8 ms·

Why Buy America Is Bad Law

31 points by gok 5y ago

dec0dedab0de 5y ago
I personally would rather my tax money be spent in the country, even if it costs more. As a matter of fact I would take it a step farther and say that all Government purchases must be completely sourced in country. All the way down to the semiconductors in their smart phones. We're a large country, with a ton of resources and people, we should not be dependent on anyone else. At least not for anything the governments are doing.
- ghkbrew 5y ago
  This is how you end up with $500 toilet seats, though. If something can't be profitably made in the US then the only production for it will be explicitly for the government. And it will be a de facto monopoly and priced accordingly. Maybe that's a tradeoff you're willing to make to make sure that there is always someone in the US who can make toilet seats. I would rather it be a more nuanced decision than a blanket mandate.
  - dec0dedab0de 5y ago
    I didn't think it through that far, but yes I would be willing to make that tradeoff. Toilet seats are important, and if something whacky happens and global trade is interupted for an extended time, we should have at least one toilet seat maker. That said, I would also tax all imports to the point that the only imports worth buying are ones that are of a significantly higher quality than their domestic counterpart. I would also ban trade with any countries that have awful labor and environmental practices. This one would be the most difficult, because how do you define awful? And how long do you keep the ban after they fix things? If you go back far enough the whole world gets banned.
  - username90 5y ago
    That is bullshit. 40 years ago the industrialized world was actually industrialized and the developing world was not, so everything was produced in the industrialized world and toilet seats still didn't cost half a months wage for low earners. Similarly todays Chinese laborers have no problems affording stuff they produce. Industrial production is very efficient, the products aren't super expensive even if you pay the laborers decent wages.
    - dec0dedab0de 5y ago
      I think you missed the point they were trying to make. They are saying that there will be situations where the government has to buy some product domestically, but every private business and citizen imports that same product. The law would cause a domestic manufacturer to exist with the sole purpose of providing that product to the government. Since they won't have any other customers, or any competition, the price will be high.
  - anthonygd 5y ago
    Having a single customer doesn't make a monopoly; if anything it gives that customer much more power. There's no reason the government can't do price comparisons even when buying from the US. If you want to sell $500 toilet seats then I'll sell $499 toilet seats. There might even be someone out there who could make them for $498... Obviously the US can't/hasn't/won't out compete the entire world in all areas but it should be at least competitive. Competition should extend beyond pure price. National values should be more than politicians talking points. If widget A is made by Uighur forced labor and widget B is made by a middle class labor in a free market, are you willing to spend more for B? How much more? FWIW - I don't want a blanket mandate either but I don't think you have a convincing argument against it.
recursivedoubts 5y ago
America's manufacturing capacity has been largely destroyed in all but the highest end goods where there actually is protectionism in place (we may lose high-end semi-conductors soon) The supply chain is now firmly planted in Asia. We've papered this disaster over with debt and asset bubbles. And still these people act as if we are going to fall for the same old wine & wool just-so story from 18th century England again.
- alistairSH 5y ago
  IIRC, manufacturing output reached an all-time high in 2018. We're doing that in higher-margin industries with fewer workers. So, I'm not sure "capacity has been destroyed" is even remotely accurate in any general sense.
  - Retric 5y ago
    Measuring manufacturing output in dollars isn’t a counter argument. A Yacht may be worth 1,000,000 TV’s, but it doesn’t represent anywhere near the same industrial capacity. Especially if the components of said yacht / car / etc where imported. It’s not even purely a question of economics. In a crisis like COVID you can easily prevent exports to meet local demand. Trying to force imports on the other hand doesn’t work.
- underseacables 5y ago
  Globalization destroyed America’s manufacturing base. At some point politicians decided we had plenty of manufacturing to spare, so we should give it to other countries who need it more. Now, we are paying for it.
  - knownjorbist 5y ago
    Manufacturing is not some magical thing we should be exclusively trying to court.
    - hellbannedguy 5y ago
clarkevans 5y ago
A repeal of Buy America would be prudent if it were accompanied with very stiff taxation of products from countries that lack equivalent environmental, labour, and democratic policies. Otherwise, we're asking U.S. based companies to compete with organizations that simply bypass environmental protection, labour protection, or fail to support a democratic government.
- senortumnus 5y ago
  Agreed. The article addresses that by suggesting that purchasing trains from Japan or Euro producers would meet both enviro and labor standards.
- bryanlarsen 5y ago
  This article is about passenger train cars so the competition is from Europe or Japan.
- koboll 5y ago
  This is what I'd like to see most from American trade policy -- not dismantling organizations like the WTO, but rededicating them to promoting human rights and worker protections rather than the interests of transnational capital.
  - convolvatron 5y ago
    why would anyone pay for that?
- CogitoCogito 5y ago
  This is one of the fundamental issues I take with arguments of free trade and how it's best because "different countries focus on what they're best at". That all sounds good if you don't turn on too many brain cells, but there are certain things we do less efficiently on purpose because we hold certain values as more important.
  - cardosof 5y ago
NikolaeVarius 5y ago
I'm at the point where I think that I'm okay with some inefficiency that at least gives the impression that the nation is trying to take care of its citizens. Globalization and such have been very good at lowering prices and general increased productivity for most people, but I think its clear that its leaving behind a bunch of people who do not want to be forced into this global market, and get angry about it.
- hedora 5y ago
  They’re paying foreign firms an average of $1,000,000 per temporary job that pays $40K/year for 2-3 years. It isn’t so much protectionism as government mandated graft.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  The article is about how Buy American in the mid-20th century immiserated generations of Americans with bad transportation and long-term debt. Which aspect of that even gives the impression of caring for our citizens? In terms of transportation infrastructure the USA is behind countries like Kazakhstan and Morocco. We need all the help we can get from other countries. Indeed, the law we need is that we're forbidden to buy from ourselves, and nobody who has ever planned an American transportation system is permitted to do it again without at least 20 years of remedial experience abroad. We need Buy Not American.
  - amjaeger 5y ago
    Do you have a source or a specific reason to comparing to Morocco? I was there in 2015. The trains were in pretty rough shape, on one of the trains the toilet was damaged and you could see the train tracks... I don't remember any other specifics, but overall the transportation was a bit rough. That being said, I don't know much about the quality of transportation in America outside of the east coast.
    - jeffbee 5y ago
      https://www.sncf.com/en/sncf-around-the-world/triumph-for-morocco-hs-line https://www.sncf.com/en/sncf-around-the-world/triumph-for-mo...
AbrahamParangi 5y ago
Buying domestic is "inefficient" in the same way that buying insurance is "inefficient". I would expect the pandemic to have reinforced the lesson that when things go to hell, you need to have domestic industrial capacity.
- ddingus 5y ago
  The people who need to internalize that lesson will not generally be impacted enough. This is likely to result in growing unrest among the people who are both impacted and increasingly done with that kind of leadership.
  - handrous 5y ago
    I hesitate to even bring him up, but Trump's overt rejection of the neo-liberal trade policy consensus that's been embraced by the leaders of both parties since Reagan, is a highly underrated component of his appeal. (for the record, no, I don't like the guy, but I think his campaigns and his platform, such as it was, are fascinating and that over-simplifying the story of how he got elected & why people voted for him is a dangerous trap)
    - ddingus 5y ago
      Yes, this is bigger than Trump. Been happening for decades on now. Honestly, Trump bumbled around and made a lot more obvious to more people. In addition to just being Trump. I can tell you a lot of people went for Trump, 70 million total this last time, precisely because they saw Trump as not being part of that order. Fascinating indeed!
- howmayiannoyyou 5y ago
  Inefficient over what timeline? Medium term inefficiencies are nothing in the face of supply chain imbalances that leave a democratic country at the mercy of the CCP's now belligerent & long oppressive regime.
onepointsixC 5y ago
While Reagan did implement "Buy America", he also removed subsidies for American shipbuilding where as other nations did not. Since then America went from one of the largest ship builders to now almost nothing. It's a national security problem. Now the largest shipbuilders are China, Japan, and South Korea whom all pump billions of subsidies into their industries. This article would have been far more convincing pre-covid when few worried about supply chains. Today? Forget it.
- pg_bot 5y ago
  The problem is the Jones act not subsidies. Imagine not being able to drive an imported car in the United States. That's what the Jones act dictates for shipping. Who cares where the ship is manufactured? Almost every ship that is "built" in the United States was designed internationally and is composed of imported parts. It's the buyers of the subsidized product that are the beneficiaries of the subsidy. We should take advantage of other nations' foolish behavior instead of following in their footsteps.
mc32 5y ago
I don’t get this. When we advise other countries how to bootstrap their economies economies will tell them to build up their local economy and import knowledge where needed. This was the playbook for the “Asian tigers” but also post war Japan (or back to Meiji Japan) and China and we see it in India too... Hey but when the US wants to do a little of this, then these profiteer advocates get all tied up in knots. They could not care less about US workers and job losses and skills losses. They only care that the status quo of making money for the interests they represent is uninterrupted.
OldHand2018 5y ago
This is a poor article. The main evidence for “Americans can’t build stuff good” is the NYC subway cars ordered in 1970. Even the most “America First” of Americans will readily agree that manufacturing in the 1970s was horrible compared to present times. If you actually click on the provided link and scroll down to where it talks about those train cars, you’ll see that the first problem came from running an extended-distance speed test where the average speed over the entire distance exceeded the maximum speed in the design of the train cars. You can’t seriously say that burning out the electric motors as a result of this is a manufacturing deficiency. Then there is this quote: > When the R-44s initially entered service, failure rates increased tremendously because of a combination of new technology and inadequate training. You can probably attribute some of the “new technology” part to manufacturing problems. How much? Who knows? But if your subway system is poorly run and has inadequate training, the best subway cars built in the best factory in the world isn’t going to save you.
- rsynnott 5y ago
  > Even the most “America First” of Americans will readily agree that manufacturing in the 1970s was horrible compared to present times. Of course, a big part of the reason for that was presumably lack of external competition in the 70s. If you say to Manufacturing Company X "don't worry about the European and Japanese manufacturers, they're not allowed bid on this" you are unlikely to get the same sort of quality than you'd get if they were. British car manufacturing is a nice example; in effect, the government forced consumers to buy the British manufacturers' output via protectionism. The result was _legendarily_ awful quality. And by the time the protectionism waned (when the UK joined the EU), it was too late; the industry was so used to not really having to compete that it just couldn't adapt to having to produce a good product, and largely collapsed.
  - OldHand2018 5y ago
    > Of course, a big part of the reason for that was presumably lack of external competition in the 70s. If you say to Manufacturing Company X "don't worry about the European and Japanese manufacturers, they're not allowed bid on this" you are unlikely to get the same sort of quality than you'd get if they were. Yes! (And no). In the US, by 1970, foreign auto manufacturers had achieved a 10% market share, and it had been growing steadily since the mid 1960s. The Detroit manufacturers were fully aware of this, they just weren’t making changes. That was a time of great societal unrest and huge labor strife. It’s not hard to imagine the elites not wanting to save American manufacturing jobs or at least making them competitive.
eatonphil 5y ago
This article seems to focus solely on trains. Surely the legislation has an impact on more than just trains. If the point was that the problem that affects trains (the US doesn't have modern, efficient train manufacturers) also affects other industries, the article didn't mention any other industries. If trains are the only problem, it sounds like the Buy America legislation isn't bad and we should deal with buying trains separately?
bandyaboot 5y ago
As if the goodness or badness of the law matters. With something like this with such an obvious political angle, the importance of the quality of the law is approximately zero.
baron816 5y ago
Policy is trying to do too much. Clearly, if you limit the suppliers you can buy from, you’re going to be overpaying. And if you’re overpaying, you limit how much you can buy. Investing in infrastructure helps other industries thrive—it shouldn’t be done for its own sake. Politicians have over fetishized manufacturing. They need to stop promoting and protecting jobs that don’t need an education.
tuukkah 5y ago
The gist: Left-wing parties in Europe have a term for imports in this circumstance: parallel imports. According to this view, protectionism is justified on labor or ecological grounds, but imports from countries with strong unions and environmental regulations trigger neither justification.
kyrra 5y ago
Another fun one that is the Jones Act: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_Marine_Act_of_1920 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_Marine_Act_of_1920 My TLDR is that you have to use american-made ships when transporting product from 1 US port to another. The US government regularly suspends the act, like it did during the recent oil issue on the east coast: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-13/biden-lifts-u-s-ship-mandate-to-ease-gasoline-shortages https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-13/biden-lif... The CATO institute (right leaning group) pushed to drop it 2.5 years ago: https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/jones-act-burden-america-can-no-longer-bear https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/jones-act-...
- protomyth 5y ago
  I still think an amendment to suspend the act for Hawaii and Alaska would be a good first step. [edit] and cruise ships
buildingmateri 5y ago
Frankly if anyone actually cared about climate change we would be desperately seeking to shorten supply chains and buy/produce locally. Bringing in everything from Asia when it could be done locally is absolutely terrible for ghg levels and pollution. Still waiting but not holding my breath for ESG to include "short supply chain".
droopyEyelids 5y ago
How can this article claim to analyze the benefits of the law without addressing the strategic importance of maintaining domestic industry? We're talking the USA's final few manufacturers in essential industry, here. If we give them up, and then get in a war, that means we would almost automatically lose the war. War is still a real thing that happens on Planet Earth. Even if the equipment our protected domestic manufacturers make is expensive and low quality, there is a world of difference between expensive and shoddy vs 'nothing at all'
- UncleEntity 5y ago
  > If we give them up, and then get in a war, that means we would almost automatically lose the war. That argument has been pretty much made obsolete since the invention of the atom bomb...
protomyth 5y ago
This whole article is about passenger trains which is not the focus of the majority of the train track in the USA. GE makers and exports excellent cargo train engines. Picking one very specific, small manufacturing area and claiming in represents the whole is a bit hard to swallow and a really poor argument.
dukeofdoom 5y ago
When things started to get outsourced to China, the promoted belief was that we will bring democracy to China. However, seems like the opposite happened, and Communism got more popular in the USA. Less pollution at home and cheaper goods might be worth it though. I'm pretty amazed by the quality of even cheaper Amazon brands, that I can just order from my couch.
Rebelgecko 5y ago
I'm convinced that these sorts of laws would be better if we just bought the foreign equivalent and wrote a check to the domestic manufacturers who weren't chosen. Here is an experience I had with the "Fly America Act" (a law saying that government funded travel must be done on American airlines, except in the most extreme circumstances): I was traveling to a city in a foreign country. That country's flag carrier had a 5 hour flight for $600. The best option from a US airline (Delta) was an indirect flight (around 9 hours each way) for $800. Between the ticket cost, overtime I got for the additional layovers, and extra per diem spent during the layovers, flying on a US airline probably cost the government an extra $1000. It would've been a win-win-win-win if the government had let me fly the foreign flight and just given Delta a gift of $200 * The foreign airline gets another customer * Delta gets $200 without having the costs of another passenger, and they'd still be able to sell the seat I ended up sitting in * The government would've saved hundreds of dollars by not having to pay me overtime * I would've gotten home sooner

31 points by gok 5y ago

I personally would rather my tax money be spent in the country, even if it costs more. As a matter of fact I would take it a step farther and say that all Government purchases must be completely sourced in country. All the way down to the semiconductors in their smart phones. We're a large country, with a ton of resources and people, we should not be dependent on anyone else. At least not for anything the governments are doing.

ghkbrew 5y ago
This is how you end up with $500 toilet seats, though. If something can't be profitably made in the US then the only production for it will be explicitly for the government. And it will be a de facto monopoly and priced accordingly. Maybe that's a tradeoff you're willing to make to make sure that there is always someone in the US who can make toilet seats. I would rather it be a more nuanced decision than a blanket mandate.
- dec0dedab0de 5y ago
  I didn't think it through that far, but yes I would be willing to make that tradeoff. Toilet seats are important, and if something whacky happens and global trade is interupted for an extended time, we should have at least one toilet seat maker. That said, I would also tax all imports to the point that the only imports worth buying are ones that are of a significantly higher quality than their domestic counterpart. I would also ban trade with any countries that have awful labor and environmental practices. This one would be the most difficult, because how do you define awful? And how long do you keep the ban after they fix things? If you go back far enough the whole world gets banned.
- username90 5y ago
  That is bullshit. 40 years ago the industrialized world was actually industrialized and the developing world was not, so everything was produced in the industrialized world and toilet seats still didn't cost half a months wage for low earners. Similarly todays Chinese laborers have no problems affording stuff they produce. Industrial production is very efficient, the products aren't super expensive even if you pay the laborers decent wages.
  - dec0dedab0de 5y ago
    I think you missed the point they were trying to make. They are saying that there will be situations where the government has to buy some product domestically, but every private business and citizen imports that same product. The law would cause a domestic manufacturer to exist with the sole purpose of providing that product to the government. Since they won't have any other customers, or any competition, the price will be high.
- anthonygd 5y ago
  Having a single customer doesn't make a monopoly; if anything it gives that customer much more power. There's no reason the government can't do price comparisons even when buying from the US. If you want to sell $500 toilet seats then I'll sell $499 toilet seats. There might even be someone out there who could make them for $498... Obviously the US can't/hasn't/won't out compete the entire world in all areas but it should be at least competitive. Competition should extend beyond pure price. National values should be more than politicians talking points. If widget A is made by Uighur forced labor and widget B is made by a middle class labor in a free market, are you willing to spend more for B? How much more? FWIW - I don't want a blanket mandate either but I don't think you have a convincing argument against it.

recursivedoubts 5y ago

America's manufacturing capacity has been largely destroyed in all but the highest end goods where there actually is protectionism in place (we may lose high-end semi-conductors soon) The supply chain is now firmly planted in Asia. We've papered this disaster over with debt and asset bubbles. And still these people act as if we are going to fall for the same old wine & wool just-so story from 18th century England again.

alistairSH 5y ago
IIRC, manufacturing output reached an all-time high in 2018. We're doing that in higher-margin industries with fewer workers. So, I'm not sure "capacity has been destroyed" is even remotely accurate in any general sense.
- Retric 5y ago
  Measuring manufacturing output in dollars isn’t a counter argument. A Yacht may be worth 1,000,000 TV’s, but it doesn’t represent anywhere near the same industrial capacity. Especially if the components of said yacht / car / etc where imported. It’s not even purely a question of economics. In a crisis like COVID you can easily prevent exports to meet local demand. Trying to force imports on the other hand doesn’t work.
underseacables 5y ago
Globalization destroyed America’s manufacturing base. At some point politicians decided we had plenty of manufacturing to spare, so we should give it to other countries who need it more. Now, we are paying for it.
- knownjorbist 5y ago
  Manufacturing is not some magical thing we should be exclusively trying to court.
  - hellbannedguy 5y ago

clarkevans 5y ago

A repeal of Buy America would be prudent if it were accompanied with very stiff taxation of products from countries that lack equivalent environmental, labour, and democratic policies. Otherwise, we're asking U.S. based companies to compete with organizations that simply bypass environmental protection, labour protection, or fail to support a democratic government.

senortumnus 5y ago
Agreed. The article addresses that by suggesting that purchasing trains from Japan or Euro producers would meet both enviro and labor standards.
bryanlarsen 5y ago
This article is about passenger train cars so the competition is from Europe or Japan.
koboll 5y ago
This is what I'd like to see most from American trade policy -- not dismantling organizations like the WTO, but rededicating them to promoting human rights and worker protections rather than the interests of transnational capital.
- convolvatron 5y ago
  why would anyone pay for that?
CogitoCogito 5y ago
This is one of the fundamental issues I take with arguments of free trade and how it's best because "different countries focus on what they're best at". That all sounds good if you don't turn on too many brain cells, but there are certain things we do less efficiently on purpose because we hold certain values as more important.
- cardosof 5y ago

NikolaeVarius 5y ago

I'm at the point where I think that I'm okay with some inefficiency that at least gives the impression that the nation is trying to take care of its citizens. Globalization and such have been very good at lowering prices and general increased productivity for most people, but I think its clear that its leaving behind a bunch of people who do not want to be forced into this global market, and get angry about it.

hedora 5y ago
They’re paying foreign firms an average of $1,000,000 per temporary job that pays $40K/year for 2-3 years. It isn’t so much protectionism as government mandated graft.
jeffbee 5y ago
The article is about how Buy American in the mid-20th century immiserated generations of Americans with bad transportation and long-term debt. Which aspect of that even gives the impression of caring for our citizens? In terms of transportation infrastructure the USA is behind countries like Kazakhstan and Morocco. We need all the help we can get from other countries. Indeed, the law we need is that we're forbidden to buy from ourselves, and nobody who has ever planned an American transportation system is permitted to do it again without at least 20 years of remedial experience abroad. We need Buy Not American.
- amjaeger 5y ago
  Do you have a source or a specific reason to comparing to Morocco? I was there in 2015. The trains were in pretty rough shape, on one of the trains the toilet was damaged and you could see the train tracks... I don't remember any other specifics, but overall the transportation was a bit rough. That being said, I don't know much about the quality of transportation in America outside of the east coast.
  - jeffbee 5y ago
    https://www.sncf.com/en/sncf-around-the-world/triumph-for-morocco-hs-line https://www.sncf.com/en/sncf-around-the-world/triumph-for-mo...

AbrahamParangi 5y ago

Buying domestic is "inefficient" in the same way that buying insurance is "inefficient". I would expect the pandemic to have reinforced the lesson that when things go to hell, you need to have domestic industrial capacity.

ddingus 5y ago
The people who need to internalize that lesson will not generally be impacted enough. This is likely to result in growing unrest among the people who are both impacted and increasingly done with that kind of leadership.
- handrous 5y ago
  I hesitate to even bring him up, but Trump's overt rejection of the neo-liberal trade policy consensus that's been embraced by the leaders of both parties since Reagan, is a highly underrated component of his appeal. (for the record, no, I don't like the guy, but I think his campaigns and his platform, such as it was, are fascinating and that over-simplifying the story of how he got elected & why people voted for him is a dangerous trap)
  - ddingus 5y ago
    Yes, this is bigger than Trump. Been happening for decades on now. Honestly, Trump bumbled around and made a lot more obvious to more people. In addition to just being Trump. I can tell you a lot of people went for Trump, 70 million total this last time, precisely because they saw Trump as not being part of that order. Fascinating indeed!
howmayiannoyyou 5y ago
Inefficient over what timeline? Medium term inefficiencies are nothing in the face of supply chain imbalances that leave a democratic country at the mercy of the CCP's now belligerent & long oppressive regime.

onepointsixC 5y ago

While Reagan did implement "Buy America", he also removed subsidies for American shipbuilding where as other nations did not. Since then America went from one of the largest ship builders to now almost nothing. It's a national security problem. Now the largest shipbuilders are China, Japan, and South Korea whom all pump billions of subsidies into their industries. This article would have been far more convincing pre-covid when few worried about supply chains. Today? Forget it.

pg_bot 5y ago
The problem is the Jones act not subsidies. Imagine not being able to drive an imported car in the United States. That's what the Jones act dictates for shipping. Who cares where the ship is manufactured? Almost every ship that is "built" in the United States was designed internationally and is composed of imported parts. It's the buyers of the subsidized product that are the beneficiaries of the subsidy. We should take advantage of other nations' foolish behavior instead of following in their footsteps.

mc32 5y ago

I don’t get this. When we advise other countries how to bootstrap their economies economies will tell them to build up their local economy and import knowledge where needed. This was the playbook for the “Asian tigers” but also post war Japan (or back to Meiji Japan) and China and we see it in India too... Hey but when the US wants to do a little of this, then these profiteer advocates get all tied up in knots. They could not care less about US workers and job losses and skills losses. They only care that the status quo of making money for the interests they represent is uninterrupted.

OldHand2018 5y ago

This is a poor article. The main evidence for “Americans can’t build stuff good” is the NYC subway cars ordered in 1970. Even the most “America First” of Americans will readily agree that manufacturing in the 1970s was horrible compared to present times. If you actually click on the provided link and scroll down to where it talks about those train cars, you’ll see that the first problem came from running an extended-distance speed test where the average speed over the entire distance exceeded the maximum speed in the design of the train cars. You can’t seriously say that burning out the electric motors as a result of this is a manufacturing deficiency. Then there is this quote: > When the R-44s initially entered service, failure rates increased tremendously because of a combination of new technology and inadequate training. You can probably attribute some of the “new technology” part to manufacturing problems. How much? Who knows? But if your subway system is poorly run and has inadequate training, the best subway cars built in the best factory in the world isn’t going to save you.

rsynnott 5y ago
> Even the most “America First” of Americans will readily agree that manufacturing in the 1970s was horrible compared to present times. Of course, a big part of the reason for that was presumably lack of external competition in the 70s. If you say to Manufacturing Company X "don't worry about the European and Japanese manufacturers, they're not allowed bid on this" you are unlikely to get the same sort of quality than you'd get if they were. British car manufacturing is a nice example; in effect, the government forced consumers to buy the British manufacturers' output via protectionism. The result was _legendarily_ awful quality. And by the time the protectionism waned (when the UK joined the EU), it was too late; the industry was so used to not really having to compete that it just couldn't adapt to having to produce a good product, and largely collapsed.
- OldHand2018 5y ago
  > Of course, a big part of the reason for that was presumably lack of external competition in the 70s. If you say to Manufacturing Company X "don't worry about the European and Japanese manufacturers, they're not allowed bid on this" you are unlikely to get the same sort of quality than you'd get if they were. Yes! (And no). In the US, by 1970, foreign auto manufacturers had achieved a 10% market share, and it had been growing steadily since the mid 1960s. The Detroit manufacturers were fully aware of this, they just weren’t making changes. That was a time of great societal unrest and huge labor strife. It’s not hard to imagine the elites not wanting to save American manufacturing jobs or at least making them competitive.

eatonphil 5y ago

This article seems to focus solely on trains. Surely the legislation has an impact on more than just trains. If the point was that the problem that affects trains (the US doesn't have modern, efficient train manufacturers) also affects other industries, the article didn't mention any other industries. If trains are the only problem, it sounds like the Buy America legislation isn't bad and we should deal with buying trains separately?

bandyaboot 5y ago

As if the goodness or badness of the law matters. With something like this with such an obvious political angle, the importance of the quality of the law is approximately zero.

baron816 5y ago

Policy is trying to do too much. Clearly, if you limit the suppliers you can buy from, you’re going to be overpaying. And if you’re overpaying, you limit how much you can buy. Investing in infrastructure helps other industries thrive—it shouldn’t be done for its own sake. Politicians have over fetishized manufacturing. They need to stop promoting and protecting jobs that don’t need an education.

tuukkah 5y ago

The gist: Left-wing parties in Europe have a term for imports in this circumstance: parallel imports. According to this view, protectionism is justified on labor or ecological grounds, but imports from countries with strong unions and environmental regulations trigger neither justification.

kyrra 5y ago

Another fun one that is the Jones Act: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_Marine_Act_of_1920 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_Marine_Act_of_1920 My TLDR is that you have to use american-made ships when transporting product from 1 US port to another. The US government regularly suspends the act, like it did during the recent oil issue on the east coast: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-13/biden-lifts-u-s-ship-mandate-to-ease-gasoline-shortages https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-13/biden-lif... The CATO institute (right leaning group) pushed to drop it 2.5 years ago: https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/jones-act-burden-america-can-no-longer-bear https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/jones-act-...

protomyth 5y ago
I still think an amendment to suspend the act for Hawaii and Alaska would be a good first step. [edit] and cruise ships

buildingmateri 5y ago

Frankly if anyone actually cared about climate change we would be desperately seeking to shorten supply chains and buy/produce locally. Bringing in everything from Asia when it could be done locally is absolutely terrible for ghg levels and pollution. Still waiting but not holding my breath for ESG to include "short supply chain".

droopyEyelids 5y ago

How can this article claim to analyze the benefits of the law without addressing the strategic importance of maintaining domestic industry? We're talking the USA's final few manufacturers in essential industry, here. If we give them up, and then get in a war, that means we would almost automatically lose the war. War is still a real thing that happens on Planet Earth. Even if the equipment our protected domestic manufacturers make is expensive and low quality, there is a world of difference between expensive and shoddy vs 'nothing at all'

UncleEntity 5y ago
> If we give them up, and then get in a war, that means we would almost automatically lose the war. That argument has been pretty much made obsolete since the invention of the atom bomb...

protomyth 5y ago

This whole article is about passenger trains which is not the focus of the majority of the train track in the USA. GE makers and exports excellent cargo train engines. Picking one very specific, small manufacturing area and claiming in represents the whole is a bit hard to swallow and a really poor argument.

dukeofdoom 5y ago

When things started to get outsourced to China, the promoted belief was that we will bring democracy to China. However, seems like the opposite happened, and Communism got more popular in the USA. Less pollution at home and cheaper goods might be worth it though. I'm pretty amazed by the quality of even cheaper Amazon brands, that I can just order from my couch.

Rebelgecko 5y ago

I'm convinced that these sorts of laws would be better if we just bought the foreign equivalent and wrote a check to the domestic manufacturers who weren't chosen. Here is an experience I had with the "Fly America Act" (a law saying that government funded travel must be done on American airlines, except in the most extreme circumstances): I was traveling to a city in a foreign country. That country's flag carrier had a 5 hour flight for $600. The best option from a US airline (Delta) was an indirect flight (around 9 hours each way) for $800. Between the ticket cost, overtime I got for the additional layovers, and extra per diem spent during the layovers, flying on a US airline probably cost the government an extra $1000. It would've been a win-win-win-win if the government had let me fly the foreign flight and just given Delta a gift of $200 * The foreign airline gets another customer * Delta gets $200 without having the costs of another passenger, and they'd still be able to sell the seat I ended up sitting in * The government would've saved hundreds of dollars by not having to pay me overtime * I would've gotten home sooner