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> Having some overseas products and imports is one thing, but when you have to import 90%+ of it, we're losing. I think it's more complicated than this. If Chi
by djoldman 6y ago
> Having some overseas products and imports is one thing, but when you have to import 90%+ of it, we're losing.
I think it's more complicated than this. If China sells steel at a sufficient quality at a far cheaper price, why make it in the US?
If the concern is national security, make a stockpile sufficiently large to suffice while a steel industry is restarted locally.
It doesn't make sense to employ protectionism - it's bad economics and rent seekers come out of the woodwork.
The goal of any nation should be to move its workers up the skills pyramid to work on more complicated products.
We don't want to be making shirts in the US, we want those people to be doing higher skilled jobs.
- ldoughty 6y agoI certainly didn't mean to suggest we do everything internally... Just that we have some meaningful production capability at home.
- lazide 6y agoDo you have any ideas on how to do that if it isn’t naively economically viable?
- lazide 6y agoWhich is great until the country who is making all your shirts decides they don’t like you and stops selling you shirts. Unless you like being shirtless I guess? You can’t have a strategic reserve of every major good large enough to actually get through something like that realistically. Things change too quickly, and most of the really important imported goods we can’t store enough of anyway. Are we going to have a strategic CPU reserve? IPhone reserve?