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America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

molsonhart.com

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Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#181

Post by bluGill »

smcl wrote: post #110
nine_zeros wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm surprised that the administration didn't understand this. Curious why you are surprised at incompetence being unable to understand complexity.

The thing is the US already experienced Trump 1.0, so it was presumably easy for many to assume that Trump 2.0 would follow broadly the same pattern and that there'd be an "adult in the room" somewhere to say "this will crash the world economy and do three consecutive 9/11s worth of damage to the stock market". So even though there are some very silly people in very high places saying some very wild things, the assum…

The amazing things to me is people still are not asking why people are so mad about the state of things they voted for Trump in the first place. Trump is the only one promising to make some changes to make life better for those who don't want to go to college. "Maybe he will, maybe he won't, but everyone else is ignoring us" is what I keep hearing when I listen to those people.

Fix health care - socialism isn't the only answer despite what many hear will say.

Fix school - it shouldn't be all sit at your desk but that is what we get. Bring back gym class. Make kids get practical experience building the things they designed (that is shop class). Math could be fun - but most teachers don't believe it themselves, and so they haven't a hope of passing that on to students.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#182

Post by pjc50 »

dashundchen wrote: post #114
tbirdny wrote: post #71

America doesn't underestimate it, its president does.

I saw a chart passing around from this Cato Institute survey (Cato is a right wing think tank) [0]. It made me laugh. > America would be better off if more Americans works in manufacturing than they do today. Agree 80%/Disagree 20% > I would be better off if I worked in a factory instead of my current field of work. Agree 25%/Disagree 73% [0] https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/2024-08/Globalizat...

They're going to end up with some sort of corvee forced labour scheme enforced by ICE, the logical conclusion of "other people should go work in the factories".

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#183

Post by bluGill »

pjc50 wrote: post #155
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair point. :/ My friend is watching his business get ready to die. His wife is still the CEO, and she's losing her shit. They're not alone. There's thousands and thousands of similar operations, all over the US, that will have to shut down, if something doesn't give. I guess the mega-rich oligarchs think this is great, but they don't employ the majority of Americans.

> They're not alone. There's thousands and thousands of similar operations, all over the US, that will have to shut down, if something doesn't give. I wonder where they were on election day, when they had a choice. The record of business owners voting D is .. not great.

D has not been a good choice for small business either.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#184

Post by Workaccount2 »

I think most people have a very confused understanding of money(currency) and value. Workers produce value, not money. Workers get a cut of that value, which is converted to money. To get by comfortably in the US, a first world developed economy, you need to be producing a lot of value. Everything is made to accommodate high value workers.

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.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#185

Post by Clubber »

esafak wrote: post #165
Teever wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't just ego. This is an impending existential issue. America needs to increase manufacturing capacity if it wants to maintain hegemony and possibly world peace. China will soon have the ability to take Taiwan and Korea and Japan. If that happens it's game over for any American interests and perhaps democracy as a whole. Wargames[0] paint a grim picture of an upcoming conflict between China and America over Ta…

That is not an existential issue; many former hegemons, such as the United Kingdom, continue to exist. Coalitions exist to ward off hegemons.

>such as the United Kingdom, continue to exist

They were really close to not existing. France stopped existing, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, France, Yugoslavia, Greece, all stopped existing. China, Thailand, Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Cambodia, Laos, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Myanmar, New Guinea, Guam, East Timor, and Nauru all stopped existing.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#186

Post by [deleted] »

stronglikedan wrote: post #59

I don't think anyone underestimates that, as much as some people with the author's viewpoints would like it to be true. 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 skill…

[deleted]

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#187

Post by zasz »

like_any_other wrote: post #163
pjc50 wrote: post #35

> China generates over twice as much electricity per person today as the United States. Why? 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 a…

> Other than that it seems to be mostly good points, especially the overall one: you cannot do this overnight. It's annoying Americans were given only two choices - offshoring is great and let's keep doing it, and, as you say, the opposite, meth-fueled let's bring back manufacturing overnight. The kind of slow and steady protection and promotion of home-grown industry that China and most of Asia so successfully used…

That IS what Biden was trying to do though with the CHIPS Incentive Act. He was trying to onshore production of semiconductors in a partnership with TSMC. Didn't do him any favors, and Harris lost the state of Arizona anyway. Americans had the choice between a party that was serious about trying to onshore some manufacturing and a party that wasn't, and it made the wrong choice because vibes, basically.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#188

Post by howmayiannoyyou »

asdajksah2123 wrote: post #109

America does need to bring back manufacturing. Not because a manufacturing job that pays $25/hr is somehow better than a service job that pays $25/hr. 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 s…

The components of a strategic manufactured product can be as simple as an injection molded switch, a LiION battery, capacitors, copper wire, etc., so the notion of bringing only "strategic items" back is as much a myth as the idea its mostly coming back to the USA. The goal here is to diversify the supply chain globally so its not concentrated in China. Internally this is sold as bringing MFG back to the USA (will happen to a noticeable degree), but that's not the actual plan.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#189

Post by pjc50 »

pokot0 wrote: post #176
pjc50 wrote: post #35

> China generates over twice as much electricity per person today as the United States. Why? 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 a…

Can someone explain to me why EU VAT is considered a tariff, while US sales taxes are not? They both seem a sale tax to me.

Only people who are wrong consider VAT a tariff. Yes, importers have to pay it, but so do local manufacturers.

VAT has basically the same effect as sales taxes with a much more complicated tax incidence.

Re: America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

#190

Post by FirmwareBurner »

like_any_other wrote: post #163
pjc50 wrote: post #35

> China generates over twice as much electricity per person today as the United States. Why? 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 a…

> Other than that it seems to be mostly good points, especially the overall one: you cannot do this overnight. It's annoying Americans were given only two choices - offshoring is great and let's keep doing it, and, as you say, the opposite, meth-fueled let's bring back manufacturing overnight. The kind of slow and steady protection and promotion of home-grown industry that China and most of Asia so successfully used…

> The kind of slow and steady protection and promotion of home-grown industry that China and most of Asia so successfully used to grow their economies was completely absent as even a talking point

The slow and steady way that post-WW2 Korea and Japan did needs a unanimously agreed 10-20 year long game plan between industry and government, which is incompatible with democracies who change colors and strategies every 4 years where the new administration begins to tear down everything the previous administration did because they serve different voter bases and corporate lobby groups.

It is also incompatible with the US since a lot of corporations made bank due to offshoring and will fight it every way they can since they don't want to deal with costly US labor who can unionize or sue you for millions if they break a finger at work. Even TSMC Arizona had to bring half the workers from Taiwan, and it's not like they're making tchotchkes.

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