> It's true that tariffs will make buying goods from China less appealing, but if you look at the outcome, it's not really a win. Consumers are paying more for the same goods, companies are scrambling to move their production to India and Malaysia, and there's not a significant increase in US manufacturing.
If you look at the actual outcome, it was that China devalued their currency or otherwise lowered prices to eat the tariffs, because their nightmare is manufacturing getting a foothold anywhere else, whether it's India or the US. Which is a win for the US because we have China paying us billions of dollars in tariffs without paying significantly higher prices for goods.
That doesn't help US manufacturing directly, but it gives the US a lot of leverage in trade negotiations because now China wants that situation to stop happening. And in the meantime the money can be used for tax cuts or subsidies to US businesses.
We could also just raise the tariffs more, for as long as China decides they want to keep paying them instead of letting them push manufacturing out of China.
> Not only tax cuts, but subsidies and investment aimed at increasing manufacturing in specific industries
Tax cuts and subsidies are equivalent. And it's not clear why targeting specific industries is useful rather than giving the same incentives across all industries.
> A concerted program to identify labor and skills shortages, and address them
Address them how? With more subsidies, which is really just equivalent to tax cuts again? This is the sort of thing markets are better at than governments.
> A program to identify the missing parts of manufacturing ecosystems and address them. One reason why electronics are made in China is not only cheap labor, but access to a whole ecosystem of suppliers and other manufacturers. Need one million PCBs assembled, plastic casings made, half a million cardboard boxes printed, instruction manuals printed and bound, well, there's a whole ecosystem of partners ready to get all of these things done with the capacity to have a relatively short turnaround time.
This is certainly a problem, but it seems to imply the opposite of your other proposed solutions. You would then not want to target specific segments but rather have broad incentives to engage in all different kinds of business activity, i.e. general tax cuts.
> A clear bipartisan commitment that this is something that won't get deprioritized or axed one or two administrations later, but something that is of national interest and that both parties agree to push forward
This seems like something you need Democrats to do rather than something you need Trump to do.
> A national focus on a key differentiator from other countries' manufacturing. China has cheap, Japan, Switzerland, and Germany have good, the US has big and sturdy maybe?
What does this even mean? Countries don't need to differentiate like this. How is it even differentiation when three of the four countries you listed are using the same one?