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America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

• jollyllama 1y ago
  It depends what you mean by "America" and it depends what you mean by "bringing manufacturing back."
• lerp-io 1y ago
  earth doesn’t need more factories, consumer shit needs to be printed out of some sort of organic material that is able to decompose quickly.
  • gabrielgio 1y ago
    or change the consumer habit to consume less, and/or change how things are produce in order to them last longer (reduce planned obsolescence) or even better we rebuild the system to serve human needs instead of feeding capitalism's endless growth.
    • tarriffnomore 1y ago
      [flagged]
• ysofunny 1y ago
  it's like they believe building is as quick as destroying. almost like they think delete can be ctrl+z'ed back into undeleted very quickly 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
  • nathan_compton 1y ago
    Weird take, since most of the people still in charge are old boomers who've barely even learned to use a computer.
    • drittich 1y ago
      I think the main point stands, though, which is that you can't undo to the previous state. E.g., rolling back all tariffs/deportations/firings/budget cuts would not undo the damage done.
    • marcosdumay 1y ago
      Some very old kids, yeah. With a almost baby-like understanding of the world.
• oldpersonintx 1y ago
  [dead]
• shin_lao 1y ago
  Doesn't mean we shouldn't do it.
  • nathan_compton 1y ago
    Well, sure, but perhaps some kind of plan is warranted?
    • throwawaymaths 1y ago
      Isn't the point of capitalism to not have a plan and let the market figure it out?
      • VeninVidiaVicii 1y ago
        Capitalism as such went out the window with tariffs.
        • throwawaymaths 1y ago
          No, purely free markets (which weren't free to start off with) went out the window.
      • davidw 1y ago
        How are markets going to figure anything out with tariffs changing every day, depending on the mood of dear leader?
        • throwawaymaths 1y ago
          That's a problem for the markets to suss out.
          • fullshark 1y ago
            They've sussed out that if you suck up to him he'll give you an exemption. Of course if you are a medium sized business you are screwed and have to wait in line, but you'll get your chance as long as you can hold on through the summer. In two years of course it won't matter.
• jonathanstrange 1y ago
  It's easy to bring manufacturing back, just give it a decade or two, but impossible to make it internationally competitive without large-scale market regulation such as tariffs or handing out government subsidies.
  • firejake308 1y ago
    My problem with large-scale market regulation is that it also increases the price of inputs for companies who would otherwise be interested in building a factory in the US. Do you have a solution for that?
    • js8 1y ago
      Why would you incentivize foreign companies to do that, when you want American companies to build factories in US?
    • Ajedi32 1y ago
      Inputs are cheaper (and thus have lower tariffs in an absolute sense) than outputs. I think the author underestimates the ability of the market to adapt to incentives. 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.
    • jonathanstrange 1y ago
      I feel misunderstood. I'm definitely not advocating for tariffs. The point is that even if this strategy worked for bringing manufacturing back (it won't in general and widespread because of labor shortage), it would result in products that are not going to be internationally competitive.
  • viraptor 1y ago
    This view is too trivial. You could also stimulate manufacturing by promising tariffs increasing over the next X years, while not taxing the imported building materials and machines for longer. Or you could use tariffs to both break trade and make the environment too expensive and uncertain to invest in large construction - and delay the process by a few extra years.
• vFunct 1y ago
  Our economy was designed to NOT have citizens work at factories. We pay thousands of dollars a year in our public schools to teach each of our citizens calculus, literature, world history, and physics, so that they DON'T have to work at a factory, or perform manual labor like picking strawberries or driving trucks or cleaning toilets. 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.
  • rizpanjwani 1y ago
    [flagged]
    • nonethewiser 1y ago
      The Quarter Pounder plus
  • nonethewiser 1y ago
    But aren't China's learning outcomes higher in calculus, physics, etc? Also the US is already the 2nd largest manufacturer in the world.
    • vFunct 1y ago
      There's a lot more to our education than that. Additionally, our REAL competitive advantage are our universities. We have the best universities in the world, by far, and that's what drives our economy over all others as we create the most valuable intellectual property.
      • nonethewiser 1y ago
        That doesnt really address how the leading manufacturer is also leading in the metrics you said are opposed to leading in manufacturing.
• PaulKeeble 1y ago
  Its the integration and overall combined effect of the entire industrial pipeline that makes China so incredible. It processes all the raw materials and the recycling/reuse of off cuts through every possible way to turn those raw materials into components and then into goods with very little need for import from other countries. Its the complete system for a huge variety of goods. 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.
  • digianarchist 1y ago
    Absolutely. Canada for example should not be shipping lumber and oil to the United States for further refinement. It should be processed domestically.
    • knowaveragejoe 1y ago
      Why would that be better? Comparative advantage is real.
      • digianarchist 1y ago
        1. Jobs. 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.
        • snapcaster 1y ago
          Do you not believe in the theory of competitive advantage? The tradeoff is higher prices, do you think that doesn't matter?
• throwawaymaths 1y ago
  Molson has a Chinese spouse, directly benefitted from Chinese manufacturing for a long time, and often spouts direct propaganda from his X account so while he's likely to be right about a lot of things he had/has a strong incentive to not imagine alternatives to the status quo.
  • cbg0 1y ago
    Try attacking the points he made in the article instead of him.
    • throwawaymaths 1y ago
      What attacks? Fwiw: "he's likely to be right about a lot of things". Perhaps I should have been more specific: I think his analyses are mostly correct, his predictions are not. Subscribe to ground news so that you know what historically a news sources biases are.
      • throwawaymaths 1y ago
        For example: "you can't imagine the cheap Chinese robots coming online"... Then what's stopping an American manufacturer from buying a Chinese robot, taking the tariff hit once, then manufacturing domestically with no tariff?
    • pcdoodle 1y ago
      I don't really see what he said as an attack. It's good to have some "small print" sprinkles with the meal.
• vishnugupta 1y ago
  No kidding! 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.
  • jmclnx 1y ago
    And do not forget NIMBY :) Where I live it is close to impossible to even get a Dog House approved and built.
    • vishnugupta 1y ago
      Exactly! 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?
      • ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
        > The regulatory apparatus has to be rewired. 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.
        • franktankbank 1y ago
          St. Paul drinking water has suffered under 3m mismanagement.
        • bluGill 1y ago
          We can go too far into deregulation, but we are currently too far in regulation. Push for the correct middle ground. 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.
• 1970-01-01 1y ago
  Where are those AI experts on this one? Why isn't AI commanding our manufacturing boom? Isn't manufacturing all just software and logistics?
• mppm 1y ago
  Jonathan Blow's "Preventing the collapse of civilization" [1] makes a similar point. It is easy to assume that, if we can build EUV machines and space telescopes, then processing stainless steel and manufacturing PCBs is baby stuff, and is just waiting for the proper incentives to spring up again. Unfortunately that is not the case -- reality has a surprising amount of detail [2] and even medium-level technology takes know-how and skilled workers to execute properly. Both can be recovered and scaled back up if the will is there. And time -- ten or twenty years of persistent and intelligent effort should be plenty to MAGA :) 1. https://www.youtube.com/embed/pW-SOdj4Kkk https://www.youtube.com/embed/pW-SOdj4Kkk 2. http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-amount-of-detail http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...
  • imbusy111 1y ago
    But the important question is - is it worth it? Should we be doing something more valuable instead?
    • rayiner 1y ago
      Define "more valuable."
      • esafak 1y ago
        Leading to higher profits, jobs people want, and security, for starters.
        • mantas 1y ago
          Security needs taxes which lower profits and salaries (= jobs people want). On top of that, security needs a lot of not-so-profitable capabilities. High profits and jobs people want also don't exactly go hand-in-hand.
    • mantas 1y ago
      Depends on how evaluate what is valuable. E.g. here in europe a lot of people think subsidising local agriculture is not valuable and we should just import cheaper food. On the other hand, a lot of people agree that food security is kinda valuable by itself. And want similar security in more fields. In that sense yes, doing „low tech“ is valuable in the long run.
• pjc50 1y ago
  > China generates over twice as much electricity per person today as the United States. Why? 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?)
  • mapt 1y ago
    When I visited China, the expats told me that recreational drug supplychains were strictly compartmentalized. There was the supply of illicit drugs for Westerners (imported by the sons of Nigerian businessmen, the cliche went), the supply of illicit drugs for Chinese people (who only dealt with Chinese people), and then there were the vast array of drugs that are completely legal to get over the counter in China without a prescription (at a pharmacy or CTM shop) that would be controlled substances in a US pharmacy. 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."
• beanjuiceII 1y ago
  yea its difficult lets not do it
  • knowaveragejoe 1y ago
    Let's approach it from the other direction: why should we? What are we getting by trying to "bring it back"?
    • tmpz22 1y ago
      High paying factory jobs that will allow an individual to purchase a home and start a family!
      • krapp 1y ago
        Ok. Those jobs don't exist. Now what?
      • pjc50 1y ago
        How much do you have to raise the prices of manufactured goods to get there? 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.
      • tonyedgecombe 1y ago
        Factory jobs aren’t high paying and even if you brought all manufacturing home it would barely impact manufacturing employment. 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.
  • drittich 1y ago
    False dichotomy. An alternate position is to do it in a measured, planned way, not under duress as the economy tanks and international relations are soured.
• ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
  This pretty much mirrors what a friend of mine said (he is a recently-retired Co-CEO of a medium-sized manufacturing business). 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.
  • nine_zeros 1y ago
    > I'm surprised that the administration didn't understand this. Curious why you are surprised at incompetence being unable to understand complexity.
    • ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
      Fair point. :/ 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.
      • skyyler 1y ago
        The majority of Americans simply are not going to benefit from this administration, it seems.
      • pjc50 1y ago
        > 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 wonder where they were on election day, when they had a choice. The record of business owners voting D is .. not great.
        • bluGill 1y ago
          D has not been a good choice for small business either.
• kotaKat 1y ago
  Missing reason #15: commercial lenders with a brain realize that these tariffs and this self-imposed domestic crisis will dissipate in the next ~6 years. Nobody's going to lend in this market to try to spin up a new greenfield project in the US that will take years to get operational when they can sit and ride it out - ESPECIALLY at these interest rates.
  • potato3732842 1y ago
    I'm not so sure. 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.
    • Workaccount2 1y ago
      I have a suspicion that the coming tax cuts will be extreme, and the gaps in critical funding will be covered with tariff income. This will essentially make tariffs a cornerstone for government finances. Political suicide to roll back tax breaks if they are primarily for the <$150k earners, like trump wants.
      • FireBeyond 1y ago
        > 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.
• thinkindie 1y ago
  The US should look into other countries efforts to replicate Silicon Valley, you just can't. You will get some niche good, you will waste some money there, but you won't get the same level. ' This, without even considering for a moment that China is 4+ times the US.
• csense 1y ago
  There are plenty of people saying these tariffs will not work. 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.
  • knowaveragejoe 1y ago
    > 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 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.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • asdajksah2123 1y ago
    > There are plenty of people saying these tariffs will not work. 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.
• lenerdenator 1y ago
  America? 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.
  • knowaveragejoe 1y ago
    Americans also have more free time and disposable income because of that decision, among others. Why would you want them to struggle more?
    • lenerdenator 1y ago
      The people in the areas where things used to be made certainly have more free time, but they don't have disposable income. 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.
      • pjc50 1y ago
        US unemployment rate floats along at about 4%, and is kept from going any lower to prevent inflation. 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)
      • ZeroGravitas 1y ago
        It's odd how little factories moving from union areas to red states gets mentioned in this context. 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.
• zero_k 1y ago
  America is not a country, it's a continent. I know, Canada will be a province, and soon Panama of course, but in the meanwhile, it's a continent, not a country.
  • codedokode 1y ago
    But famous American themselves call their country "America".
  • phendrenad2 1y ago
    If you search a dictionary for "America", the first result will likely be "The United States of America". https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/america https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/america It doesn't make you wrong, but you're also not right.
• aurelien 1y ago
  It is just a point of pragmatism. Countries that wish to bring manufacturing back to their country just have to use people to do that just like they used people to put the production outside. Which by the way will produce lot of business :)
• stronglikedan 1y ago
  I don't think anyone underestimates that, as much as some people with the author's viewpoints would like it to be true. 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.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • hackyhacky 1y ago
    Putting aside the rah-rah patriotism, you perhaps don't understand the problem any better than Trump does. The moon mission to which you allude was difficult but, critically, that difficulty was not felt by most Americans: it was a challenge for NASA engineers. Trump's current economic plan will increase inflation, cripple America's role in world trade, and result in negligible increase in manufacturing in the short term. Wildly unpopular policies do not last in a democracy.
  • podgorniy 1y ago
    > To paraphrase Kennedy 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.
  • 1y ago
• 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago
  It's difficult but necessary to bring manufacturing back due to defense logistical reasons. 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.
  • cogman10 1y ago
    Tariffs work against the goal. 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.
• tbirdny 1y ago
  America doesn't underestimate it, its president does.
  • dashundchen 1y ago
    I saw a chart passing around from this Cato Institute survey (Cato is a right wing think tank) [0]. It made me laugh. > 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/Globalization%20Survey_2024.pdf https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/2024-08/Globalizat...
    • pjc50 1y ago
      They're going to end up with some sort of corvee forced labour scheme enforced by ICE, the logical conclusion of "other people should go work in the factories".
      • cratermoon 1y ago
        We already have that, it's called prison labor. The current regime will certainly ramp that up and throw even more people into forced labor camps.[1] 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 https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/flyover-country
        • constantcrying 1y ago
          That is not a loophole. Also prison labor tends to be "unskilled", so useless and even counterproductive in manufacturing roles the US would need if they were to compete with China.
• kjkjadksj 1y ago
  The state of the art is literally a half century beyond where american manufacturing was when it died. Anecdotally according to older family members who had those old manufacturing jobs, they were working at companies doing stuff like bending a steel rod at the end and then shipping it off to a sub contractor. This was not glamorous work. Most of them got into it because you don’t need to speak english to bend a pipe in a factory. And they did everything in their power to ensure the next generation would not have to work those sorts of jobs.
• fragmede 1y ago
  https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTj8VBsTQ/ https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTj8VBsTQ/
• nomdep 1y ago
  /s He is right, we should just crawl under a rock and die instead. Remember the JFK "We choose to go to the moon" speech? (I wonder how many of this defeatist articles are financed by China somehow).
  • ks2048 1y ago
    Trump is doing his version of the JFK vision. We choose to dismantle the country and strip it for parts.
• myth_drannon 1y ago
  A personal anecdote from someone close to me. A food plant in Canada (so not heavy/high tech manufacturing), was importing raw materials from US, processing it and exporting it to US. After Trump tariffs, they bought some small plant in the middle of nowhere USA. Moving most of the equipment to that US plant, increased the salaries of Americans that worked there before (very low salaries compared to Canada). So yes, it's unskilled labour but an example of production moving quickly back to US.
• constantcrying 1y ago
  Building up manufacturing has always been a period of pain for the population. There is so much to learn and so much hard work to do with, at least initially, so little gain. 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.
• numbers_guy 1y ago
  Isn't manufacturing mostly a red herring? Sure some select people who are currently in Washington might care about it from a geopolitical angle, but the electorate is not lamenting the lack of manufacturing jobs, but rather their decreased share of the proceeds of the no.1 national economy in the world. Even if you bring all manufacturing back, I doubt those same people will be happy working in those factories.
  • fromMars 1y ago
    Exactly, especially in the conditions workers in other countries tolerate. It's the wrong solution to income inequity.
• asdajksah2123 1y ago
  America does need to bring back manufacturing. Not because a manufacturing job that pays $25/hr is somehow better than a service job that pays $25/hr. 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.
  • apercu 1y ago
    For strategic, economic, national defense and public health reasons, I completely agree with you. Too bad a large portion of our electorate is brainwashed by propaganda and/or completely out to lunch.
  • kelseyfrog 1y ago
    If we're going to defy the invisible hand, we should at least do it to benefit people in a concrete way - health care, education, UBI. Doing it for "strategy" is equivalent to simply burning the money people would have otherwise saved by doing nothing.
  • howmayiannoyyou 1y ago
    The components of a strategic manufactured product can be as simple as an injection molded switch, a LiION battery, capacitors, copper wire, etc., so the notion of bringing only "strategic items" back is as much a myth as the idea its mostly coming back to the USA. The goal here is to diversify the supply chain globally so its not concentrated in China. Internally this is sold as bringing MFG back to the USA (will happen to a noticeable degree), but that's not the actual plan.
    • ta1243 1y ago
      So putting tarrifs on Mexico, Canada, Europe helps diversify?
• Workaccount2 1y ago
  > 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. 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.
  • karn97 1y ago
    Westerners have had too good of a life and you cannot compete with an asian who is told every day if he doesn't perform he will be homeless. You just cannot compete.
    • pjc50 1y ago
      > Westerners have had too good of a life You're not going to sell the electorate on ".. and so we're going to make your life worse to compete with China", though.
      • karn97 1y ago
        Just talking about the reality we face
  • themaninthedark 1y ago
    Combined with his point 8 about work conditions, the exploitation seems willful. Factories can be air conditioned.
• jghn 1y ago
  The other day I saw the results of a poll [1] where 80% of Americans thought the *country* would be better off if more Americans worked in factories. However, only 20% of Americans thought that *they* would be better off if more Americans worked in factories. It was surprisingly bipartisan. 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-70263adbaeb7 https://www.ft.com/content/845917ed-41a5-449f-946f-70263adba...
  • toomuchtodo 1y ago
    Americans are cosplaying (voting their belief system, not what they'll do, the "revealed preference"), as they do as farmers [1] [2] [3] [4], as they do as "rural Americans" [5]. It is an identity crisis for tens of millions of people [6]. Their crisis is our shared political turmoil. Happiness is reality minus expectations. 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-farms-farmers/720361/ https://www.agriculturedive.com/news/agriculture-shifts-farm... [2] https://www.terrainag.com/insights/examining-the-economic-crisis-in-farm-country/ https://www.terrainag.com/insights/examining-the-economic-cr... [3] https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-labor https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-labor [4] https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/agriculture/our-insights/trends-driving-automation-on-the-farm https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/agriculture/our-insights... [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6q_BE5KPp18 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6q_BE5KPp18 [6] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/11/there-are-a-lot-of-bitter-people-here-im-one-of-them-rust-belt-voters-on-why-they-backed-trump-again-despite-his-broken-promises https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/11/there-are-a-...
    • lotsofpulp 1y ago
      While simultaneously needing migrant labor with lower minimum wages and labor laws for agricultural workers.
      • toomuchtodo 1y ago
• fromMars 1y ago
  The world is an interdependent eco- system these days. The idea that a country can isolate itself an reproduce expertise that has flourished elsewhere is a bit silly and tilting at windmills. 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.
• kelseyfrog 1y ago
  I had to stop reading at the Michael Jordan baseball part. Everything after that wasn't believable anymore. He wasn't that bad at baseball[1]. 1. https://vendettasportsmedia.com/michael-jordan-wasnt-that-bad-baseball/ https://vendettasportsmedia.com/michael-jordan-wasnt-that-ba...
  • mikeyouse 1y ago
    He was a mediocre AA player... compared to his basketball skill, he did absolutely suck at baseball.
  • ks2048 1y ago
    He wasn't that bad at baseball compared to a random person or a minor league player. 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.
• PaulHoule 1y ago
  I think of environmental conflicts that disappears in the US thanks to manufacturing moving to China. 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 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.
  • pjc50 1y ago
    Yeah, it's underrated how the Chinese boom just did not care for environmental impact, and because political organizing is banned the public are limited in how much they can complain about it. 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.
  • dfxm12 1y ago
    Why would obsession with anime and (I assume Jaoan is a typo for) Japan lead to sinophilia? You know sinophilia means "love of China", and that anime and Japan are not Chinese, right?
    • PaulHoule 1y ago
      Thanks for pointing out the typo, I fixed it. 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 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)
• margorczynski 1y ago
  Still, this kind of outsourcing of manufacturing (or even more food production) puts the US in an incredibly uncomfortable position, especially that China is its main geopolitical enemy. 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.
  • pjc50 1y ago
    Last time I looked the US was a net exporter of agricultural products to China. Well, until the retaliatory tariffs hit.
    • seanmcdirmid 1y ago
      Food, airplanes, tech IP (eg software, phone designs) are the main exports of the USA to China.
  • franktankbank 1y ago
    Subsidize the essentials let the free market sort the rest. I think we still want competitive markets within our borders for the stuff we subsidize so we don't get stagnation of the industry. Maybe there are clues how it could be structured like we subsidize farming.
  • causal 1y ago
    The author is not anti-US-manufacturing. He explained how the current tariff policy undermines US manufacturers. He is pointing out the obstacles and what we must do to overcome them. The obstacle is the way.
    • themaninthedark 1y ago
      I wouldn't say he is anti-manufacturing but more that he takes a defeatist view. Two of his points: "Industrial supply chain is weak" and "We don't know how to make it" are exactly the same. >all the factories which make the needed components are in Asia, >because they know how to make the best semiconductors in the world. But this is looking at the problem and then missing the point: If I decide to start mfg. IPhone in the US, I can't because there are no suppliers. As long as nothing changes, there will continue to be no suppliers. If I HAVE to mfg the IPhone in the US, at first I will import due to no supplier but someone will make a local supplier because they can undercut my importer.
• wormlord 1y ago
  I think the collapse of the American Empire is no more preventible than the collapse of the British, Spanish, or Roman empires. The issues with the US being the reserve currency has been known for a while now (and was even predicted by Keynes before the Bretton-Woods summit): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma 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.
  • Herring 1y ago
    Empires come and go, that's just a fact of life. The question was whether they'd fall back relatively gracefully like (Western) Europe, now with multiple countries ranking at the top of "World's Happiest Countries", or whether they'll become Russia 2.0 with the biggest guns, richest oligarchs, and the worst quality of life. 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.
    • potato3732842 1y ago
      The fall of the Soviet Union was arguably more graceful than the two world wars and myriad of colonial worlds it took Europe butt out. Even if you exclude the world wars it probably holds.
      • wiseowise 1y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conflicts_in_territory_of_the_former_Soviet_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conflicts_in_territory... Very graceful.
        • potato3732842 1y ago
          The sum total of the fatalities column on that page is joke compared to even the most optimistic assessment of how the British middle east or French Indochina went, and that's before you add in all the crap in Africa. Edit: You could probably even include the current Ukraine shindig and my statement would still hold.
• elbasti 1y ago
  Like OP, I work in manufacturing (after 15 years in startup land). I'm not as experienced as him, but I work in manufacturing that makes similar products on both sides of the US/Mexico border. 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!
  • franktankbank 1y ago
    The cost of manufacturing your stuff is not labor dependent only because you are probably putting together low cost components made with cheap labor. What if you had to make the spring or the resistor or the little painted metal box? Could you do that without labor being the big cost?
• system7rocks 1y ago
  This is an interesting read though I’m not an economist but even pick up that the author is wrong about some of these points. Still, I don’t think the author is an economist either. And a little harsh on US workers - but I know there are people really struggling in the US who need work and bring their problems with them. What a mess this country is in.
• Workaccount2 1y ago
  I think most people have a very confused understanding of money(currency) and value. Workers produce value, not money. Workers get a cut of that value, which is converted to money. To get by comfortably in the US, a first world developed economy, you need to be producing a lot of value. Everything is made to accommodate high value workers. 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.
  • californical 1y ago
    I somewhat agree with your point, but it’s also important to include the other side of that pricing. 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.
    • ragazzina 1y ago
      > isn’t that the actual cost of a t-shirt? And they were artificially cheap at $10 Maybe a part of the $15 difference is in marketing.
  • charlie90 1y ago
    I disagree with this. Everybody wears clothes. Everybody eats food. 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.
  • bluGill 1y ago
    You are missing something: quantity. A toilet brush itself is low value, but the US needs 30 million per year (this is a guess, but it seems reasonable enough - every person buys one every 10 years, which seems right based on how long they last. I am likely off, but probably not by an order of magnitude so let us use that number for discussion unless/until someone really wants to find a better number). If you can make/sell a million brushes per year with a gross profit of $1 on each that is a million dollars, if labor and the machines are amortize to $.50 each you net profit is then $500k/year - many small company CEOs would be happy with that. You can run the numbers many different ways, but the important point is low value production is always about volume.
• jccalhoun 1y ago
  There are some interesting things in this but there are also some deeply cynical anti-working class stereotypes: >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.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• a2128 1y ago
  >There are over a billion people in China making stuff. 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.
• pknerd 1y ago
  I loved his writing style. Everything is simple, understandable, and to the point for the people like me who don;t know much about this topic.
• ranadomo 1y ago
  > Let’s focus on America’s strengths in high end manufacturing, agriculture, and innovation instead of applying tariffs to all countries and products blindly. We should be taxing automated drones for agriculture at 300% to encourage their manufacture here, instead of applying the same blanket tariff of 54% to that that we apply to t-shirts. 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.
• dventimi 1y ago
  "America Underestimates the Difficulty of Bringing Manufacturing Back" "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.
• axegon_ 1y ago
  The true and sad truth is that manufacturing can be moved anywhere but the people that keep parroting about it's importance are in complete denial about the primary issue: costs. These costs have very little to do with infrastructure and building factories or logistics. Those are a contributor, sure, but that only scratches the surface. While China has seen insane growth in the last 20 years, that growth is at the expense of workers. No doubt they have a lot of value in terms of skills(which take a long time to acquire) but you also need to remember that there is a difference between the significance of working in Asia and Europe/north America. To us Europeans (and North Americans) work brings stability and security. In Asia, work is the difference between life and death, regardless of how skilled you are-you are legally expandable. Does anyone seriously believe that iPhones will be made in the US? The basic salary at foxconn is just under 320$/month or $1.81/hour. That is around 10x less than the US. This is ignoring the atrocious working conditions and far above the 40 hour work week. If we do factor in that as well, the difference is likely in the 25-30x range. I come from a country with a minimum hourly wage of around $3.6, let me tell you, as soon as the clock hits 18:00, people will drop everything where they stand and go home. The only way to compete with China is to automate everything and let machines do all the work, which is not a terrible idea but also nearly impossible to achieve. And even if you spend two decades doing all that, there are costs to all the R&D to get there. No one is going to buy a $15k iPhone, nor will they buy a $20K laptop. A logo that says "Made in X" won't justify the price. This comes from someone that uses a dual-xeon workstation as a personal computer. 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.
• acyou 1y ago
  This article seems to be full of propaganda and downright lies. 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. 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?
  • mindtricks 1y ago
    If you feel there are misrepresentations, then just pick one point and discuss that. I've worked in manufacturing-dependent companies and industries, and lived in China for years. His observations don't feel entirely off-base to me and fit much of what I've observed. So if there is something wrong here, help us clarify one part of it.
    • acyou 1y ago
      "To make Brain Flakes, you melt plastic and force it into shaped metal molds. Were we to import the machines and molds needed to do this, it would work for a little while, but as soon as one of those molds broke, we’d be in trouble, because there are almost no moldmakers left in the United States. The people who knew how to build and repair molds have either passed away or are long retired. In the event of a problem, we’d have to order a new mold from China or send ours back, shutting down production for months." 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.
• trc001 1y ago
  It's really only one guy that underestimates it
• sightbroke 1y ago
  I am by no means an export on manufacturing, nor international trade, economics, or virtually anything relevant to manufacturing. Just a layman here. 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.
  • aaronbaugher 1y ago
    Yes, there's little nuance. I see so many people saying it will be hard to bring back manufacturing jobs, or "we can't go back to the 50s," and then they just stop as if that settles the argument. The implication, which they never say out loud, is that we shouldn't even try, just accept things as they are. Just be the Big Consumer until someday the rest of the world doesn't want our dollars anymore, and then what? 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.
• casey2 1y ago
  All of these points are overstated or just flat out wrong. For example the price of cheap manufacturing labor in America isn't higher than it looks, it's much lower, because there are an extremely large number of NEET men. 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.
• nobodyandproud 1y ago
  These are all good points, but I’ll add a different take here. 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.
• hintymad 1y ago
  The mainstream assessment is deindustrialization is inevitable in the western world because all kinds of legitimate reasons: the cost is too high. The talent pool is too small. We are left behind and lack critical IPs and infrastructures. People are too lazy/stupid/uneducated/self righteous/<your favorite derogatory phrases>. We can hang on to our high-value service industry. 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.
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago
  "In other words, unlike many who have voiced an opinion on this topic, I know what I am talking about." "I'm a first generation American..."
• keashe12 1y ago
  I think there are many people in the United States that would rather have manufacturing jobs than to have fast food or retail jobs. Kirk
• bawana 1y ago
  We offshored manufacturing for profit. We are now offshoring brainpower. Manufacturing will only come back in the form of intelligent robots .
• nyeah 1y ago
  Fine, we underestimate the difficulty. But we can make a detailed plan like other countries do. The US has massive advantages. Just no longer so massive that we can expect to win on sheer awesomeness. 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.
  • acdha 1y ago
    > But we can make a detailed plan like other countries do 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.
    • nyeah 1y ago
      Administrations come and go. Voters need to calm down and ask for something rational.
• thctphr 1y ago
  I don't think it's realistic to bring manufacturing back, so to speak. Are the words being taken literally here? Does this truly mean Orange Man wants to bring all manufacturing back to the United States, or do we want to weaken our largest competitor and buy those cheap products in other countries who are less of a threat, speaking in terms of their technological advancement and economical trajectory?
  • seanmcdirmid 1y ago
    China has been moving cheap product production to SEA for awhile now, what the USA wants is countries like Vietnam to make cheap products without Chinese involvement in the manufacturing tech and supply chains…which is pretty much impossible.
    • palmotea 1y ago
      > China has been moving cheap product production to SEA for awhile now, what the USA wants is countries like Vietnam to make cheap products without Chinese involvement in the manufacturing tech and supply chains…which is pretty much impossible. 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."
      • seanmcdirmid 1y ago
        That’s complete BS. China has been building out this advantage for a couple of decades now, and anyone paying attention knows this. The common knowledge presented by Trump isn’t very useful. Yes, America too could build out this capability by aggressively investing in it for a couple of decades.
• ninetyninenine 1y ago
  [flagged]
  • tptacek 1y ago
    You're right: it's a bit racist. It's also faulty reasoning: you went to a high school in Cupertino with a markedly higher population of second-generation Asian-Americans, and went to a high school in an extraordinarily wealthy area; in fact, I think you might be attempting to generalize from the zip code with the highest density of immigrant professionals in the United States. If you want to generalize from China, that by itself is 1.4 billion people; they're as varied as any large population.
    • ninetyninenine 1y ago
      But I’m also Asian myself and all my relatives and everyone I know from China is the is way. It’s a stereotype. Asian tiger moms. Asians are good at math. Math competitions, test scores. Quantitative metrics everywhere point to a worth ethic that is viciously high. My conclusion of course is derived from quantitative evidence from general populations and iq scores by country. When I mentioned Cupertino I did it only to say that all the quantitative evidence happens to align with my anecdotal experience.
      • tptacek 1y ago
        There are no such things as "IQ scores by country". If you're thinking about the data behind "IQ and the Wealth of Nations", the Richard Lynn stuff, it's basically fraudulent.
        • ninetyninenine 1y ago
          [flagged]
          • tptacek 1y ago
            I didn't say anything about the validity of IQ. I said that Richard Lynn's numbers, which this site cites, are fraudulent. "IIT 2024" appears to be results from a website survey. Respectfully, I think it's you that needs to do a bit more reading. I might be wrong about any of this stuff; I'm not an expert. But I'm pretty sure the first Google search result you find for "IQ by country" isn't going to rebut me effectively.
• dboreham 1y ago
  One American did the underestimating.
• LatteLazy 1y ago
  I prefer the alternative explain: this is just trump bringing in a national sales tax without having to go through the senate or eat the unpopularity. 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)
• readenough 1y ago
  I think Molson Hart should add a panda to their line of stuffed animals.
• blindriver 1y ago
  The amount of pooh-poohing of this idea is even more than I would have expected from HN, despite tech’s love of belittling others ideas. 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?
  • pif 1y ago
    > We have all benefitted from globalization immensely but we don’t have neighbors, families or friends that have been destroyed by it. 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.
    • blindriver 1y ago
      Blue collar workers never pushed for globalization because they knew exactly what would happen, they would lose their jobs and they did. 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.
• qgin 1y ago
  Given what’s likely to happen with with AI and robotics over the next 10 years, all this debate about bringing back manufacturing jobs is pretty silly
  • daveguy 1y ago
    There is no technological path to AGI, much less intelligent robots, in the next 10 years. Everyone underestimates the massive amount of parallel processing going on in a single human brain. That doesn't even consider how massive the sensor array is. The doublings required for our artificial technology to catch up is about 25-35 years, maybe more depending on how much Moore's Law slows down.
    • rollcat 1y ago
      > The doublings required for our artificial technology to catch up is about 25-35 years, maybe more depending on how much Moore's Law slows down. "A technology that is '20 years away' will be 20 years away indefinitely." https://m.xkcd.com/678/ https://m.xkcd.com/678/
• Havoc 1y ago
  The part that blows my mind is timing. It's going to take years to get anything up and running. Yet tariffs are cutting supply immediately. wtf is the plan for the 5-10 years in between?
  • chewbacha 1y ago
    oligarch buy up of failed industries. Then we all live as renters.
• thyristan 1y ago
  Building a new factory needs a few years from idea to start of planning to production. 2 years if you are really really quick maybe, 4 to 6 years might be more realistic. The term for the current administration ends in 3.5 years and the next one probably won't be lead by Trump, so things will change. 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.
  • potato3732842 1y ago
    Politicians have been running on platforms of about undoing the damage of offshoring since Obama's first term at least, now here we are in 2025 and someone just won an election and it played a key role so clearly it's a big important thing and it's reasonable to expect it to stick around as an issue on the official party platforms. There is a non-negligible chance that in 2029 there will be someone in the white house who continues to push in that direction, even if the specific policy is very different from the current tariff policy. 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.
• jongjong 1y ago
  Nonsense. Bringing manufacturing back to the US will be easy. Economists will probably call it "Miracle on the hudson river". 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.
• NoTeslaThrow 1y ago
  We never stopped manufacturing, we just stopped employing people. > 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.
  • nickpsecurity 1y ago
    Which means policies that reverse that are immensely important. The process of offshore our jobs and much I.P. took decades. Getting them back and rebuilding manufacturing support will take a long time, too. Just need to make steady progress each year with incentives that encourage large leaps in progress.
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  • glitchc 1y ago
    Concur, employee training and retention are at an all-time low. There are no positions available for junior employees, minimal onboarding and mentoring of new employees. Organizations have stopped planning people's careers. Used to be that the employee's career growth was their manager's problem, while the employee could focus on the work. Now the employee must market themselves as often, if not more often, than actually doing the work. Meanwhile organizations see employees as cost centres and a net drain on their revenue sources. Corporate culture in America is definitely broken. I'm not sure how we can fix it.
    • nradov 1y ago
• vdbdbdbdbc 1y ago
  [flagged]
• alkonaut 1y ago
  7. Uncertainty seems overlooked these days. The job of politicians is to make people and businesses dare. Making people dare getting an expensive education or starting a business or hiring your first employee or whatever it might be. What that requires will vary (if it's a social security system or a tax break for new companies or whatever). But something it always requires is trust in the stability. That the calculus for an investment is valid over N years. That laws or taxes don't swing wildly with political cycles.
  • mlinhares 1y ago
    That has been the bane of brazil for decades, every politician, at every level, undoes or stops whatever the previous politician was doing so there's absolutely no guarantee what you're doing today will still work tomorrow. 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.
    • e40 1y ago
      For decades one political party has fomented this by pushing disdain for intellectuals and experts and the effectiveness of government itself.
• iancmceachern 1y ago
  Not America, Trump
• dghughes 1y ago
  Even if you guys did rebuild e.g. textile factories down there in crazy land you're not going to pay workers $300/month to be able to compete globally. Nobody wants to pay $1,000 for a pair of underwear.
  • eYrKEC2 1y ago
    Tariffs don't help you compete globally -- they're about disadvantaging the global in favor of the local. 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system
• ggerules 1y ago
  Extremely well written! 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.
• newsclues 1y ago
  Difficult sure, but the economic incentives and national security implications will make the difficult task possible
• anon7000 1y ago
  This article was a really interesting take on this too: https://semianalysis.com/2025/03/11/america-is-missing-the-new-labor-economy-robotics-part-1/ https://semianalysis.com/2025/03/11/america-is-missing-the-n... 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.
• danvoell 1y ago
  "incentivize, subsidize" - yes. There should be less incentives and tax breaks for "holding an asset" and more incentives for making things that improve human lives. Most of the laws are set by the incumbents who stand to lose what they have built and who have the money to pay the lawyers to set the tax code. Real estate should not get incentives unless its getting someone in a home. Private equity, same. Venture capital, after a certain point, same. If you are worth a bazillian dollars, same. A lawyer with balls needs to take on the tax code. I'm kind of hoping the whole Harvard escapade awakens a few legal idealists out there.
  • runeks 1y ago
    > There should be less incentives and tax breaks for "holding an asset" and more incentives for making things that improve human lives. I think you're overlooking that, say, giving out a 10-year loan for a small business is exactly "holding an asset" (holding a bond issued by said small business for 10 years). For the benefit of everyone involved.
• Sporktacular 1y ago
  Written when the tariff on Chinese phones was only 54% and later 10%. Ah, those were the days.
• elif 1y ago
  It really is starting to bother me when people attribute a deceptive narrative crafted by one individual to "American thinking" as if there was even a lone individual in this country who was earnestly believing a global trade war would solve a non existent trade problem before the narrative became convenient to our dictator
• ethagknight 1y ago
  This article is very goofy. America manufactures very complicated things. Building an iPhone at scale is not complicated in the grand scheme. Building it as low cost per unit is a complicated socioeconomic question- ive seen and read enough about working conditions at Foxconn to know that the complexity rests with the government control of the laborers' lives, and the laborers' lack of relief from what Americans would decidedly call slavery. 1- Tariffs will bring some manufacturing back to the US. The before/after tariff pricing presented in the article is fiction- price points cannot simply be doubled, consumers will reject it, pricing is extremely complicated and sensitive, Apple would have already had the iPhone set at $616 if they believed that was an attainable price for the volume. Apple is among the most profitable companies in the world, in part thanks to their mastery of labor exploitation. 2- Weak industrial supply chain- we have an incredible supply chain and industry can hop right on. Trains, planes, and automobiles galore. Extremely adaptive and we have plenty of room to expand. Auto manufacturers dont seem to mind building in the US, slightly more complicated than the toys that Molson sells. 3- We dont know how to make it: some things sure, most things: yes we do. We do have some additional capacity building required but this is not some crazy challenge. The beautiful thing about it is that, for the stuff we cant make easily, we can just pay the tax and keep in motion. It becomes a simple optimization calculation. 4- effective cost of labor- this is a challenge for sure but it has significant upside implications for American labor and the American lower and middle class. Again, this is a simple optimization. He points to all the fraud in the American system and the slave-like conditions of the Chinese system as if those are things things that shouldn't be addressed / barriers to entry for US? US needs lots of improvements that should be addressed not matter what. 5- Infrastructure- I seriously doubt the electricity stats but accepting it at face value, we have endless gas and sunlight in the west, US can adapt here as well. China notably does NOT have endless gas supplies. 6- Made in America will take time- OK? I am here for it! 7- Uncertainty- I would love to see them permanent. But locking in some wins from 4 years of America-first, modernized manufacturing base will go a long way. 8- Most Americans are going to hate manufacturing- why is that something you get to declare and presume? I think Americans will love job opportunities. 9- The labor does exist, we are just paying them to not work. it's an epidemic and circular problem. A bigger current issue is that we also dont have enough jobs to put low skilled workers to work. We need more low-ish complexity but reliable jobs. And so on...
• calebm 1y ago
  > And to sew, we must first repair the social fabric. This.
• computerthings 1y ago
  [dead]
• pdfseek 1y ago
  Made in China is the result of meticulous division of labor across various industries in Chinese society, gradually built up over 30-40 years. If Americans decided to abandon their current lifestyle and start building from scratch, perhaps they could. But who would give it up?
  • gsf_emergency 1y ago
    I'd say 60 years. As you implied one can't just dismiss the heartbreaking necessity of the CuRev Even after considering the alternate pathway called ROC[tm]-- after all you may argue Morris Chang et al gave up lifestyles-- & I hear Rationalistic Daoism is having a resurgence on the mainland (vs Confucianism)-- Because (sadly) it's all still about morale & spiritual
• ricardobeat 1y ago
  > It may seem trivial to make that glass that separates your finger from the electronic engineering that powers your ability to access the internet, but it’s difficult. Out of all examples one could pick, this is the worst, as Corning Gorilla glass is actually made in the USA (Kentucky), and used by all other manufacturers.
• torginus 1y ago
  Regardless of what is believed about how well implemented or necessary these reforms are I believe there is an ironclad law of reality that real wealth can only be expressed in terms of material things - houses, phones, computers. The era of making up tall tales about the supposed value of money via all sorts of futures and stocks and financial instruments the feeble mind can scarely understand cannot be over soon enough. The value of money manifests when its exchange for physical goods. If the Communist fairy waved her magic wand about and distributedall the wealth of the rich to every american equally, half of the people would decide to buy a new car with their newfound wealth next day, only to find out the supply of cars hasn't increased. There'd be like 10% more cars sold, with people bidding over each other to actually get access to that supply, which would trigger massive inflation in practical terms, revealing the emperor had no clothes all along.
• hnburnsy 1y ago
  >We don’t have the infrastructure to manufacture It is really that hard. Look what happened in Arizona. TSCM brought the most complex semiconductor chip making supply chains to the US on a vacant piece of land in NW Phoenix in about 4 years. And it wasn't just TSMC that invested in the Arizona site, but also companies like Linde ($600M), APS ($100M), Sunlit Chemical ($100M), Air Liquide ($60M), and Chang Chun ($300M). Maybe others can comment, but are semiconductor chips the most complex thing to manufacture in the world? Not sure but the Arizona TSMC supply chain proves it can be done.
• initramfs 1y ago
  if manufacturing were brought back, the skies would be filled with coal soot. better that the u.s innovates in other ways, but the u.s seems to largely reject renewable energy to power those plants.
• mystified5016 1y ago
  I work for a US startup manufacturing (as much as is feasible) in the US. Because of the embarrassment that is meant to be our government, DoE hasn't paid for a contract completed in December (including physical goods), and DoD has silently stopped all of the R&D contracts we've been applying for. We're about a week or three away from bankruptcy. Our only foreign vendors are for PCBs and a particular type of motor. US PCB fabs are and have always been vastly more expensive and really don't do small scale runs at any sort of reasonable price. The motors? No one makes them domestically. I'd gripe more, but this administration simply doesn't care about little guys like us. US small business are going to start dropping like flies soon.
• realperspectde 1y ago
  America does not have to bring manufacturing back. It has to devote resources to robotics and AI to replace workers to make products for itself and it's people. The transition period is currently already underway due to the tariffs. An unintented consequences is that the big players in commerce(Nike, All Big brand names...) no longer have a monopoly due to China relaxing the regulation on it's factories to disclose for which brands they manufacture products. Now that the everyday person knows that they can also buy products from the same factories at a fraction of what they used to pay. They will do that. So the middleman will slowly fade out unless they can compete with... Robotics and AI. The other consequences of the shift in this consumption dynamic is that it behaves in a downward fashion on inflation. People's incomes did not increase but they can now purchase more with their incomes. Jackets that used to be advertised as 200/300/400 dollars now can be bought for $20/$30 directly from the middlemen in China and get shipped to the US since they are under the $800 dollar limit. This is actually a win win for all US residents. Enjoy it while it lasts.
• numitus 1y ago
  to return production to the United States, it is necessary to reduce the level of wages and consumption to Chinese level
• RecycledEle 1y ago
  I understand his economic arguments. Let me make a national security argument: China will move against Taiwan. Chinese ambitions do not stop there. They want Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and many more nations as their new territories. We saw international trade cut off in WW1 and again in WW2. It will happen again, and soon. We are better off with an incremental step-down in trade from tariffs than a sudden cut-off. That is what Donald Trump's tariffs are doing.
• bnolsen 1y ago
  This is a case of taking away existing artificial barriers and let what people do their thing in the market. 5 and 10 year plans are only for economies run into the ground by an elite intelligentsia.
• panny 1y ago
  meta observation; It is amusing to me that the comments on this site are majority "No, we are not smart enough to run a drill press. That takes years of training!" but back in 2020, every commenter was pretending they were doctors.
• susiecambria 1y ago
  And for those who want a video, watch Scott Galloway on Anderson Cooper https://youtu.be/qg3JOR44r6M?si=Ggwfuuy-_lXjFUxq https://youtu.be/qg3JOR44r6M?si=Ggwfuuy-_lXjFUxq. Galloway notes that the US is only second to China in manufacturing and the Cato survey that found 80% of Americans want more manufacturing but 1-in-4 or 1-in-5 have any interest in going to work in manufacturing. And he quotes Dave Chappelle, "we want to wear Nikes, not make Nikes." (https://youtu.be/LAg1bDvuarc?si=-aLApcSdAk75d7Vr https://youtu.be/LAg1bDvuarc?si=-aLApcSdAk75d7Vr) Back to the article, I'm no expert on tariffs, but explaining things to people and trying to understand where they "are" (I'm a social worker, so this is SW-speak) are two things I've spent my policy career doing. If I hear one more quilter (I make and sell one-of-a-kind quilts) say that the solution to the high price of quilting fabric (because of tariffs) is returning manufacturing to the US and Trump is our savior for recognizing this, well, I don't know what I'm going to do other than share the link to this blog.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• anon6362 1y ago
  To build assembly lines, one has to first make custom tools, jigs, and parts and apply processes to them that cannot just be 3D printed in plastic or metal or FDM'ed. The main show-stopper to them is the lack of working knowledge about precision tooling manufacturing. For example, some of the best power machine tools in the world came from Germany and from Bridgeport, CT between 1910 and 1965. There are/were moderately large, 1 micron runout milling machines such as Moore No. 2 and No. 3. These things generally aren't made anymore and not many people know the tricks and processes to make similar or equivalent machines that make other tools and machines. Like that the unshielded body heat of an operator can swing the runout of a precision machine in an otherwise climate-controlled environment.
• JoelJacobson 1y ago
  Could anyone clarify what the author means regarding duty drawback? He writes: "There is no duty drawback for exporting. In the past, even in the United States, if you imported something and then exported it, the tariff you paid on the import would be refunded to you. They got rid of that..." My understanding was that duty drawback—where import duties are refunded if the imported items or their components are later exported—is still broadly available in the U.S., though with certain exceptions (like steel/aluminum tariffs under Section 232 or trade within USMCA countries). Is he referring specifically to recent tariff changes or targeted exceptions rather than a general elimination? Or has there been a broader policy shift I'm missing?
• mocules 1y ago
  There's an argument that America is fundamentally broken at this point. By fundamentally, I mean value wise the country is splitting apart. Trump is the saviour for half the country and the devil for the other half. It's basically taken less than a hundred years, even after riding on the back of world war 2 and hegemony, to bring the country back to the great depression. The trade wars for me are just another desperate attempt by the country to point blame elsewhere. House prices are at an all time high. Cost of living is becoming unbearable. So, $25 dollar menial jobs are scoffed at, because of inflation. Inflation is due to out of control printing/spending and government debt. Debt is due to big government, capitalist greed and oligarchy. Capitalist greed is due to economies of scale when offshoring. Oligarchy and big government is due to an entrenched lobby system. Lobby system is due to the cost of electioneering and bad decisions by successive governments. It goes on and on. Root cause: Systemic rot. Diagnosis: Failing empire Prognosis: UK (if the fall is managed)
• poulpy123 1y ago
  Yeah sorry but the Apple math is so weird that it cmake me doubt the rest of the article. An increase of 54$ in taxes doesn't explain the 216$ increase in price. Of course to keep the same profit, the price would increase more than 54$ to handle some externalities and the decrease of sales, but it would be paid only once and do not need to increase at each step
• bostonwalker 1y ago
  > And if we want to apply tariffs, do it slowly. Instead of saying that products will be tariffed at 100% tomorrow, say they’ll be 25% next year, 50% after that, 75% after that, and 100% in year four. And then make it a law instead of a presidential decree This is the big difference between a tariff regime that is credible in such a way that the business community can plan investment around it, and the current one that has mostly just caused chaos and confusion.
• greenie_beans 1y ago
  > 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. he knows a lot about manufacturing but weirdly not much about labor. very unsubstantiated, derogatory comment. it gets worse! > 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. > Chinese workers are 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. > And they can do their times tables. To manufacture, you need to be able to consistently and accurately multiply 7 times 9 and read in English, and a disturbingly large portion of the American workforce cannot do that. like the fuck? where are your sources? this sounds like some ignorant shit to say
  • monetus 1y ago
    It is extraordinarily malicious, and reminds me of Michael Richards.
  • beachtaxidriver 1y ago
    Lol that was my reaction too, this guy is an asshole. He should just leave.
  • DonsDiscountGas 1y ago
    I'd guess the source is stuff he has personally witnessed, which means even if it's true (would somebody just go on the Internet and tell lies?) it says nothing about prevalence.
• igravious 1y ago
  Basically [Inside Business China](https://www.youtube.com/@Inside_China_Business https://www.youtube.com/@Inside_China_Business) in a blog post.
• tobir 1y ago
  The litigiousness point should have been at the top of the list. You can build roadways, but if you constantly have stories in the news of people striking it rich by suing someone, and half the billboards you see in your town is of people telling you they'll help you do it, then it's going to be extremely expensive to employ folks. It'll be easier to teach folks hard work, it's very difficult to change a culture when 1. A huge sector of our legal system geared towards it 2. People can easily get rich off of it.
• g0db1t 1y ago
  [flagged]
• superqd 1y ago
  The most fundamental problem in the U.S. is this: Infinite Growth Capitalism The VAST majority of what is wrong with our society (political and obviously economic) can be traced to this. It's the expectation that every economic endeavor must show a return on investment - forever. That every entity must strive to optimize the bottom line every day of its existence. Optimizing for growth above all else crushes and consumes everything. Increasing local manufacturing will only create more opportunities for people to be indentured to a company that literally hates their existence. A company is forced to build here in the U.S. and people are supposed to rejoice they now have another option for their lives to simply be tolerated and disposable?
• user777777 1y ago
  Pol Pot wanted his people to go back to agriculture society. Mao wanted his people to build steel smelters in their backyards…
• user777777 1y ago
  America is the wealthiest nation in the world. You just need more equality! Not MORE wealth! Where is that supposed wealth going to go to? Look where it has gone!
• mv4 1y ago
  Setting geopolitics aside, Russia was able to revive and ramp up domestic manufacturing after the sanctions. So this should be possible in the US.
  • flakespancakes 1y ago
    I think it's a little early to hail Russia's war economy as a success story worth emulating.
• gxonatano 1y ago
  America does not underestimate that difficulty. Donald Trump does.
• steve76 1y ago
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