Bringing “manufacturing back to the US” is a fool’s errand. The future of manufacturing is automation, not jobs.
Eventually US will be in isolation.
The moment is threatened Canada , Denmark sovereignty and EU/NATO, countries are planning for life without US
In other words, not much would be lost except the devious lip service.
To that end, the future I want doesn't focus so much on money, but on needs. Letting a market dictate "needs" is clearly not working for the betterment of humanity a whole. While it helps with progress, I believe there is an upper limit when human behavior is brought into the equation.
Even then the quality wouldn't be up to par. Since we've collectively agreed we don't need to have due process anymore, I guess I can look forward to making shoes will I'm being indefinitely detained.
I will share a metaphor you can spread.
I run a mile every morning not because it is the most calorie efficient way to get around, nor because it is the most monetarily productive use of my time, but because it keeps my legs strong and me healthy.
That’s probably correct. But the current trajectory means that China will have the robot-operated factories, not the US. What do you anticipate the US will do to obtain goods from those Chinese factories? Especially when AI stands poised to obsolete a lot of the white collar jobs where the US still retains a competitive edge?
You can’t treat the reserve dollar as something that will perpetually defy physics. The pound used to be the world’s reserve currency not too long ago. There’s no reason for the world to continue flocking to dollars when other economies surpass the US.
The US just doesn't have the supply chain that China does. You need to be able to source the materials, and they have, effectively, entire cities dedicated almost wholly to producing those "intermediate" raw materials—eg, things like the grommets for the shoelaces, the big sheets of faux leather that can be cut to the right size & shape to make the body, etc. They also have the industrial capacity to do the molding for the soles, and produce the laces, at scale.
None of that exists here—in some cases not in the scale required, but in most cases not at all.
With across-the-board tariffs, the only way to fully avoid them is to start from the raw materials on up—mine and purify the minerals, raise the animals for their leather, pump and refine the oil for the plastics, harvest the trees for their rubber (are we still getting rubber that way...?). All here in the US.
Some of those raw materials likely don't even exist on our land in sufficient quantities to supply all our industrial needs, even setting aside how much time, money, and manpower it would take to set up the mines (and ranches, and oil fields, and rubber farms), the several stages of refining, and all the different ways the materials need to be shaped or alloyed or combined or extruded or or or...
And where is the money to fund all that going to come from? Clearly not the federal government (unless, I suppose, you posit that it's one or more of Musk's companies doing all this—I suppose that could be one of the aims here; just give Musk a monopoly over literally everything we make...). Every domestic company is going to be cutting back six ways from Sunday, because every product is going to cost massively more, so even the people still making as much money as they were last year are going to be buying less. And many people will be making less, either because of those same cutbacks (through layoff or hour/wage reduction), or because they were part of the federal agencies getting wantonly gutted for no good purpose, or among the companies that did business with them and now have lost a major customer.
Bringing manufacturing onshore for any significant percentage of our consumer or industrial goods is barely even a pipe dream. It's pure cloud-cuckoo-land fantasy.
> people don't want a job, they want money and purpose
And society will not give them any of that without a job.
There, now you should understand "the obsession with jobs."
> most jobs barely deliver either
And no job delivers even less.
Welcome, this is where we're going to be for foreseeable future. Prison made inferior Nikes will end up costing 500$ a pair. Not that anyone is going to have money to buy them.
As you mentioned we'd probably need to still source from other countries. The bigger issue here is the USD may lose its reserve currency status.
The rest of the world might just trade in Euros and Yuan. Inflation will truly take off then.
If an investor wants to build a factory to produce shoes (a process that can take years), they need to be sure that the tariffs won't just go away next year.
Trump's tariffs are anything but this.
“Wholesome Biden & Obama memes” are probably propaganda. And videos about “fat Americans” being marched into factories sounds like something the Chinese could make.
Unless you are an aristocrat. Them your "job" was to fleece the peasants, and somehow "society" accepted this for thousands of years.
Now before you get all hung up how this isn’t possible. There is precedent. The government would do just this during the great depression, sponsoring artists knowing it is more valuable to have artists in the population than to lose that talent pool and benefits to culture over cold cruel economics.
Scarcity is very real, I'm not sure why you would feel otherwise. Fortunately, we have largely eliminated scarcity of the necessities of life due to economic policies that are as far from your suggestions as possible, but that doesn't mean that they are produced at no cost or that scarcity in general does not exist.
And you don't need to go back 100 years for precedent. We basically paid people to sit at home during covid, and I didn't see some sort of renaissance as a result. Why would this be any different?
money to survive, purpose to thrive
you don't need a 'job', and particularly a 'job' who's only purpose is to make profit for someone else
we really need to rethink society
All three districts fell for “thousands of tech jobs”… turned out to be a couple dozen of people they brought in.
Who will?
The Trump administration? Why would they be selling counterfeit Nike shoes?
Nike themselves? Why would they buy shoes from someone else? And if you mean they'd just keep manufacturing them elsewhere...they'd still have to pay the tariffs when they hit customs, so they'd still be $$$$. Unless you're proposing that Nike is going to start an industrial-scale smuggling operation...? Or that the Trump administration is going to provide some kind of sooper sekrit tariff waiver just for them, so they can pretend to be selling Made in the USA Nikes? And that's only talking about Nike. What about all the other manufacturers of consumer—and industrial—goods?
None of that passes the smell test. Nike's not going to take a loss to pretend their foreign-manufactured shoes, which now cost them much more, are actually being cheaply made in the USA just to prop up Trump. And Trump is, to all appearances, 100% all-in on these tariffs: he would rather have them and utterly wreck the US (and global) economy than have things cost the same because no one is actually paying the tariffs just to "prove" that his bonkers excuse for an ideology actually works.
No; if Trump gets a third term, it will be, purely and simply, because he has managed to utterly destroy the machinery of democracy so that a free and fair election in the US is a wistful memory.
Why not let the market take care of it? It's cheaper to buy things from China then make them yourself. When that changes, production will naturally move to the next best place. I don't see the issue.
That's because money lets people efficiently deploy resources where they feel it is needed.
What makes you say it's "clearly not working", other than comparing developed nations to a non-existent utopia?
Meanwhile, if it ever gets to the point that automation has truly replaced humans, why not have the machines here at home? There's no good argument against it and plenty of arguments for it.
> that is my point
You're letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. Realistically, you're not going to change society to give people "money and purpose" without a job. Fixating on an unrealistic goal takes focus away from more realistic ones.
I mean, for a least a century people have been proposing using productivity improvements to increase leisure time and distribute goods more equally. And in that time work demands have increased (e.g. going from one full-time worker in a typical household to two).
Until the 90s, that's the trajectory we were on. For life to constantly get better whilst human servitude is lessened over time.
We should be getting ever shorter work weeks and earlier retirement ages. It's the entire point of technology.
I think the implication here is that such a society is not built on markets or even money, but rather by individuals working together to foster a collective community that meets everyone’s needs.
Yes, communism. The more advanced we become technologically the more sense it makes. We’re largely at a point where most jobs are made up - created to give people something to do because if we don’t then they die.
We’ve pushed consumerism to the absolute max. Now, most goods are pretty much worthless. But we have to buy them, or we die. That’s how markets works. We work, and we consume, or else.
That made sense when the work we were doing was beneficial and the stuff we’re consuming was needed. We’re past that now. Most people are working to produce something dumb, or worse, evil. New addictions, new poisons, new bombs, and new problems to be solved by new software.
I have rarely ever aligned with this president, but it is clear that we need to bring manufacturing home if we are going to have any future.
The sooner we get out of our nation state well of stability as a species? I don't know what dopey star trek fantasy land you are living in, but we are sooner going to destroy the world than join hands and all sing kumbaya. Especially if we allow some autocratic regimes to come to power.
Consider a case that was not unique, the growth of iron production in the great lakes area between 1855 and 1865.
In 1855 it was 1000 tons of iron ore. By 1860 it was over 100,000. By 1865 it was a few times greater than that.
Now consider even a single year in there where production is increasing by thousands to tens of thousands of tons. Good business. (The machines used to load and unload those boats and the change in boat designs is awesome by the way. Worth looking up.)
That was early. With much worse technology, and much less capital.
There were crazier deltas in production increase in the 1890's and across the guilded age.
The US natural resources are gigantic. There are 330 million people living there. It has more resources than ever before in history.
Steel and plastic are currently produced in the hundreds of millions of tons per year in the US. That is hardly a middle aged man who cant do a pushup.
With a proper 10 year boom, US production could be exponentially increasing year over year. If it and its people choose it.
A lot of people in the US seem to be envisioning this. It is a really non-abstract vision even for americans of... modest intelligence.
It may be the case that providing the world with banking and facebook, and silicon plans, though possibly much more lucrative than physical production, is just too abstract for the average american to identify with as a positive.
Or it may be the case that physical production is more lucrative than software service export, but that the US government has mismanaged the market constraints in the physical domain and so it just appears to not be the case.
I am not sure which is true. What I do know is that for the average person, the idea of making stuff and trading it is simple to understand, and people like it. Even people who do not make anything identify with this goal. Maybe instead of iron and steel it will be nvidias chips this time around.
I think Americans dont like being the social media export country. Its just not a good future vision you can identify with.
And since producing all this is not such an easy task, the people who produce the food and build the houses want something in return. That's what we call jobs.
So when you say that jobs is not needed - you mean that there is no need to live in houses or that there is no need to give the people who build the houses anything in return?
I don't know, but if suddenly someone really has a problem with the fact that the government is still not taking enough money from them to finance various unpromising projects, I am happy to take on the government's work and free of charge get any amount of money from them to implement the widest range of interesting projects.
Communism makes no sense until we reach a post-scarcity economy, which will never happen.
Like I said, the people you're talking about just had a significant period of time where they were effectively paid to stay home and had ample time to pursue their personal interests, yet no meaningful innovation was produced by that cohort that I'm aware of. What am I missing?
"I don't need 1000 pairs of shoes"
I am not sure why they think it left. The US manufactures far more today than it ever did in the past. The people were largely relieved by robots, granted.
> becoming a mostly service and consumer economy would be the final winning position.
Service isn't always fun. A lot of people don't like selling Big Macs. They are under the impression that if they could have a manufacturing job, they would enjoy work more. That is what drives it.
What they don't realize is that they could already have a manufacturing job. Manufacturers struggle to hire. But the problem there is that, per BLS, 70% of manufacturing happens in rural areas – whereas most people never look for work outside of the city they live in. Thus they conclude that manufacturing doesn't exist. Out of sight, out of mind.