HN Reader

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.

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.

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.

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.

This.

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?

> 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.

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?)

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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

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.

Kirk

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.

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

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?

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.

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...

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.

>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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

"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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

What a mess this country is in.

Ah, those were the days.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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?

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.

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)

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.