The US is building factories at a fast rate

Meanwhile in China:

- exports plunge by 7.5% in May, far more than expected https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/07/chinas-exports-plunge-by-7po...

- profit tumbles 18% in April https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-industrial-profits...

- chip progress stagnating. Oppo chip design unit completely shut down https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/12/oppo-chip-disbands-phone-c.... Japan stops shipping semiconductor equipments to China https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Tech/Semiconductors/Japan-c.... China is still stuck on 14nm chips.

- multinationals moving supply chains out of China faster than ever. Tesla asks Chinese suppliers to build plants in Mexico (June '23) https://cnevpost.com/2023/06/08/tesla-asks-chinese-suppliers.... BYD make EVs in Vietnam (May '23) https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/chines.... On top of older news this year that Apple wants Foxconn to move out 50% of its production lines from China by 2025. And Dell's production completely out of China by 2027.

China is no longer the "world's factory". It will stagnate for 10+ years, similar to Japan's lost decades, but with worser birth rate than Japan today. It reported 8M babies in 2022, low that was last reached in 1940s.

We've never seen a large portion (25%+) of a large modern economy vanish in a span of a few years. (factories moving out, which decreases downstream economic activities such as real estate and retail).

This is great news, just anecdotally I have personally seen 3 large factories come up in my state in the last 2 years. All related to EVs and battery supply chain but still quite the pace.

Perhaps I'm just bad at economics, but it always seemed to me that the countries making all the stuff would eventually hold all the power (and I say this as someone working in tech who produces nothing tangible). The fact that it costs exorbitant amounts to construct new buildings, railways, etc. in the U.S. and how our cities almost look antiquated or frozen in time compared to Asian cities shows that we missed a generation or two and probably need to catch back up now.

W in WTO stands for the World. It does not say anything about the US.

Part of why the US working class has been so angry isn't just the economic misery but the decades of being gaslit by politicians pretending that outsourcing to countries with no OSHA, no EPA, no concerns about carbon emissions, no workers rights, no unions, and radically lower wages is going to create jobs in America.

It's a clearly absurd proposition on its face. Of course that's going to depress wages and destroy jobs, especially in manufacturing.

I'm all for free trade with other free countries with similar levels of rights for workers and concern for the environment. Outsourcing elsewhere should be taxed proportionally to the gap in these areas.

If you want a simple to implement solution, a tax on a combination of wage disparity and CO2 emission disparity would be enough to capture most of the relevant differences. The latter can be very objectively checked using satellite imaging.