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The US is building factories at a fast rate

businessinsider.com

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Re: The US is building factories at a fast rate

#191

Post by throwaway2037 »

cryptonector wrote: post #179
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…

> The reversal of Reaganomics Reagan wanted to get the U.S. back on the gold standard, which leads to balanced trade. He was talked out of it by Fed chair Volker. What you call Reaganomics goes back to Nixon. I suppose that's probably just as well for you, but I don't think any administration between 1971 and 1991 (or even 2011 or now even) really thought "hey, let's take blue collar jobs and send them to Japan, and…

    Reagan wanted to get the U.S. back on the gold standard, which leads to balanced trade.
Thank you to share. I was surprised to confirm this through a simple Google search: "Did Regan want the gold standard?"

Sample result:

    In 1981, for example, former U.S. President Ronald Reagan created a “gold commission” which decided not to go back to the gold standard.
Thank goodness they said "no"!

Re: The US is building factories at a fast rate

#192

Post by throwaway2037 »

pirate787 wrote: post #84
standardUser wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Reagan also laid out the vision for NAFTA and signed the Canada-US FTA in 1988

I think it is important to separate free trade agreements between highly developed nations and under developed nations. For example, when NAFTA was enacted, Canada was already very rich (like the US), but Mexico was much poorer than both. It was pure labour arbitrage on both parts.

Re: The US is building factories at a fast rate

#193

Post by midoridensha »

wizofaus wrote: post #151
kneebonian wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there's still plenty of places in the world that, on the basis of labour costs, it would be vastly cheaper to operate than in the US. Keep in mind costs aren't just what you have to pay people but also things like regional security, the risk of the government nationalizing your company and assets, ability to get skilled/capable/honest people. Basically there has to be a degree of stability, including a centralized…

Mexico stands out to me as a country that hasn't lived up to its potential in that regard. Certainly there's no shortage of potential cheap labour, given the number of refugees making their way across it. And regional security and ability to get hold of necessary skilled workers shouldn't really be an issue, when you have the US right next door. It's hard not to see why it wouldn't be significantly to the US's benefi…

>so I do wonder what the primary forces working against it might be.

Extreme corruption, lack of rule of law, extreme violence to name a few. Mexico is basically a failed state: the government doesn't even control large parts of the territory it claims, ultra-violent drug cartels do. How is that a good place to build factories?

Other central American counties are at least as bad. El Salvador has a higher death rate from violence than war-torn Syria during the height of its civil war.

Countries farther south would be much better bets, but they still have huge problems with corruption. Brazil, Chile, Peru, etc. aren't nearly as bad, and do have their own manufacturing industries (Brazil is home to Embraer, for instance).

Re: The US is building factories at a fast rate

#194

Post by edgyquant »

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #100
FrustratedMonky wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why the downvotes? The US totally was the driving force around creating and growing globalization. How is this not known to be true, its history at this point.

It’s because Americans generally do know this. All the things coming to a head now were brought up as concerns back then. The position of the average America, the entire time deindustrialization was happening, was that Americans were being sold out by the wealthiest class and they were told economics isn’t zero sum as a rebuff.

Re: The US is building factories at a fast rate

#195

Post by xupybd »

I work in a factory and the opportunities to improve with custom software are huge.

Typical MRP/ERP solutions limit the way information flows around a factory. We have custom software running most of everything. It's a lot of CRUD and data pipelines. But wow are our processes easier to automate than I've seen with other systems, such as SAP.

Re: The US is building factories at a fast rate

#196

Post by missedthecue »

wefarrell wrote: post #107
User23 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you see that working? I mean what’s the operational mechanism that drives union jobs from wealth taxes?

I never implied a causal relationship, they are two sides of the same coin.

If we want to... we need to...

that's what you said and that reads plainly to me like you are implying a causal relationship.

Re: The US is building factories at a fast rate

#197

Post by pphysch »

marianatom wrote: post #175
pphysch wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This argument, on an international scale, has never made sense to me. Have its proponents never been poor? If US-China trade were to stop tomorrow, US would suffer 100x more than China due to lack of critical goods. China would have a dearth of greenbacks.

Actually US and China is disengaging, and we can already see what would happen if trade were to stop tomorrow, by what's happening now. China June 2023: Massive reverse migration by laborers back to countryside, Shanghai population down 135k compared to 2021 https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3215126/s... . Physical retail closures up to 80%. Entirely empty malls in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen. Re…

You can tell any story you want by cherry-picking headlines and ignoring the broader context. Pundits like Gordon Chang have been predicting post-Mao China's imminent collapse since 1989.

They've always been spectacularly wrong because they don't understand China and don't want to.

Re: The US is building factories at a fast rate

#198

Post by bluGill »

wizofaus wrote: post #78
FrustratedMonky wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'.

Surely though there's still plenty of places in the world that, on the basis of labour costs, it would be vastly cheaper to operate than in the US. On that basis I'm not convinced wage growth in SE Asia is the primary reason the US manufacturing industry is deciding to reshore. Is the same phenomenon occurring in other wealthy countries that haven't put in place taxpayer funded incentives to do so?

You also need a stable government where you can invest and have your factory survive long enough to be worth it. War and corruption makes many cheap counties not worth investing in.

Re: The US is building factories at a fast rate

#199

Post by robocat »

jakearmitage wrote: post #7

OK, now we need immigration reform to actually get enough people to work on everything.

Currently people born outside the US make up ~15% of population in the USA. Let’s say you want to increase that to 20% over $x years.

Now you need 5% more houses, 5% more cars, 5% more electricity, 5% more infrastructure, and ~33% more immigrant support services.

Immigration is not a simple sticky-plaster - it has deep impacts on every part of your country’s infrastructure and services. It can work, but it ain’t easy: I live in New Zealand where ~30% of our population is people that were not born here (New Zealand is quite picky about who gets to come here, so we have less structural problems than some European countries that accept large numbers of refugees with little opportunity to filter for the most suitable people).

New Zealand has been building housing at a fast pace to keep up with the ~50% increase over the “native” population. How many places in the US can absorb the pressures of increasing immigrant numbers?

Re: The US is building factories at a fast rate

#200

Post by snerbles »

nojvek wrote: post #123
no_wizard wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a professor remark once (this is circa 2009) that we should all learn a highly skilled trade around advanced manufacturing because eventually offshoring will reverse itself and by your early 30s you'll be in a prime position to profit immensely off the re-shoring of advanced manufacturing equipment and processes Maybe he was right. I'm in my early 30s now, and I don't regret becoming a software engineer, but al…

I really envy anyone working in Industrial Robotics. It's such a fascinating field. Automating physical things is so much more rewarding than automating digital things.

Industrial controls engineering was a ton of fun, and indeed more rewarding.

But the pay was nowhere near that of a software dev job in SV.

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