America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

America?

No.

The shareholder class underestimates it.

A lot of Americans realize that it's going to be hard, which is why we should have made an example out of the first guy to profit off of sending manufacturing off to the shores of a geopolitical rival.

Americans also have more free time and disposable income because of that decision, among others. Why would you want them to struggle more?

The people in the areas where things used to be made certainly have more free time, but they don't have disposable income.

Unless we're just here to repeat canards from the 1990s given by financiers which explained why it was good to shut down the main employers for entire towns.

Question: if the jobs were off shored, but the resulting profits were shared more equally, would Americans still complain?

US unemployment rate floats along at about 4%, and is kept from going any lower to prevent inflation.

There are localized problems - and it's all very similar to the post-Thatcher UK - but you cannot be serious in imagining that employment would magically return to the exact spots it left. In fact that's one of the sub-problems OP talks about: so you want a US Shenzen. Where are you going to put it?

(UK equivalent: we're discussing keeping Scunthorpe blast furnaces open, so that we can have a "secure" supply of "domestic" steel .. made entirely from imported ingredients. Because the mines the plant was built to refine are empty)

I wouldn't expect "now that you've caught us we'll pay you to shut up" to go over well.

Yes, definitely yes.

America suffers from a flattened income curve. There are many many more people earning $100k+ today than in 1960 (inflation adjusted). America has an envy problem first, equality problem second, spoiled child problem third.

I would not necessarily say that the envy is unjustified. If you live in a rich country you ideally want all citizens to become wealthy. Else, irrespective of income, you will be lorded over by those who are magnitudes richer than you.

"Caught us" implies that the capitalists, the people who own the manufacturing plants, did something immoral, or illegal or under handed, but in the economic system that everyone championed in America, especially at that time, this was simply allowed. Seems like the fundamental anger is about the injustice of the economic system that leads to such consequences.

I'm not talking about billionairs or the ultra wealthy. I am talking about the 60-90% top earners category.

You can cut out the top 10% of earners in the country and it still wouldn't do much to change the situation for those in the <60% earning percentiles.

To put it short; the reason you cannot afford a home isn't because of Bezos, Musk, and Blakrock. It's because the other bidders have STEM masters degrees and dual income high paying jobs, and probably a few hints of financial literacy thrown in too.

It's odd how little factories moving from union areas to red states gets mentioned in this context.

Areas gutted, jobs lost and some lesser number of jobs with less benefits and pay created elsewhere.

So many political ideas seem to only be allowed to be discussed if you can add a garnish of racism or xenophobia to them.

> To put it short; the reason you cannot afford a home isn't because of Bezos, Musk, and Blakrock.

When one person holds the wealth equivalent to the total yearly economic output of a mid-sized American metropolitan area, yes, it's going to introduce distortions, even if only because the people who actually do the labor under those people are being paid less in order to better fund the equities that make up the wealth of that person.

And that's before getting into the other problems with the housing supply.

>who actually do the labor under those people are being paid less

No, that's where you have it backwards they are being paid more. That's the exact reason why they are buying that house when you say "who the fuck can afford that".

Ironically, they are also the ones being exploited the most by the top 1%.

An amazon warehouse sorter will never create or do anything that makes amazon much more money than what they are paid. They get $18/hr for producing $21/hr of value, doing the same static task all day everyday. Amazons "profit margin" on these workers is almost nothing.

The lead cloud architect though gets paid $350k/yr, but can design a single change that will make amazon $30-40 million/yr. The profit margin on them is insane. And they are the ones outbidding everyday people on things, driving up costs.

Back 60 years ago, everyone was much more clumped around the same (lower) income, so the houses where smaller and the prices more amenable to more people.

You don't hear people complaining about that because the states that are the net losers of those jobs are full of people who think factories are dirty and unsightly and pay garbage wages, etc, etc, hence why they're fine with their politicians implementing the policies that are driving them out in the first place. Sure, the blue collar people know what's up but they're outnumbered by the white collar economy handily enough that it never becomes a leading political gripe you hear about from these states.

Whereas when states that aren't behaving that way lose jobs, factories and industries to Mexico or China they're all "hey WTF" over it because they actually cared and didn't want that economic activity driven off.

Boeing started a plant in SC: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/jun/10/boeing-open...

Then later moved all 787 production there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24544139 https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2020/09/09/44441906/the-dea...

While the main articles seemed to have a good riddance tone, the HN comment section seemed to be more restricted in that view.

>It's hard to believe that the current Boeing leadership will turn things around with even less focus on quality and talented workers. Feels like they should be moving back towards engineering driven approaches.