>How hard would it be to ban trade with China? It depends. A lot of why China is such a manufacturing powerhouse right now is not only do they have the factori

>How hard would it be to ban trade with China? It depends. A lot of why China is such a manufacturing powerhouse right now is not only do they have the factories and machines, they have people trained to do that kind of work. They also have lots of factories working near each other with shipping and energy infrastructure to support them, none of which is easy to do quickly. A lack of OSHA and EPA protections certainly helps things move quickly and cheaply in ways our current automation doesn't...yet. Some industries can switch to different countries much more readily than others (injection molding is easy, rare earth production and silicon foundries much less so), so I wouldn't expect to see trade banned over night, but we have been seeing some manufacturing moving away from China for some time now.