global economy eventually self-levels. Either you go up the chain so far that you eventually go off the rails by being unable to make basic stuff. And eventually being eaten by more hungry people with the basic skills. Or you keep yourself down by forcing yourself to not loose basic skills. Former gives you a short moment of glory with a high price for future generations. Later forces people to be more ascetic if that's the right word.

But I don't see the point in throwing billions of dollars from taxes at this industry just to make all those shoes here-- that is stupid (because the jobs that would create are not gonna be very desirable, they are gonna drive up costs all over by competing for labor, and that kind of protectionism is gonna invite retaliation).

The situation is very similar for a lot of industries.

I also think it is extremely unhealthy to baby an industry long-term by isolating it from competition like this.

I'd be totally on board if there was like 20% unemployment in the US, and this was a short term plan to give those people work/income.

But that's not it. This is in my view really bad policy driven by emotional arguments, and actual numbers, expected outcomes and historical precedent (for "I know better than market economies what ought to be produced") all heavily weight against this.

I'm very confident right now that the whole "20%ish tariffs for everyone to balance trade deficit with everyone" approach is gonna be walked back or lead to abysmal outcomes, and people should have realized that from the start.

High profits and jobs people want also don't exactly go hand-in-hand.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma

Any discussion of "bringing back manufacturing" that doesn't mention government spending or social programs to educate and upskill the population is not genuine. The current leadership are fools and ideologs who will only hasten the decline, which might actually be better globally if it lowers emissions. Time will tell I guess.

It's still far from played out, but right now they're solidly on the road to Russia 2.0, with decades-long trends pointing that way.

Very graceful.

Edit: You could probably even include the current Ukraine shindig and my statement would still hold.

In absolute terms it's one of the harshest death tolls in the last decades. It's far from a joke. Though for completeness, AIDS was also going on there and it's hard to tell from the stats the proportion of impact

What the US got in return was cheap goods and a whole lot of debt. What the world got was stability. The US is no longer interested in subsidizing the global order.

The current discussion re: “bringing back manufacturing” is making the mistake that everyone always makes when Trump is involved: taking him at his word. The point isn’t to bring back all manufacturing. The point is to profit off of imports. Some manufacturing will return — whatever is high value added and benefits primary from cheap shipping internally - but nobody thinks that Americans are going to sew t-shirts.

Also, those who are looking for an American decline as comeuppance for being unkind to allies are going to be sorely disappointed. The US has everything it needs to be self sufficient, and no matter how batshit crazy the leadership is, it’s still — still — the safest place to park capital, still the largest consumer market by far (more than twice China), has a stable demographic and a middle class country to its south that brings in lower cost workers as needed. Not to mention being totally energy independent, bordered on two sides by oceans and with more potential port coastline than the rest of the world combined… and also holding the virtually all of the world's supply of high-purity quartz, which is a requirement for semiconductor production.

This theory doesn't really explain what was going on at tremendous expense in Iraq, Afghanistan or even all those years ago in Vietnam.

If there is a decline, I expect it to be in internal security and the transition from high-trust to low-trust society.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...

https://www.hudsonbaycapital.com/documents/FG/hudsonbay/rese...

It's a really complicated manoeuvre even if you're not actively trying to shoot yourself in the foot. Eg Domestic factors (automation, corporate offshoring decisions, etc) also contributed to manufacturing job loss. A weaker dollar would probably help, but isn't a silver bullet.

The main article for this post goes into this in a lot of detail.

I mean, we have half of Africa shooting themselves in the foot over and over for our own benefit. And every time it looks like an African nation is going to do something about it, some counter-military force appears out of nowhere (with US arms?) and some important political heads are assassinated.

This isn't a conspiracy theory, either. The destabilization of world governments done by our government to our benefit is well recorded.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_imperialism#Strategy

Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Guam, American Samoa, are locations that are directly under US control. The entire western hemisphere is within our sphere of control, and a huge chunk of the planet was either directly aligned with us (EU, AUS/UK) or was compliant for fear of regime change.

The country itself was founded on the destruction of dozens of civilizations, a victory so total you don't even consider it as part of US imperial conquest. I can't believe I even have to explain this to people on here my God.

They each had longer runs than we’ve had.

My pet theory is lead. From 1950 to 1980 we birthed a leaded generation [1]. Today, up to 60% of American voters were born before 1975 [2]. (Voters born between 1950 and 1980 came into the majority in the 1990s and should fall into the minority by 2028, but only barely. So in summary: Iraq War, Financial Crisis, Covid and Trump 47. It won’t be until the 2040s when truly unleaded voters, those born after 2000, command a majority.)

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35254913/#&gid=article-figur...

[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/04/09/the-changing...

China and others are clearly demonstrating the power of capitalism with state support. The US is too busy infighting and keeping capitalism and politics separate (small government, let the market decide etc). You wouldn't find enough employees that want to work in manufacturing; you'd need millions to even try and get close to what China is doing.

Now I'm not actually OK with what China is doing, the paragraphs about worker conditions were quite telling. But I will recognize that it gives them the upper hand in manufacturing that the US hasn't had since the 50's.

(meta: I'm gonna have to specify "the 1950's soon" don't I?)

The tariffs most certainly will dissipate but we can't discount the chance that they may be replaced with actual written in law voted on by congress and signed by the president taxes that have similar but much more durable effects.

Manufacturing and heavy industry really hates off-shoring. They only do it because the sum total of other policy makes it the only viable option. I can see them taking a decent haircut in pursuit of some longer term goal.

Political suicide to roll back tax breaks if they are primarily for the <$150k earners, like trump wants.

What tax breaks has he aimed at these people beyond some of the overtime and tipping (which is expected to only equate to about $2K)?

Instead:

>The largest tax cuts would accrue to the highest-income families, the Treasury said.

> Household in the top 5% — who earn more than $450,000 a year, roughly — are the “biggest winners,” according to a July 2024 analysis by the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. They’d get over 45% of the benefits of extending the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, it said.

> A Penn Wharton Budget Model analysis on the impacts of the broad Republican tax plan had a similar finding.

> The bottom 80% of income earners would get 29% of the total value of proposed tax cuts in 2026, according to the Wharton analysis, issued Thursday. The top 10% would get 56% of the value, it said.

I don't know what news source you trust, but if you google it, he stated it back in March.

What he says is almost irrelevant to what he actually does most of the time. He 'says' he wants to lower taxes on the lower income folks, but the tax bill he actually passed was essentially a handout to wealthy and businesses. He 'says' he wants to bring back manufacturing, but the reality is his tariff actions do nothing of the sort.

> According to Lutnick’s interview with CBS News, Trump’s tax policy goal is to remove federal income taxes for individuals earning under $150,000 annually.

(omitted some of the other bullet points around tariff funding and tip exemption)

> While Lutnick later walked back the certainty of these plans, he clarified that the proposal is aspirational and depends on the ability to balance the federal budget.

I have serious doubts about the likelihood of a Trump proposal that even his Commerce Secretary says are "aspirational". Then again, the other part of Trump is that sometimes he does whatever he wants, regardless of what his Secretaries have said or known (witness the tariffs being paused mid hearing, leading to a Republican politician frantically swiping at his iPad in the middle of his testimony about the value of keeping the tariffs despite widespread market uncertainty).

To compete with that the entire pipeline from raw materials through components and final product needs to be reproduced and its taken China 40+ years to build up to this capacity and capability.

I think its something more countries should consider and do for certain pipelines but we are in a world with vast international trade and the winner(cheapest) takes most of the trade so whatever it is needs to be worth while within country.

2. Profits.

3. Refined products can be exported to countries that don't have refinement capabilities. Not just the US and China. This gives Canada better trade leverage.

4. Security. A big one that's emerged in the last few weeks.

I don't see either Poilievre or Carney talking about this which is disappointing but not unexpected.

Canada and the US have been to court multiple times over NAFTA violations (sometimes Canada is at fault admittedly).

https://www.international.gc.ca/trade-agreements-accords-com...

The incredible part is USA exported that entire sector to China.

> Chinese workers work longer hours more happily and they’re physically faster with their hands; they can do things that American labor can’t. It’s years of accumulated skill, but it’s also a culture that is oriented around hard work and education that the United States no longer has. In China, there are no people who are too fat to work. The workers don’t storm off midshift, never to return to their job. You don’t have people who insist on being paid in cash so that they can keep their disability payments, while they do acrobatics on the factory floor that the non-disabled workers cannot do.

It's an actual joke to present something with such a derogatory view of the median American worker with no data to back it up. Most of America's "labor class" is in fact Mexican, the country with the highest annual hours worked per year. Secondly hours worked does not relate directly to productivity. American workers are the most productive in the world. [1]

More importantly, _we don't manufacture like this anymore, even in China_. Doing "acrobatics" on the factory floor is now obsolete. Much of what's said here fails to acknowledge that we would _not_ build our supply chains the same way as China does. China had a surplus of human labor (one that's facing an impending demographic crisis) and so used human labor in ways modern western countries would not and do not.[2]

[1] https://www.weforum.org/stories/2018/01/the-countries-where-... [2] https://ifr.org/ifr-press-releases/news/global-robotics-race...

Reproducing these supply chains is more possible than this article states. Doing it via destroying our economy however will not work.

Do we sacrifice a democracy for the dollar? If not, is our economy annihilated? We have no credible alternative to reshoring for this reason alone.

I've got some bad news for you.

What democracy? Whose democracy?

Trump just blamed Zelensky for the war in Ukraine again. The entire administration keeps saying they will make Canada the 51st state and "destroy canada economically". They want to take Greenland by force. I don't think America cares much about democracy anymore, only dollars. China will take Taiwan and US will will keep buying chips like they always did.

Anymore? Arguably, the US never did. Ask, for example, the people living in Caribbean or Latin American countries what happened when they elected leaders that the US disliked.

Or Iran. Or Italy. Or Congo. And so on.

Or ask the Indonesians about the mass killings in their country in 1965-1966, supported by the US. Around 500,000 people died, though some estimates put the number of deaths at 1,000,000. Ask the Filipinos about how the US propped up their military dictatorship back in the 1970s-1980s.

I could keep going, but I think you get the point. The US has never been sincerely interested in democracy -- only strategically. The illusion that the US cared about democracy was a primarily Western luxury.

I don't think it's a good idea to assign Trump's beliefs, or those of his administration, to America as a whole. Any more, frankly, than it's a good idea to assign those of his opposition to the country as a whole.

The leadership is not the country.

If that Russia equivalent invades an Ukraine equivalent, despite both instances being considered unthinkably crazy, what are we going to do? Or, what will China do, to us?

The tldr of that post is: - To be really good at making robots, you need to iterate fast

- To iterate fast, you need all component manufacturers nearby (or you’ll be wasting weeks shipping parts from somewhere else)

- To be really competitive at manufacturing, you need to be good at robotics.

- If you’re missing all of these pieces, it will be hard to catch up with (say) China, which has been exponentially growing in every possible aspect of manufacturing for decades. Not only do we not have strong manufacturing, but we don’t have strong robotics companies, don’t have many of our own robotics components companies, and don’t even have much in terms of raw materials. Whereas China has been investing heavily in every single one of these areas.

Bringing manufacturing back means investing in all aspects of the supply chains which lead to technical innovation in manufacturing, which is really hard to do when the supply chain is set up to pull from our current competitor.

I agree with just about everything in the blog post, except, the underlying Michael Jordan baseball analogy example. Does the analogy hold if we swap Michael Jordan for let's say... Bo Jackson? He really was very good at a number of sports before his hip injury.

The US needs to bring back manufacturing for strategic reasons and in strategic areas.

And it needs to have the capability to scale up manufacturing in response to emergencies.

But also, importantly, the US doesn't need to do this by onshoring all manufacturing. Near shoring and friend shoring will have to be extremely important components of adding these capabilities, and unfortunately, teh actions the US is taking will likely hurt nearshoring and friendshoring and will end up making the US less strategically capable in manufacturing even if it's able to reshore a significant amount of manufacturing.

Manufacturing is skilled, well-paid labor that requires commitment, attention, and care. That is why there's a shortage of labor--not because of wages.

In theory. In practice the numbers are way lower.

As some one who has done quite a big time in India IT services firms, have lots of war stories, our Delivery manager would often tell us if US managers only knew adjusted for regular all nighters, whole week on-call hell weeks. Development phases where teams would be working days at stretch in office. The actual per hour rate of an engineer in India is at best $1 - $5 an hour. You just can't bill the customer that way.

Only reason why this even works is India is still poor and people work for anything.

Im sure, adjust for everything(in real practice) manufacturing hourly wages in China aren't all that different and wouldn't be surprised if they are at something like $1 per hour, or something such.

Americans have little idea how much affluence and luxury their ordinary citizen has. Most of the world would do anything even to be poor in the US.

Fair enough to say nobody in the US is signing up to work a hellish factory job for $1/hr anytime soon.

In the 1990s there were numerous manufacturing plants in the US (two on the South Hill of Ithaca alone) that were found to be contaminated with solvents like

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichloroethylene

People thought it was great stuff, you wouldn't believe how hard it is to get cutting grease off things after you turn them on a lathe and vapor de-greasing makes it go away just like that.

China has some of the most advanced agriculture on the planet including a "vertical farm" that can sell straw mushrooms for about $2 a pack where they are super-proud that humans only touch them with a forklift. (Contrast that to the labor-intensive mushroom farms of Pennsylvania where somebody cuts each one with a knife.)

We are pretty omnivorous (I think mealworms start with "meal") and my obsession with anime and Japan has turned into serious sinophilia but my wife and I are hesitant to eat "Chinese Food" grown in China because of widespread environment contamination, I mean they've been building up heavy metal stocks ever since Emperor Qin Shi Huang poisoned himself with mercury.

It used to be a thing that people were importing massive quantities of baby formula to China because they didn't trust locally manufactured stuff.

You know sinophilia means "love of China", and that anime and Japan are not Chinese, right?

Yes, but they're culturally related. Anywhere where people write with Chinese characters or used to write with Chinese characters has legends about nine-tailed foxes, for instance. The intelligentsia had access to Chinese literature and this diffused into the public imagination. [1]

For me it started out with being willing to enjoy media in an unfamiliar language (first Japanese) that gradually became familiar. Then playing the Japanese game Dynasty Warriors that got me thinking about the Romance of the Three Kingdoms and about the characters and the place names and other old Chinese stories like Journey to the West and pretty soon I am enjoying Chinese pop culture about old stories and new stories of the fantastic and even learning some Chinese, getting curious about Chinese mobile games that aren't known at all in the west because Chinese people cosplay as characters from them, etc. (At the university where I work I overhear conversations in Chinese almost every day)

Yes, Japan is a different culture which I still enjoy and appreciate, but for me it was also a gateway to China. [2] I was an anime fan for 30 years but in the last 3 years I've had the same kind of giddy feelings for Chinese pop culture that I had about anime at the beginning and of course that means I'm going to buy a whole fish and eat it with my family because my son's Chinese friend suggests it.

Lately I've been playing the Japanese game Dynasty Warriors Origins which has both Chinese and English voices and find it strange on one hand to hear legendary Chinese heroes speaking Japanese which I mostly understand and then listen intently to the Chinese which to me is still a wall of unfamiliar syllables where I struggle to pick out proper names and an occasional word or phrase -- but I have a great time trying!

[1] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinosphere

[2] ... and it goes the other way, China's pop culture is inspired by Japan (I think it's funny that many Chinese games like Azur Lane use Japanese voices in the west because they know the kind of person likely to play that kind of game knows phrases like suki da! and has an emotional feel for Japanese even if they aren't fluent in it)

He's been telling me this, for years. It's not a secret. The information has been out there, for ages. I'm surprised that the administration didn't understand this.

Why would you assume they don't understand? Every time they're questioned about the tariffs the narrative shifts. We have a trade deficit, we're getting ripped off, we want to bring back domestic manufacturing jobs, we'll automate them with robotics and AI, we're playing hardball to negotiate a better trade deal and get rid of fentanyl, it's a matter of national security, an economic emergency, the dollar is overvalued.

You cannot trust a word from them. If you want to understand why they're doing something you must look only at incentives and outcomes. My current analysis is that there's some internal conflict, but the overall push for tariffs comes from a desire to crash the economy and use the downturn to consolidate wealth and power.

Given the timescale any solution will require cooperation across political parties. You can’t start something that will get undone in four years.

Then accept it won’t make much difference to the inhabitants of bumfuck USA. Automation is what took their jobs.

Start at the top of the food chain and gradually work down. If America can make cars but not car tyres then implement gradually increasing tariffs on imported tyres. 1% this year, 2% next and so on. Pretty soon you have a car tyre industry again.

Know when to stop, just like it doesn’t make sense for a banker to clean their own house it doesn’t make sense for a rich country to be making tee shirts.

Of course this won’t happen because of the American political system.

They’re an environmental nightmare and very, very thin margins.

>They’re an environmental nightmare and very, very thin margins.

Which is an argument for consuming less tyres. It doesn't really have much to do with where you make them other than perhaps it is better to make them in a country with stronger environmental regulations.

If automation took those jobs then why aren't all those automated factories in USA?

By acting against China that means I applaud moving manufacturing to Vietnam. I want to help Botswana grow - and I wish there were more countries in Africa I could name that seem to be on a good path (I cannot name the majority of countries in Africa, the ones I can are because they are in the news for bad things happening. I'm not even sure Botswana - I mostly know about them because last time I brought up Africa someone from there said their country was an exception).

Overall the world is better off with a lot of trade. Comparative advantage is real. There are things I can do that I don't want to become good at. However we also need to be aware that not everyone in the world is the friend of freedom and some must be cut off lest they grow. Nobody is perfect though, so you can't cut off everyone.

(Source - worked in int'l remittances w/ African receiving countries)

it is a hard problem

I see exactly zero point in repeating the example of China again. Why would the outcome be different? Vietnam is another Communist pseudo-dictatorship. Why is this one so different that it won't support Russia?

Vietnam has been at war with China in the recent past. Today China is claiming seas that the US and internal law both call Vietnam's territorial waters - though currently they are not at war. Thus even if Vietnam doesn't move in a good direction, just keeping them where they are (as opposed to supporting China) is useful if only because all indications today are China will start a war in the future. (again nobody knows if they will, but they are preparing as if they will)

Nothing prevents anyone from making moves 20 years from now that are bad. All we can do today is encourage those who seem to be moving for the better. We have no clue how things will turn out. Even when we make what in hindsight now looks like a bad decision, we have no idea how it would have been if we had done something different.

Just like China did? They had a whole phase of economic liberalization and opening trade.

>Nothing prevents anyone from making moves 20 years from now that are bad.

Vietnam is literally another communist pseudo-dictatorship. Their place in the world is obviously far more ambiguous than that of e.g. England. The idea of shifting manufacturing to Vietnam because you do not like the positions of China is just absurd.

>All we can do today is encourage those who seem to be moving for the better.

Why should the US not focus on supporting long term allies who aren't communist single party states?

we should of course support most of europe which usualy has better government. Likewise the other countries in America - both north and south. And so on for anywhere else we can find friends. I an not a Trump fan even if once in a while he does something I support

As has happened with China? When they opened up trade and became part of a global economy their nationalistic ambitions stopped and they ceased to support dictatorships like Russia. Also their political system opened up and they morphed from a uniparty communist country to a liberal democracy. Oh wait, the exact opposite happened on all accounts.

You didn't answer my question. Why would Vietnam be any different? Why should the US help build their economy so that they can do the exact same thing as China did. Your theory of how this works is disproven by reality. You can not make a country a liberal democracy by opening up trade with them. It failed with China, it failed with Russia.

It worked with South Korea, and Taiwan. (Japan and Germany, but they were on the losing side of a war with us which is a confounding factor). It is by no means perfect, but I've yet to see anyone suggest something else that has any chance of working.

Japan and Germany did not get convinced by the virtues of liberal democracy and free trade. They were both forcibly converted under US occupation.

and

last time I brought up Africa someone from there said their country was an exception

Making what are essentially strategic decisions in this "shoot from the hip" fashion is what lands us repeatedly in these situations. By way of illustration, let me try one from the 1980's out on you:

"By acting against Iran that means I applaud men like Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden"

(In fairness to the americans who made that colossal blunder, I'll assume that, to them, it seemed a good idea at the time. They were simply not long term thinkers. So no one ever asked, "Hmm, what comes next though?")

We, as a people, need to start thinking a bit further ahead than the ends of our noses.

Bloc building. Europe has countries which do lots of manufacturing. Use those to gradually reduce reliance on China by slowly restricting Chinese access to the Bloc market and build up supply chains inside the Bloc.

Making everything in the US can not be done without a very severe decline in living standards.

>Is doing nothing acceptable?

How high is your desire to learn Chinese?

If the US sees it as a threat and wants to do something it should maybe look to what China has done. Because tbh what Trump did re Tariffs is pretty close to "nothing" all things considered.

They won't though because as soon as you have someone saying "look, let's just put together a staged plan so that in, say, five years we'll produce X% more electronics domestically..." you'll have a Republican shrieking about "five year plans" and how the USA is becoming communist

Trump's tariffs would theoretically rebalance trade on the long term, albeit in a highly destructive manner. But the more diplomatic solutions as proposed by other commentators like Catherine Tai, Yanis Varoufakis or Michael Pettis would be the introduction of capital controls to stem the demand for US treasuries, or better, the reintroduction of Keynes' proposal of the International Clearing Union back in 1945. The ICU's role would be to actively balance global trade surpluses via the international currency bancor, of which would have fixed control of FX rates rather than relying on FX markets to punish surplus nations and help deficit nations respectively. As for nations outside the Union, they would just get treated similar to the USSR.

Curious why you are surprised at incompetence being unable to understand complexity.

This has been a pretty sobering reminder to anyone that, in fact, there is no such thing.

Fix health care - socialism isn't the only answer despite what many hear will say.

Fix school - it shouldn't be all sit at your desk but that is what we get. Bring back gym class. Make kids get practical experience building the things they designed (that is shop class). Math could be fun - but most teachers don't believe it themselves, and so they haven't a hope of passing that on to students.

You've said re healthcare that "socialism isn't the answer" - assuming you mean "I don't want a single-payer or free-at-the-point-of-use system" then I'm not sure what is the answer then. They've currently got some of the worst health outcomes on the planet despite spending amongst the most per-capita. They can either try more privatisation or maybe give something like Medicare For All a shot...

And re "fix school" you seem to suggest that shop class needs to be more widespread and maths teachers just need to be more enthusiastic? If the idea is to give kids more options then things like making sure that there are widely available apprenticeship programs and technical colleges to develop these skills, as well as strong (dare I say, union) jobs waiting for them when they complete their training.

And re maths teachers, if it's anything like the UK I suspect that teachers are being expected to do more with less at every stage of schooling. They handle more kids per class with fewer teaching assistants available. They need to handle more diverse lessons than before because there are insufficient PE teachers, Music teachers, Drama teachers etc). They're having a tougher time with kids behaviourally due to the rise of social media and a broader economic decline that causes a whole host of social issues that end up being schools' problem. Having poor school system is a symptom of greater societal problems, you don't fix schools without solving those (sidenote: you also don't solve those by pointing the finger at vulnerable communities like immigrants and LGBTQ+). Telling maths teachers to be a bit more enthusiastic doesn't fix any of that, it just makes the maths teachers hate their job a bit more.

i'm not suggesting enthusiastic math teachers is all we need: lack of enthusism is a sympton of a problem but fixing symptoms isn't enough. Likewise I'm not sure shop class is the answer - but schools are leaving a lot of people out by not having them.

the us has a great school system overall but it needs to be better.

I dunno what to tell you man, it sounds like you're a true believer on this. I reckon everyone who has undergone a healthcare bankruptcy (a uniquely American thing, btw) or could not get treated be cause they couldn't afford it was a true believer before they were let down.

It is really of no consequence to me which you choose, I don't live there and it's looking likely I'll probably skip even visiting let alone consider moving there in future.

I am not desputing that we spend far too much for what we get. I am desputing the solution.

Healthcare and schools are both important and hard problems. Most people with ideas have bad ideas IMHO.

My friend is watching his business get ready to die. His wife is still the CEO, and she's losing her shit. They're not alone. There's thousands and thousands of similar operations, all over the US, that will have to shut down, if something doesn't give.

I guess the mega-rich oligarchs think this is great, but they don't employ the majority of Americans.

I wonder where they were on election day, when they had a choice. The record of business owners voting D is .. not great.

That's the optimistic POV at least imo.

Someone may be able to pay workers $300/month and make them work the "996 working hour system"[1], but if they then have to mark up the end product by 100%, the disparity between local and global price to consumers narrows.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system

No.

The shareholder class underestimates it.

A lot of Americans realize that it's going to be hard, which is why we should have made an example out of the first guy to profit off of sending manufacturing off to the shores of a geopolitical rival.

America suffers from a flattened income curve. There are many many more people earning $100k+ today than in 1960 (inflation adjusted). America has an envy problem first, equality problem second, spoiled child problem third.

You can cut out the top 10% of earners in the country and it still wouldn't do much to change the situation for those in the <60% earning percentiles.

To put it short; the reason you cannot afford a home isn't because of Bezos, Musk, and Blakrock. It's because the other bidders have STEM masters degrees and dual income high paying jobs, and probably a few hints of financial literacy thrown in too.

When one person holds the wealth equivalent to the total yearly economic output of a mid-sized American metropolitan area, yes, it's going to introduce distortions, even if only because the people who actually do the labor under those people are being paid less in order to better fund the equities that make up the wealth of that person.

And that's before getting into the other problems with the housing supply.

No, that's where you have it backwards they are being paid more. That's the exact reason why they are buying that house when you say "who the fuck can afford that".

Ironically, they are also the ones being exploited the most by the top 1%.

An amazon warehouse sorter will never create or do anything that makes amazon much more money than what they are paid. They get $18/hr for producing $21/hr of value, doing the same static task all day everyday. Amazons "profit margin" on these workers is almost nothing.

The lead cloud architect though gets paid $350k/yr, but can design a single change that will make amazon $30-40 million/yr. The profit margin on them is insane. And they are the ones outbidding everyday people on things, driving up costs.

Back 60 years ago, everyone was much more clumped around the same (lower) income, so the houses where smaller and the prices more amenable to more people.

Unless we're just here to repeat canards from the 1990s given by financiers which explained why it was good to shut down the main employers for entire towns.

There are localized problems - and it's all very similar to the post-Thatcher UK - but you cannot be serious in imagining that employment would magically return to the exact spots it left. In fact that's one of the sub-problems OP talks about: so you want a US Shenzen. Where are you going to put it?

(UK equivalent: we're discussing keeping Scunthorpe blast furnaces open, so that we can have a "secure" supply of "domestic" steel .. made entirely from imported ingredients. Because the mines the plant was built to refine are empty)

Areas gutted, jobs lost and some lesser number of jobs with less benefits and pay created elsewhere.

So many political ideas seem to only be allowed to be discussed if you can add a garnish of racism or xenophobia to them.

Whereas when states that aren't behaving that way lose jobs, factories and industries to Mexico or China they're all "hey WTF" over it because they actually cared and didn't want that economic activity driven off.

a generation of kids that never lost all their work because they didn't hit ctrl+s at the correct moment is now trying to run things

What if a war erupts? Suddenly the US cannot produce a lot of essential stuff - I think Covid was a good example of that happening.

Of course the question is can this be done and what will be the price if so.

I believe we should scale up manufacturing in the US for different reasons.

But I'm also a realist. If war erupts between China and the US, then anyone in the US or China still alive 4 weeks after the start of hostilities will have more pressing concerns than worrying about where things are manufactured. Again, just the reality.

We shouldn't plan on the basis of end of the world scenarios. Rather we should plan on the assumption that we want to confer maximum benefit on the US in likely non-apocalyptic future timelines.

Observationally I fear there is a lack of nuance in discussing "bringing back manufacturing" (really re-expanding) to the U.S.

I fear the lack of nuance is due to bias based on not liking the guy in the red tie or the other guy that's in a blue tie so there's just blinders about whether or not a particular policy will achieve a particular stated goal.

The next thing I see is it just lumping manufacturing all into one bucket.

Take manufacturing smartphones. Because the U.S. doesn't assemble iPhones the U.S. appears to be bad at manufacturing? No, I think it's just not good at assembling iPhones.

Just looking at numbers, sure the U.S. steel production is dwarfed by China but globally it's still a major producer. And there's no discussion of quality.

Look at oil & gas. I'm pretty sure the U.S. both produces the raw material and refined product at a significant amount globally.

Plastic manufacturing. I toured a bottle manufacturing plant last summer. It's primary a customer was Limited Brands (Victoria Secret)

It built molds. It upgraded factory equipment roughly every 8 years (increasing production & reducing labor costs). Why was it able to manufacturer bottles in the U.S. even it's selling at a higher price? Because it's primary customer was essentially down the street. That is, apparently the cost to not import across the globe more than offset the cost to manufacture here.

I understand that's just an example and I'm trusting the information from that company was reliable.

But first I think we need to be honest about how much manufacturing is here and what type. Then discuss which policies are likely to achieve goals we may have in mind.

I think there's merit to manufacturing semiconductors and batteries here. But we need to also be aware that while manufacturing may bring jobs, an increasing amount of labor will be automated.

Seems much better to look seriously at the manufacturing we still have (as you say, it's considerable), where we can expand on that, and where we're lacking and need to rebuild.

Once the military needs are met, I don't care what we make, just that we need good jobs for people who are not able to handle more complex jobs.

If manufacturing becomes more efficient at using labor from automation that seems like that would lower the number of available jobs wouldn't it?

Unless consumption grows with the increase in output so that more factories are needed to meet the demand?

If you need 1000 cars and automation takes it down to 10 people from 100 people before, where are those 90 other people to get jobs?

Unless you grow the need for cars to 10000.

Simplification I know, but I am confused at how manufacturing is supposed to endlessly support a large "less-complex task" labor supply while simultaneously providing a good standard of living?

we also need education reform so that those people get the education needed to do more complex tasks insteade of droping out. What this looks like I don't really know.

"A technology that is '20 years away' will be 20 years away indefinitely."

https://m.xkcd.com/678/

Ah, those were the days.

Beyond the obvious skilled labor there’s supply chain network, maintenance, townships and supporting system around them.

And all of this needs human labor which is taken from somewhere else. How do you incentivize them? Just throwing money at the problem won’t solve it either. Because more often than not it’ll attract charlatans who will promise the sky, take the money and move away.

Where I live it is close to impossible to even get a Dog House approved and built.

The regulatory apparatus has to be rewired.

And then what happens when a new administration comes along 4-8 years down the line and decides to abandon some of those initiatives?

That has its own issues.

Not sure if it's still the case, but the Yangtze River used to be one of the most polluted water bodies on earth.

I'm not sure exactly what the correct middle ground looks like. I do know that there are signs of a good system.

There can be no bribes in the system. All permits must have a clearly defined fee that is small and clearly covers the inspectors salary and no more. The vast majority of cases when you want to build it should be 30 minutes from applying for the permit to it being granted. The rules are clearly written up and so it isn't hard to look up the law and write up a permit that cannot be refused.

There are only rarely hearings. You have the right to do what you want on your property. If your neighbor doesn't like it for the most part they should have bought your property so you couldn't. You don't however have the right to let pollution escape your property - pollution isn't just things like chemicals, but also noise. In rural areas, or around airports we also give you rights to sun, wind, and airspace - in cities though you don't get to demand your garden isn't shaded. You don't get to tell someone what color to paint to use. You don't get to force any amount of parking (either minimum of maximum). You can't enforce building space (square foot, height). You don't get to tell someone not to run a business. You do get to require fire code such that any fire will not spread to your building, and if you want fire protection (which if you don't have you need to ensure smoke from an accidental fire won't affect the neighbors) the fire department can demand some additional features.

There is probably a lot more, and the above isn't quite correct either, but it at least gives a place to state the debate from.

Robotics automation is a tradeoff to gain efficiency at the expense of flexibility, with a large upfront cost.

Of course there are a lot variables in the above. As time goes one automation gets better. You can buy cheap robots for some common operations, and a good engineer with good CAD can run various automated analysis to ensure fit and then export to the robot and build even a single part cheaper than the human - amortizing the cost of the robot over thousands of different single parts made this way. However as the widget gets more complex you reach the point where humans are needed. In some cases you just have humans to take the parts off of one machine and put them into the next, but it is still humans. We can automate even that, but often the robot to do that would cost more than a human for 10 years.

You're saying it like it's a bad thing.

Wouldn't it be better we have automation in the west, instead of sweat shops in the east?

There surely can't over a billion factory workers in a population of 1.4 billion. I looked up a population pyramid, and let's say 100% of the population aged 15-64 is employed at a factory job, that's ~70% of the population which is only 985 million people.

Sounds more like China has an exploited educated class/lack of oppurtunity than America has bad education.

Plenty of American workers can multiply in their heads and diligently perform there work. These people work in white collar jobs though, not in factories snapping together phone cases for 12 hours a day.

The author isn't totally wrong here, Americas bottom tier labor pool sucks, but they miss the bigger picture when comparing Chinese and American workers. China has skilled workers doing unskilled work. That's why they are so good. That's also why bringing manufacturing to the US will be so hard. Ain't nobody wanna get a degree so they can work a hot factory floor all day.

You're not going to sell the electorate on ".. and so we're going to make your life worse to compete with China", though.

Producing t-shirts, window fans, or toilet brushes is not high value work. The slice of value available to convert to currency for the worker is very tiny. So you end up having to play games with the economy which inevitably will blow up in someone's face. $60 t-shirts so we can pretend that the value in a t-shirt is much more than it is, so we artificially make t-shirt manufacturing competitive with, say, automobile manufacturing.

If it actually costs $60 (really more like $25 for made-in-America t-shirts I’ve bought) to make a t-shirt, with environmental regulations and human costs accounted for, then isn’t that the actual cost of a t-shirt? And they were artificially cheap at $10 for imported ones due to ignoring externalities? In that case, producing these simple products is actually a bit more valuable than you suggest.

Maybe a part of the $15 difference is in marketing.

You can run the numbers many different ways, but the important point is low value production is always about volume.

You can't put a monetary value on a t-shirt, because people will buy them anyways. Who is to say that t-shirts aren't $60? People only think that t-shirts are "low value" because we have offshored the labor and are used to very low prices. Meanwhile I bet most Americans can't even sew.

To paraphrase Kennedy: "We choose to [bring back manufacturing]. We choose to [bring back manufacturing] in this [or the next] decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."

We will do it, and we will win, whatever that means.

What in the modern situation suggests the comparable level of diligence in approach to the goal? The fact that both goals are far-reaching does not suggest comparability of approaches to the solution.

Changing the way society/economy operates is nowhere near "building X," whatever X is, whether it's something hard like a bomb or a collider.

> We will do it, and we will win, whatever that means.

How do you know that you haven't won already? Shouldn't the end goal be clear? In the case of Kennedy you're referring to, criteria and motivation were clear.

--

To a non-US bystander, your comment sounds like a no-thinking patriotic slogan. The details of the article are such that you can take any argument and bring it into discussion in order to show its irrelevance. But we're discussing slogans irrelevant to the situation and belief in the win, even though the win is not defined.

These are the questions people need to ask themselves. We both know what the answer is.

/sarcasm, or summary of other discourse in this thread?

Not too long ago it was "common knowledge" that the Chinese couldn't do advanced stuff, now it's "common knowledge" you can't do advanced stuff without the Chinese.

Nothing is impossible (at least in this area). If someone says it's impossible, they're really saying "I don't wanna do it."

Yes, America too could build out this capability by aggressively investing in it for a couple of decades.

> America would be better off if more Americans works in manufacturing than they do today. Agree 80%/Disagree 20%

> I would be better off if I worked in a factory instead of my current field of work. Agree 25%/Disagree 73%

[0] https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/2024-08/Globalizat...

BTW we don't talk enough about the gigantic loophole in the thirteenth amendment: Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. [emphasis added]

1 https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/flyover-country

I've got bad news for you, then. https://www.vox.com/2018/8/24/17768438/national-prison-strik...

This means that nobody will even start moving production back yet, they will pay lip-service, do the minimum to get along for this term, and hope for the best for the next one.

The wise thing to do is to at least make steps in the direction of on-shoring or at least make your plans and investments compatible with it.

On this basic intrinsic level we can’t match Chinese people. Like at its deepest it may be even deeper than culture. It could be genetic.

Honestly this is a real thing. You can witness it statistically in the states. Asians in universities and among the highest earning in the states as well.

I went to a high school in Cupertino that had majority Asians and you can see the work ethic with your own eyes.

Competition is extremely high initially, products will be ridiculed for being expensive and low quality. Companies will fail and go bankrupt, workers will suffer from that.

"Bringing manufacturing back" is a path of pain, not a way to fast economic success. There is no way to change that, tariffs will certainly not change it. Are Americans ready to leave their office job and work overtime in factories and engineering departments? No, automation will not do this for you, you are competing with a country which knows far more about automation than you do. To compete with them you need to be better and cheaper.

Lastly look how Germany struggles, right now. Their industry is in large parts starting to loose any competitive edge and will continue to do, unless very significant cuts are made somewhere. You can not keep the same living standards while someone is doing twice your work for half your costs.

The points are correct but rather than bring “all manufacturing back”, the goal should be to aim for an 80:20 or 70:30. And it will still take decades, but at least with a far better chance of success.

For companies that rely on a global supply chain, manufacturing and even raw materials should aim for mostly global but a guaranteed 20 to 30% local.

It’s one way to offset a real market problem, where unchecked market forces drives all production offshore or “nearshore; leaving the nation vulnerable to supply chain disruptions.

For essentials like grains, I’d even argue that the nation should opt for an 70:30. It’d be insane for us to offshore the majority of production.

Let me add some thoughts:

1) Capacity, not cost, is the main driver for nearshoring. All things being equal, a manufacturer would rather produce a product in the US than overseas. The cost of modern products is mostly parts & material, not labor. When you add logistcs expenses, the theoretical cost advantage of overseas vs local is not that great. Remember:the people on the other side of the border are capitalists too! They want to keep most of the surplus of nearshoring to themselves! The problem is that there simply is no capacity, both in facilities and especially in people.

2) What matters even more than capacity is the first derivative of capacity. In other words: how quickly can I spin up a new factory if I win a big deal? How quickly can I spin one down if the client goes away? How long will it take me to get a permit to connect my new factory to the highway? In the US, these costs and timelines are massive. Real estate, permitting, hiring. There is an order of magnitude difference here, in cost and time.

3) The labor problems are real. I don't want to disparage the american workers I work with, because they are amazing. Truly fantastic craftsmen. But they are hard to find. You'd be surprised how many people show up who can't read or can't read a tape measure. How hard it is to find people that want to work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. By contrast, in our overseas facility we have qualified workers literally showing up at our gate every day asking for work.

In other words, the root cause problems with american manufacturing are—-surprise surprise!--the same problems as with other parts of the US that are in decay:

- Disfunctional local government, especially around permitting, construction, housing and transit

- Disfunctional education & healthcare systems.

- A lack of strategic investment in infrastructure (rail, highways)

- A social safety net that is totally out of whack, with a high cost burden for employers & employees, with little to no immediate quality-of-life benefits for the working population

Tariffs solve exactly zero of those probems!

Even then, materials & parts dominate.

There seems to be no actual plan to actually bring back manufacturing (this would require different tariffs, loans, tax accounting rules, etc). And there seems to be no targeting of china (everywhere is being tariffed, allies and enemies, strategic suppliers and places with no trade with the USA etc)

But a person used to be able to graduate high school and get a job that could support a house with a yard, a car, a non-working spouse and children.

How we get that level of prosperity back? That's the people really want. Tariffs are simply a means to that end.

I wish people would stop writing articles about 100% criticizing tariffs and instead write articles 50% about criticizing tariffs and 50% brainstorming alternative solutions to achieve the same objective.

Given the improvements in cameras and computer vision and AI and robotics, there is no reason to think this won't accelerate. A long long time ago, labor was cheap and resources were expensive. Today, the opposite is true. Keynes predicted in the 50s that we would be working 15 hour work weeks. The reason he was "wrong" was that he underestimated our insatiable human greed. We all want more. Average house size in the 50s was < 1200 sq ft. Today it is 2400+. Each kid must have their own room that is 12x12!! (I grew up with 4 boys in a 10x10, lol). Each kid must get a new $200 bat each year for little league, etc. We want a higher standard of living for ourselves and our kids. This is understandable but we forget our role in the never ending chase.

Work to do what?

> But a person used to be able to graduate high school and get a job that could support a house with a yard, a car, a non-working spouse and children.

Why do you think this has anything to do with tariffs or manufacturing?

> How do we get that level of prosperity back?

Better pay for the jobs people actually work. Reducing inequality by preventing the richest 0.1% from capturing all the massive gains in wealth the US has seen over the past few decades. Removing regulations that prevent the country from building housing and therefore driving up housing costs. Switching to a healthcare model in nearly any of the comparable developed countries almost all of which deliver better healthcare at half the cost. Not expecting everyone to be able to live a completely unsustainable suburban life. Having the government support children's upbringing by paying for high quality education, instituting rules and regulations that require mandatory paid maternity/paternity leave, etc.

Lost of poorer countries manage to do this and more just fine. The US is far richer than most of those countries.

Very little of this has to do with manufacturing jobs falling from 18mm to 13mm.

Bring back manufacturing, and make the US economy work better for workers.

> Why do you think this has anything to do with tariffs or manufacturing?

Because usually the best-paying jobs were in factories, especially if you didn't have a college degree. A lot of towns in the Rust Belt were economically dependent on a local factory -- think cars or steelmaking. Often, part of the reason these factories were so high paying is because the jobs were unionized.

Companies moved overseas to save money on that expensive labor.

Now, companies have all the negotiation leverage. "If you unionize / demand higher pay, we'll move operations overseas" is a real and credible threat, as countless companies have already done it.

Tariffs are supposed to make operating overseas more expensive. Undo the economic justification for moving the jobs overseas and they will come back.

This takes away the companies' negotiation leverage. The "If you unionize / demand higher pay, we'll move operations overseas" threat isn't credible if everyone knows overseas manufacturing is super expensive due to tariffs.

I grew up in the Rust Belt and I'm old enough to properly remember when some of those factories were still operating. I saw with my own eyes what used to be a respectable blue-collar community decay into an economic wasteland. The drugs are getting bad. A lot of people have lost hope. Young ambitious folks see no reason to stay here.

The problem and its underlying factors are so obvious to me that I'm constantly amazed to see well-informed, intelligent people who don't seem to understand it.

Seemingly, this is going to magically happen? Where are the programs to make sure this does happen? Erecting tariffs is one thing, but having an actual plan and executing on said plan is another. So far, all I see is rising prices and looming threats of job cuts due to slow downs which stem from increased costs, and there is nothing coming to buffer that.

Let alone, the investment capital isn't moving in this direction. As of this writing, the general posture of the Republican donor class is 'wait and see how long the tariffs last' not 'lets invest in American industry again'

>Because usually the best-paying jobs were in factories, especially if you didn't have a college degree. A lot of towns in the Rust Belt were economically dependent on a local factory -- think cars or steelmaking. Often, part of the reason these factories were so high paying is because the jobs were unionized.

Emphasis mine. Do you believe that the modern Republican party is pro union? Do you really think they won't undermine organized labor even if jobs come back in some form? Even though the modern Democratic party have a spotty history on labor issues, the Republicans have shown for 40 years to be the anti labor party. They rarely - if ever - pass legislation that is pro labor. This administration isn't proving to be different in that regard either, and it wasn't different the first time around.

>I grew up in the Rust Belt and I'm old enough to properly remember when some of those factories were still operating. I saw with my own eyes what used to be a respectable blue-collar community decay into an economic wasteland.

So did I. Hallowed home town and all. One of the poorest in the state I grew up. You know what else never happened? Sustained public policy to help these areas. There were largely no programs to help transition workers from one industry to another. We don't have comprehensive safety nets and retraining / re-education programs for workers. We lack all of that. Why aren't we starting by implementing those programs? Its rather wishful thinking that bringing manufacturing back to the US, that it will end up in these same areas to begin with, because manufacturing is very different than it used to be. I doubt most of these areas would be good places to re-build manufacturing capacity in the US. What manufacturing is done here is already concentrated in the South which precludes huge chunks of the traditional rust belt.

Do you understand that labor is priced into the cost of the product? Who is going to buy all of these American products made by highly paid unionized workers?

I understand the Rust Belt situation sucks, but people can’t afford to buy everyday consumer goods made with American labor. I’m wearing an American made pair of shoes right now that is 20-30x more expensive than a pair of shoes from Walmart, and even ‘less expensive’ US made shoes like Red Wing are 10-15x as expensive. Now imagine paying 10-30x more for everything, it’s not sustainable.

It’s so simple it hurts. Stop the ruling class hoarding all the wealth.

Top tax bracket used to be 94%.

Have a VERY steep wealth tax, an inheritance tax and whatever else is needed. The fact individuals exist with many hundreds of millions of dollars while so many in the same society are struggling so bad is a disgrace.

And something they're not going to get. Manufacturing is going to be heavily automated. The money is going to continue to funnel into a small portion of the population.

1. win a world war that destroys the economy of every other country in the world for a decade.

2. destroy about the past 50 years of technology and all knowledge of how manufacture it.

3. Kill 90% of people over retirement age to lower demand for housing, healthcare costs, and retirement benefits.

In the modern world with modern technology there's a lot less productive work out there for people without specialized education. We could do a better job of training more people for trades jobs (e.g. plumbers, electricians etc), and removing college requirements from some professions (e.g. med school and law school could probably be college level education rather than post college) but anyone saying that we're going back is just lying.

Like what is unique about factory work that allows for this? I’ve heard stuff like this so much and I just do not believe it. Is anyone working in a factory in the USA today able to buy a home and have a stay at home spouse on a single income?

So... here goes: rather than proclaiming a "housing crisis", maybe we're seeing the end of an exceptional period of "housing affordability". (A similar analysis of Europe and Asia applies, piecemeal.)

As such, if we want to re-enter into a new period of housing affordability, we need to ask ourselves what we plan to give up and/or trade for that?

For WW2, it was millions of lives and worldwide devastation. It seems like we'd need a complete re-evaluation of the way wealth, family structures, and social safety nets work in order to vastly expand housing. (In the US.)

By making everyone poorer. Seriously.

You are competing with your fellow citizens for those things. This was true even back then.

Right now, today, it has never been easier to make a lot of money working. So you need to compete with people in that environment. You need to be able to outbid those people for that beautiful home you want. In an environment of lots of educated and skilled workers getting skilled salaries for doing vary valuable work. That's where the bar is.

We can lower the bar back to blue-collar-high-school-diploma, but then we need to also sacrifice all those high earning college degree jobs.

Not going to happen.

When was that last really true? 1971?

> How do we get that level of prosperity back?

The issue is that this is a false premise. The house sucked. Only 1/3rd of American families had a single car at the time, and the cars sucked. We can go on and on about everything else. Not to mention the social environment at the time sucked.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to do something about the issues Americans face. But tariffs with a shifting set of sanewashed justifications are just Not It.

Back then cars and homes and essentials were relatively cheap and TVs and flying were expensive. Today it's flipped. TVs are cheap, phones are cheap. Essentials, like housing, are expensive.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/en_VpZtUFcE

And perhaps more importantly, do you have any idea what rent currently is costing? As a fraction of median income?

This is an avocado toast argument.

wtf is the plan for the 5-10 years in between?

"I'm a first generation American..."

1. https://vendettasportsmedia.com/michael-jordan-wasnt-that-ba...

He was that bad at baseball compared how good he was a basketball.

The article seemed correct IMHO,

> What happened when he switched from basketball to baseball? He went from being an MVP champion to being a middling player in the minor leagues. 2 years later, he was back to playing basketball.

What a mess this country is in.

"America" doesn't underestimate or overestimate things. People do. So which American people underestimate the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back? Name names, or it didn't happen.

Kirk

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/america

It doesn't make you wrong, but you're also not right.

Why would anyone want to go back to an economy that can be run by a third worlders? What is our competitive advantage then?

Economics works when the people do the things they are most efficient at. If a person in China can make iPhones for cheaper than an American, LET THEM. Our citizens should be designing them instead, because that's what we train our citizens to do.

Trump and the Republicans really do think of our citizens as third worlders performing manual labor like we were oxen.

Personally, I think we need to focus on making things like homes more affordable. This would go a long way toward alleviating people's feeling of being trapped.

It's definitely less of a factor compared to money, but I can't help wonder if in addition to being able to afford stuff, it's the idea that there used to be a "default" path that carried some sort of dignity. Dirty jobs have never been outright glamorous, but there's still a kind of respect that American society confers upon "traditional" industrial work - think the classic image of the humble American coal miner, factory worker, or farmer. "It ain't much, but it's honest work." I think the thought is that however you did in school and in the upper-class-employment rat race, anyone could find a stable, respectable, long-term job - probably even get trained on the job - in an industry that really matters, that does useful stuff for the country.

Now? If you fail to jump through all the office-job hoops of picking a fancy field, getting a degree, finding internships, dressing up nice, keeping a clean record, acing job interviews, etc. Or if those fancy jobs just aren't hiring near you. What are the "default" job options most people are left with? Working retail at Walmart? Putting fries in the bag at McDonalds? Janitorial? Driving a truck? Doordashing burritos?

Obviously the main thing the lack of stability and decent pay in these jobs, but when it comes to public perception and fantasizing, like you said, I wonder if a part of it is just that these service sector jobs feel... shittier. Less important for society.

Offshoring has produced a world where we can buy cheap trinkets but where many, many, americans live precariously, have little to no stability, and work more than one job to make ends meet. What Americans really want is more control over their lives and "bringing back manufacturing" is a sort of short-hand for that ideal.

I think bringing back some manufacturing may help, but in the end Americans need to learn that what they really want is more power to shape their lives and that they will need to wrest that power back from a system which has leaned ever more towards market control of the allocation of time, energy, and labor.

The poorly educated need a livelihood too. If the economy is healthier for global trade (I think it is), then some way must be found of destributing its benefits to the demographics who got hit. Otherwise you get revolution or populism.

Telling an unemployed factory worker to send their kids to college doesn't help. Doesn't help the factory worker, and doesn't help kids who see education and middle class jobs as about as unreal as the idea of becoming a famous influencer or kingpin drug dealer.

Also the US is already the 2nd largest manufacturer in the world.

i didn't understand it myself until I developed a hardware system and computed the margins, hassle, etc - manual labor/assembly/mfg is not what a developed economy relies on and its asinine to pretend it is.

I don't know how the current American dynamism movement has picked up the steam it has

It literally harms industry because anyone relying on that hyper niche part now has to pay more (because American mfg, let's face it - is not efficient) and deal with subpar quality as opposed to higher quality foreign parts.

I hate it say it, but come on man - people aren't buying American cars globally because the Japanese and even Germans can do it better. That's free market economics, either get better at making cars or focus on making things that we can do better like iPhones and Macbooks - not try to artificially defend an industry we suck at by forcing people to deal with shittier subpar products.

Maybe I'm being unreasonable, I don't know.

If you believe this statement, then you must be supportive of open borders.

People in China might be more efficient at doing local US service jobs. Whose to say we dont let them do it?

Imagine how bad the US economy would be if we had tariffs and border controls between states.

You are the one who thinks of the work as below you, that it should be moved out of sight so we can stop caring and make it someone else’s problem.

You may think a farm worker deserves $500,000,000 a year, but that won't matter until someone else decides to pay them that.

Ultimately, it's OK to say some things are more valuable than others, including the value of your labor.

See the hundreds of thousands of people in US that have died from opioid overdoses. 50% of the US population, specifically those living outside major metro areas, experienced a slow collapse (over decades) that was not unlike the fall of the Soviet Union.

A country should have _some_ semblance of what it is to truly source, manufacture, and produce the lifestyle that's made possible in the country. When the top 15-20% become completely disconnected from the other 80% working menial service jobs because the core manufacturing has been outsourced to outside the country, it will come back to bite you.

"Man must feel the sweat on his own brow" or at least have an appreciation for what makes this possible. Your comment essentially implies that you feel that you are above or should be disconnected from this reality, which is dangerous.

Globalist trade promoters are just short-term wishful / magical thinkers. It's magical thinking that you can create this social and economic imbalance via outsourcing it to the other side of the globe, without consequences over the long run. It's wishful thinking that there are enough upper middle class jobs / lifestyle for everyone that took Calculus.

What we have instead is a nation straddled with debt and useless degrees. While the counties like China do “theirs world” work produce smarter and more capable workforce all while doing the mundane work too.

I think your view also vastly underestimates the number of not so smart people that exist in America. This is no knock on them, but people in tech bubbles get to walk around in a society where the average person they interact with has a far above average IQ. So for those who don’t balance red/black trees and find shortest paths with dijkstra's algorithm need jobs too.

On top of that you forgot something I am sure you have yelled many times, diversity. Remember when it was a strength? It’s not good for any nation to be completely void of entire industries. Having factories next to the tech will germinate the thinking minds with new problems to solve.

But even more to the point. China is doing amazing things, and they were we let do the manufacturing. So we always have a strong evidence that letting others might not be the best idea.

Lord man... there's a whole mass of humanity who don't want to fart in an office chair all day, or lay around collecting the dole.

Why does it cost us 10X more to build half as much? It's not all wage differences. It's that we don't have a large talent pool of builders. When you make things -- physical things in the real world -- you learn things about the nature of reality that cannot be learned from books or computers.

People were going bananas about 10% inflation and the price of eggs before the election. They're not ready to 2X all consumer goods prices.

Automation is what took the jobs away.

To fix housing all you need to do is build more homes. America has plenty of land for that.

What I don't understand is, why would people even want the US dollar and its service industry if we can't produce sufficiently any more? And what about future conflicts in the world? The US can't even produce enough saline solution or disinfectant wipes, let along active pharmaceutical ingredients? Did people see what China goods we tariff on? We tariff China for advanced materials, electronics, machineries, and etc, yet China tariffs on our raw materials and agricultural goods. And we think the US can maintain its wealth by behaving like a colony of China? When there's a conflict between us and China, what do we do? Beg them for the life essentials? And we keep yelling to punish Russia and help Ukraine to win the war and we should, but with what? We can't even out produce artillery shells faster and cheaper than Russia, or drones faster and cheaper than China. Admiral Yamamoto used to say that he saw so many factories and chimneys in Philadelphia that he knew that those industries could turn into efficient war machines if Japan ever declared war on the US. Would he be able to say the same today?

As for what we can, wasn't the US a manufacturing powerhouse until early 2000s? BTW, the US is still a manufacturing powerhouse in some sectors, but we just can't make things cheap enough with good quality because we pretty much destroyed our light industry. Didn't China have nothing and it was heavy investment from the western world that helped China grow so fast and so rapidly? Then, why can't we shift investment back to the US and bring our key industries back? We kept talking about technical difficulties, yet we ignore the necessity of the matter.

>You don’t have people who insist on being paid in cash so that they can keep their disability payments, while they do acrobatics on the factory floor that the non-disabled workers cannot do.

>Chinese workers much less likely to physically attack each other and their manager. They don’t take 30 minute bathroom breaks on company time. They don’t often quit because their out-of-state mother of their children discovered their new job and now receives 60% of their wages as child support. They don’t disappear because they’ve gone on meth benders. And they don’t fall asleep on a box midshift because their pay from yesterday got converted into pills.

>Sadly, what I describe above are not theoretical situations. These are things that I have experienced or seen with my own eyes.

Really? How does he know if someone is on disability? How he know many of these are not seen in China? If they aren't then why aren't they? I don't think it is as simple as work ethic.

It's difficult to address the giant article full of misrepresentations point by point. It's tough to see it up at the top of HN. Wish that I could do something to correct the misinformation that is being disseminated.

This person has a vested interest. They manufacture cheap crap in China (or Vietnam, I don't care) for American kids to suck on. What more do you need to know?

This is what I have the most problem with. As I said above:

"For instance, there are plenty of tool and die makers left in the USA, plenty of injection molding machines. I have personally seen them and met the tool and die makers as well as the machines making the molds.".

The reality is that there are many injection molding machines in the USA making weapons, medical devices, electronics enclosures and connectors, car and airplane parts, and other high margin products, not kids toys. And it's a lie to say that tooling, molds, and tool and die makers and shops aren't widely available in the States. They just don't want to pay more for them, and are therefore disseminating propaganda to the contrary.

And, I have also spent time in China, I have toured the factories there, I know what I am talking about as well.

Globalization is a fact of the world today and the best path to better lives for everyone is through mutual cooperation and policies that lift all boats.

Trump's goals and attempts to change this are foolhardy.

Everything wrong and right with the author's thesis. Our present day high-end manufacturing, agriculture, and innovation are already facing the steepest tariffs from a broad range of countries. The uneven playing field extends to IP theft, heavily subsidised and protected industries abroad and other forms of unfair competition like port traffic manipulation or burdensome legislation.

The author think that "targeted tariffs" would have a different effect from what we see now with trade war and retaliatory threats, market instability and uncertainty. This is false, but also ultimately harmful to our "agricultural drone industry". It's hard to have a niche industry without the larger picture, and it's hard to have "drones" without knowing how to manufacture constituent parts and having a reliable domestic supply chain for such. A domestically sourced supply chain encourages innovation and adaptation to immediate customer demands and goods can arrive in days or hours instead of weeks or months. Innovative requests to parts makers aren't immediately harvested by Chinese industrial spies and knowledge and technological advantage can remain local for longer, allowing for time to progress again before others can catch up.

Encouraging lazy and unoriginal drone manufacture in moated "made in USA" assembly lines is precisely the low-end type of job that "no one wants to do" and will inevitably produce the least capable drones the least efficiently or profitably. Our manufacturing and industrial capacity needs to be the world's best and most cost competitive because nothing else will do.

Only automation can save American industry. There will be "fewer" jobs but they will require skill and training. Robot management and supervision and repair and update and retooling will all require a large labor force. Creating robots and the software they run on will continue to be an important and large sector of the software industry. But manufacturing is only about jobs in the way that having a healthy agriculture industry is "about jobs", hardly at all.

Manufacturing real goods is the difference between servility and freedom given that modern war in the nuclear age also entails producing billions of tonnes of metal and blowing it up in distant countries, and could require replacing percentages of the global shipping tonnage that would be destroyed in a major conflict. It requires manufacturing thousands of substation transformers and the aa systems to defend them.

If we had invested strategically into a variety of heavy and light industries over the past 30 years, we almost certainly would have invented better processes and formulae for making things than we currently possess. We could have more globally competitive steel, even more advanced finished products and the knowledge and experience to "make anything better and more profitably than anyone". Industrial production and manufacturing make up roughly 15% of US GDP today. "Bringing back manufacturing" might increase that number significantly but it's hard to see how or why it would need to be more than 30% outside of wartime. That wouldn't even require a doubling of the jobs involved because much of this would have to be automated.

I agree with the author's emphasis on education and "fixing" things being critical in the execution of any kind of industrial renaissance. If the tariff fight lowers tariffs globally, that is a small move in the right direction of leveling the playing field and rewarding domestic producers who are globally competitive.

We build about 100 SM-6 missiles a year. How long does this last against a peer? 12 hours?

I don't know if tariffs are the best way to do this but some manufacturing must come back one way or another.

The only sane way to bring back manufacturing is investments like the chips act.

Think about it this way, you are a widget manufacturer trying to place a new factory. You could put it in say Canada and enjoy cheap imports and exports of your product globally. It's cheap to produce and easy to sell.

Or you could place it in the US, but now you are looking at a minimum 10% tax on importing the resources you need. On top of that, a significant portion of the world (especially the richest nations) are tacking on an addition 10% or more tax on your product because it came from the US.

Would you build a factory in the US? Maybe if you can source everything in the US and you are fine with your primary market being only the US. Otherwise, it's a bad business move.

When talking about something like semiconductors, global access is really important to be profitable. Low or no tariffs and the proximity to China and other raw resources powerhouses is a major reason why so much of the semiconductor industry is in Asia.

You seem to assume that once manufacturing has been brought back it would somehow be internationally competitive. I don't see how that's possible.

Maybe I didn't get your point.

They're still correct though that there are plenty of good reasons why we don't do manufacturing in the US right now, and tariffs do absolutely nothing to change that reality, they just artificially make the alternative worse at significant expense to consumers.

Economists are full of bs. They keep framing everything as impossible and when something good happens later, going against all their predictions, they call it a miracle... Maybe these economists are just projecting by assuming everyone else is just as incompetent as they are.

Of course if society was made up only of economists, we'd still be living in caves, worrying about the difficulty of bringing firewood back to the cave.

I feel like we in the US have a horrible split evaluation of ourselves: either we're supreme or we're doomed. Both sides of that split are emotional states, not useful facts.

The problem isn’t that we don’t know this: it’s that the person making the decisions rejects the idea of needing to make a detailed plan, or even understand the situation well enough to recognize the problems a plan would need to address.

This, without even considering for a moment that China is 4+ times the US.

Here's another example: a market that has been completely dominated by China: consumer drones. Believe me when I say this, I hate DJI and while I have one, I refuse to use it because of all the security implications. How many European and US companies are competing with them? Quite a few actually but the big names off the top of my head are Parrot and Skydio. I own both a Parrot and a Skydio and the quality of both is amazing. Yet they are still barely keeping up with DJI and at 5x the cost despite the demand - DJI still holds 90% of the market share. I can justify the price because of my privacy concerns but that's 1/1000 people. For most people it's always going to be a trade-off between price and quality+privacy.

If you want to enforce all that through tariffs, just put 5000% tariffs so that the local manufacturing cost will be the same as the cheap import and you solved the problem. How many people will be willing to spend 100 bucks for a pair of socks? That's a different story. The soviet union attempted something similar for several decades while trying to copy western technology. Anyone that knows a bit of history can tell you how that ended. Spoilers: not a success story.

The iphone, while impressive, is not the end all be all of American manufacturing. The major goal is to bring back tool makers and increase industrial density.

>Chinese manufacturing labor isn’t just cheaper. It’s better.

>In China, there are no people who are too fat to work.

This is obviously just dumb anti-american propaganda. Since this article isn't written in good faith it's not worth my time to debunk point by point.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIPS_and_Science_Act and https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/11/24195811/biden-ev-factory...

Of course, the voters wanted something else.

In two years of course it won't matter.

It's a very thinly veiled protection racket. People do tend to repeat the plays that they know.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-year_plans_of_China

This post is specifically about Industrial Policy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_policy

But other effective interventions are anti-trust and demand-inducing regulation (e.g. people want to fly because they know it's safe).

Markets do not mean that an Industrial strategy / Industrial policy is not needed.

Markets respond to incentives created by such a strategy.

What you might call capitalists very much plan. They don't believe in central planning where one "guy" makes a plans and everyone else implements them, but they do plan.

I've just sat through a long meeting with lots of Jiras and Q2 objectives. Trust me, there's planning. Lots of planning.

Subscribe to ground news so that you know what historically a news sources biases are.

The reason we need manufacturing is because the middle class is decimated. None of us tech workers feel it because we don’t live in neighborhoods that have been decimated by it. We have all benefitted from globalization immensely but we don’t have neighbors, families or friends that have been destroyed by it.

Too many people say it will take “years” to get factories operational. That’s why Elon is there. He knows and has done this, to point out which regulations need to be axed in order to improve the time to market for new factories. Trump will listen to him and get rid of any regulation that doesn’t make sense, or even regulations that do make sense but take too much time. For better or worse factory building will be faster over the next 3 years.

Now that we have these greenfields for new manufacturing opportunities, instead of standing there with your arms crossed, shaking your head why the idea won’t work, how can you take advantage of this new opportunity to get rich?

Blue collar workers were the first to push for globalization, because they suddenly could afford a lifestyle that used to require the salary corresponding to a couple of steps upper in the corporate ladder. A blue collar salary suddenly could provide for many more amenities... til the salary was no more!

Everyone wants manufacturing back, but only for the products they can produce, because everyone still wants to buy at Chinese prices.

Furthermore, the regulations that most stand in the way of cheap manufacturing are environmental regulations, and good luck with that! We have got used to breathe clean air, and I feel most people still love clean air more than they hate globalization.

The irony now about Chinese goods is that those of us that can afford it avoid them as much as possible. I check every product that I buy on Amazon to make sure they aren’t made in China because they could be sending me poisoned goods.

Maybe they didn't with their words, but they surely did with their money!

Remember the JFK "We choose to go to the moon" speech?

(I wonder how many of this defeatist articles are financed by China somehow).