The US is building factories at a fast rate • Hacker News Board

Re: The US is building factories at a fast rate

#61

Post by libraryatnight » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 8:11 PM UTC

csomar wrote: post #40

obblekk wrote: post #2

> The US has added around 800,000 jobs in manufacturing employment over the last two years, employing around 13 million workers It's too early to know, but if it turns out the solution to decades of economic misery for middle class blue collar workers was 1. 50% tariffs on China, and 2. $100B of subsidies to chip makers and green tech... The reversal of Reaganomics we're living through will become permanent for at le…

> Maybe a good time to start a company selling to the government. Why do you think this sudden rise in industrial investment? The US didn't turn attractive overnight. This is the "economy" selling to the government their $280Bn CHIPS package. > It's too early to know, but if it turns out the solution to decades of economic misery for middle class blue collar workers was A 50% tariff does not affect attractiveness. Yo…

I dunno, my wife works in commodity management and the number of companies she's helped get out of China lately is staggering and they've straight up begged her not to move at times. Begged. I can't imagine how this looks higher on the food chain.

Re: The US is building factories at a fast rate

#62

Post by FrustratedMonky » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 8:12 PM UTC

standardUser wrote: post #37

nimish wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bad free trade deals likely did more than Reaganomics here. NAFTA + China-WTO accession really did not help American manufacturing.

Reagan launched the Uruguay Round of trade negotiations that led to the creation of the WTO, which itself resulted from the Bretton Woods system and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (pre-cursor to WTO) that were established after WWII. The US had been on that trajectory for a long time before Bill Clinton put it into overdrive!

Yeah, so many people don't read history and realize all this WTO and Globalization the US population hates, was created by the US, on purpose.

Re: The US is building factories at a fast rate

#63

Post by justrealist » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 8:12 PM UTC

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #4

obblekk wrote: post #2

> The US has added around 800,000 jobs in manufacturing employment over the last two years, employing around 13 million workers It's too early to know, but if it turns out the solution to decades of economic misery for middle class blue collar workers was 1. 50% tariffs on China, and 2. $100B of subsidies to chip makers and green tech... The reversal of Reaganomics we're living through will become permanent for at le…

> solution to decades of economic misery for middle class blue collar workers was 50% tariffs on China Who could have thought that manufacturing using western labor and laws, can't compete with manufacturing in a totalitarian regime with no respect for human lives/rights or the environment? /s Free trade should only happen as long as the trading partners share similar laws and regulation on human rights and environme…

You don't even need that. Requiring reciprocal open markets would have gone a long way.

Don't allow Google or US media imports? Sorry, you can't export cheap manufactured goods.

Re: The US is building factories at a fast rate

#64

Post by dcdc123 » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 8:13 PM UTC

Maybe this is why politicians seem to trying to ruin all education. They want generations of undereducated assembly line workers.

Re: The US is building factories at a fast rate

#65

Post by ako » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 8:14 PM UTC

api wrote: post #19

obblekk wrote: post #2

> The US has added around 800,000 jobs in manufacturing employment over the last two years, employing around 13 million workers It's too early to know, but if it turns out the solution to decades of economic misery for middle class blue collar workers was 1. 50% tariffs on China, and 2. $100B of subsidies to chip makers and green tech... The reversal of Reaganomics we're living through will become permanent for at le…

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 j…

These agreements are not the only cause, if everyone would have kept on buying locally produced products, the jobs would have remained. Problem is that we bought the cheaper products, making it impossible for companies producing locally to stay profitable. We want our cake and eat it too.

Re: The US is building factories at a fast rate

#66

Post by omegaworks » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 8:14 PM UTC

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #57

alexose wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another important factor is that China's workers make more money than they used to, especially relative to the West. There's not as much of a cheap-labor-arbitrage opportunity as there was in the early 2000s. Here's a chart illustrating this point: https://i.insider.com/532ccb18eab8eadc39f33da6

Exactly. The factories follow the Cheap Labor. From US to China, then it was China to Thailand/SKorea, then from Thailand to India. Probably don't have chain correct, and it is different for different industries. But there was definitely a progression of 'local salary goes up', 'time to move to next cheapest country'.

A race to the bottom for globalized capital, capable of making cross-border moves with a freedom denied to labor in any meaningful capacity.

Re: The US is building factories at a fast rate

#67

Post by mwbajor » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 8:15 PM UTC

mcphage wrote: post #48

mwbajor wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boomers saying: "I don't want my kid to go to machineshop in HS, he'll turn out to be a plumber" is what did it too. Building things has been looked down upon for 40 years because boomers thought it was a step backwards since their parents worked on the assembly line.

"We'll just design things and have people elsewhere do the building" is one of the dumbest ideas. How do you think you learn how to build things without building things? Who's going to build the next big thing? Oy!

A great litmus test to see if an educational administrator is knowledgeable on STEM is to see if they regard woodshop/metalshop/autoshop as purely "vocational".

Bare in mind, vocational still means "not college bound" == "useless" == "doesn't look good in the US news rankings"

Ive talked to superintendents and they just give me a blank stare when I told them that a great way to get kids to understand the cartesian coordinate system is in machine or woodshop, reading a blueprint, schematic etc. Actually doing the work is better than a word problem. They have no respect for it and this is in the best educated state in the US with supposedly the best school system.

Bottom line, if we are going to build things again, it needs to start in the schools.

Re: The US is building factories at a fast rate

#68

Post by mistrial9 » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 8:17 PM UTC

rufus_foreman wrote: post #42

majormajor wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reagan also jacked up the national debt pumping $$$$ into defense technology and hardware development, but I suspect you know that neither tarriffs nor unrestricted government spending without an eye towards the debt is what "Reaganomics" is popularly remembered as. Outside of the more immediately-public-facing stuff like tax cuts, Reagan's legacy is very much a "do what we say, not what we did" situation.

>> "Reagan also jacked up the national debt pumping $$$$ into defense technology and hardware development" That sounds like manufacturing jobs to me.

more than a hundred large companies consolidated into just five, from 1980 to 2000.. those five are [ Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, Raytheon, Northrup-Grumman, General Dynamics ] .. wages are associated with management practices, eligibility and "where did all that money go". For us civilians who do not build weapons, this was maybe not as great as some here say it was...

Re: The US is building factories at a fast rate

#69

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 8:18 PM UTC

FpUser wrote: post #43

api wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 j…

Problem with this policy is that it will prevent poor countries from ever getting up the ladder. It also ignores the fact that many advanced human right respecting countries got there not without plundering less fortunate for generations.

How is that a problem for the United States, for instance?

Do officeholders in the United States have any responsibility to people in foreign countries beyond that in ratified treaties?

Do we have any moral obligation to make restitution for our great-great-grandparents' crimes to the great-great-grandchildren of the victims? And what level of punishment is going too far?

Re: The US is building factories at a fast rate

#70

Post by anlaw » Thu, Jun 08, 2023, 8:19 PM UTC

csomar wrote: post #40

obblekk wrote: post #2

> The US has added around 800,000 jobs in manufacturing employment over the last two years, employing around 13 million workers It's too early to know, but if it turns out the solution to decades of economic misery for middle class blue collar workers was 1. 50% tariffs on China, and 2. $100B of subsidies to chip makers and green tech... The reversal of Reaganomics we're living through will become permanent for at le…

> Maybe a good time to start a company selling to the government. Why do you think this sudden rise in industrial investment? The US didn't turn attractive overnight. This is the "economy" selling to the government their $280Bn CHIPS package. > It's too early to know, but if it turns out the solution to decades of economic misery for middle class blue collar workers was A 50% tariff does not affect attractiveness. Yo…

Economic philosophy always ignores the real humans who will exist regardless what cherry picked economic markers indicate.

Reality will never care about any human philosophy. Humans will invest agency in interesting things regardless of some model in a vacuum anyone can conjure. Finance is has something very in common with religion; something humanity has zero obligation to perpetuate.

You have no idea what you’re talking about because we’ll just “fix” the philosophy to align with the reality. Trying to “fix people” to serve the philosophy is not happening.