If that's not the most NYC finance-centered headline ever, I don't know what is.
"If we just offload our bus-building industry to somewhere else, we could save $x on taxes each year. Yeah, it eliminates jobs and is another blow against strategically-important heavy industry, but please, think of my balance sheet!"
Would you really be better off if you could only buy cars made by US manufacturers? Did americans really lose out when Toyota and co arrived? Would Boeing aircraft really be better if they didn't have to compete with Airbus? Or would the incumbents just get lazy?
When a US airline thinks it's better for them to switch over to Airbus, by all means do so, that's competition.
But taxpayer money should not be used to prop up other countries' economies unless explicitly designated that way (e.g. contributions to international agencies, economic aid), and certainly not if that replaces domestic union labor.
You are basically asking taxpayers to fund an uncompetitive (i.e. wasteful) local industry.
I think that's justifiable when you have high local unemployment (making the thing a job program, really), or when you really need the industry for strategic reasons (food and weapon manufacturing), but when that is not the case, doing this raises labor costs in general and hurts your actually useful and globally competitive industries, too.
That is why even something as manufacturing cars, trucks and airplanes is vital to be resilient. And in addition, it's bad enough how much of a grip China has on our balls with rare-earth metals, pharmaceuticals, chemicals and the threat of snacking a piece of Taiwan. India isn't much better, they keep buying up Russian oil despite sanctions. We don't need to hand them more economic power.
And yes, resilience costs money. We need to explain that to our populations - and most importantly, we need to make sure that our populations actually get some more of the wealth and income that is being generated every year so they can afford it, like in the past!
I can see your point, but I'm not buying this argument for multiple reasons.
First, if you do blanket-protectionism like this, the actual strategic gain per "wasted" tax-dollar is abysmal. You could have just bought those singaporean busses, and spent the money on skunkworks and lithium mine subsidies instead if you actually needed that resilience and military capability.
But secondly, I would argue that you really don't. What kind of war are you even anticipating where you would need massively scaled up tank production of all things? The US, currently, could fight an offensive land war against the whole continent pretty much (regardless of foreign support), and for anything else tank production capabilities are more than sufficient.
Being independent sounds really good on paper (and looks appealing when glancing e.g. at the European gas situation), but isolating your nation economically has a really shitty track record, historically, especially when you are not sitting on top of a global empire to circumvent some of the drawbacks.
> we need to make sure that our populations actually get some more of the wealth and income that is being generated every year so they can afford it, like in the past!
100% agree with that, but I think this is a (tax) policy failure most of all: my take is that in a capitalist society capital inevitably accumulates at the top, and regulatory backpressure (progressive taxation and antitrust law) is needed to keep the wealth/income distribution somewhat stable; the US has been shitting the bed in that regard for more than half a century now with predictable outcomes for wealth/income distribution (similar for other industrialized nations). Redistribution/balancing dynamics ("poor people getting paid for labor") are also getting weaker because unskilled labor lost lots of relative value.
The war we're seeing in Ukraine right now. Europe has by far not enough tanks, especially heavy self-propelling artillery, to counter Russia. And for whatever reason, despite us actually having manufacturers for vehicles, we still haven't spun up large scale production, it's absurd.
IMHO, when WW3 hits, the situation will be like WW2, Europe relying on the US yet again - but I'm not certain that this time, even if the US wanted to support us, if they actually could. Not because of current political issues, but because the factories, the supply chains are all broken these days, tracing back to China far too often for my liking.
> Being independent sounds really good on paper (and looks appealing when glancing e.g. at the European gas situation), but isolating your nation economically has a really shitty track record, historically, especially when you are not sitting on top of a global empire to circumvent some of the drawbacks.
I'm not advocating for full isolation amongst Western countries but for as much isolation from China and India as reasonably possible. We don't need to produce everything ourselves all the time, but if Covid has showed us one thing, it is that each country should at least have important industries running on low scale and people with knowledge around that can be expanded quickly in time of need. The US in particular should know the danger of knowledge literally dying out - what was it, about a decade was needed to replicate Fogbank [1]?
But I feel that argument almost supports my point: If you think Poland/Germany urgently needs more armored vehicles, then spending taxes specifically on that is way more efficient than subsidising the local bus industry.
Isolating yourself is also straight up painful economically, and you also lose a soft way of de-escalation/prevention. I'm not convinced that's a net gain.
Aggregate numbers also don't look that bad to me from a Europe vs Russia point of view; if you sum up vehicle numbers for European countries the gap is no longer that big, and European inventories are on average more modern/capable, too.
How much growth in those numbers would you like to see to be able to sleep at ease?