America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back

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 alternate between maybe it will work, and catastrophic loss according to which way the tariffs and the wind blows. No one is building factories right now, and no one is renting them, because there is no certainty that any of these tariffs will last

Policy by amphetamine-driven tweeting is a disaster.

> 12. Enforcement of the tariffs will be uneven and manipulated

Yup. The 145% level seems designed to create smuggling, and the wild variations between countries to create re-labelling. It's chicken tax trucks all over again.

> This is probably the worst economic policy I’ve ever seen

Per Simpsons: this is the worst economic policy you've seen so far. The budget is yet to come.

> If American companies want to sell in China, they must incorporate there, register capital, and name a person to be a legal representative. To sell in Europe, we must register for their tax system and nominate a legal representative. For Europeans and Chinese to sell in the United States, none of this is needed, nor do federal taxes need to be paid.

This is .. not a bad idea, really. It would probably be annoying for small EU and UK exporters but less so than 10% tariffs and even less so than random day of the week tariffs. Maybe one day it could harmonise with the EU VAT system or something.

(also I think the author is imagining that sub-par workers, crime, and drugs don't exist in China, when they almost certainly do, but somewhere out of sight. Possibly due to the internal migration control of hukou combined with media control?)

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 to grow their economies was completely absent as even a talking point.

Over time, China also developed mid/high level skills, complemented their low-skill production offering with it and now competes in new industries, new tech, etc.

So...to compete with China, the country with 4x the US-population, the solution is that low-skill labor needs to return to US....?

Shouldn't instead the focus be to again foster mid/high-skill labor, moving the part that is offshored again towards low-skill labor...?

The obvious answer is this:

1. it doesn't matter if our t-shirts are made in Bangladesh.

2. it does matter if our stuff is made in an enemy nation (china).

3. U.S. labor is too expensive to move back to mass manufacturing the way we used to do it, c.f. baumol's cost disease.

4. offshoring and illegal labor have suppressed investment in automation and manufacturing technology for decades, which will be painful to undo.

The sensible outcome of these facts is

1. Focus on moving everything out of china to other cheap countries with reasonable levels of human capital.

2. Focus on re-shoring critical industries.

3. Launch moonshot investments into robotics and automation. Bringing back a big chunk of manufacturing is sustainable; bringing back jobs is not.

4. Invest in large-scale roll-out of SMR energy so we have reliable power for this new industrial build.