This is exactly what the majority of Americans voted against and exactly why the left can’t find its footing. Everyone is now fully aware that offshoring for a cheap sticker price comes with higher, harder to price costs elsewhere.
Hardly. Less than two thirds of Americans actually bothered to vote. And a slight minority of those voted for the current government.
In any case, why does this need to be about identity politics? And if so, why are you suggesting that only the left is committed to an open, free market? Isn't that more traditionally a right-wing position?
Unfortunately GP is right - optics matters more than factual correctness, and the optics here is mixed - yes gov is overspending, but the solution is to offshore more jobs.
Someone's comment said "why not let China subsidize US bus deployment?" I think that's a fine argument, as long as we're still spending to keep the US manufacturing muscle strong. The cost is the cost to have domestic skilled manufacturing labor at the ready, and someone is going to have to pay it, because you're not going to be able to buy warships from China for war with China. No different than the US auto and aerospace industries retooling from civilian to military production rapidly during previous world wars.
Corporate America cares about quarterly profits, not capability readiness. This is an incentive alignment and capital efficiency issue requiring policy improvement.
If the Chinese want to subsidize our mass transit buildout, why not let them? Are busses really critical national security concerns?
If we needed the existing NA producers to build military busses it sounds like we’d be screwed!
No, their recommendation are transit subsidies with strings attached aimed at driving domestic economies of scale. Of course, depending on how a model is defined, 100 offshore unit cap can absolutely be gamed by making a "custom" model for each city or year.
> Finally, they recommend that foreign bus manufacturers be allowed to sell up to 100 vehicles of a given model, at which point they would need to establish a US manufacturing facility to expand sales further.
> To reduce costs, the researchers suggest that the federal reimbursements for bus purchases be capped at the 25th percentile cost of similar vehicles
The contention is always around the debt that is created when you let them. If China never calls the debt, that's a huge win — you just got something for free! You'd be crazy not to take that deal. But others are concerned about what happens if they do call the debt. You might not like what you have to give up in return (e.g. houses, farmland, etc.). Just ask Canada.
Of course, there is always the option to stonewall their attempts to collect on the debt, but that creates all kinds of other negative effects when the USA can no longer be trusted to make good on its promises.
Tradeoffs, as always.
I only really skimmed the article, and didn't even load the underlying paper. But it seems like a big issue was custom orders. If we need wartime vehicle production, like in WWII, there would most likely be a single or small number of designs that a facility would produce. I would expect a lot more coordination between ordering, production, and supply chain as well --- if we need mass production, tradeoffs change.
> If the Chinese want to subsidize our mass transit buildout, why not let them? Are busses really critical national security concerns?
Busses are likely not really the national security concern, the concern would be having large vehicle manufacturing. It may be easier to retool a bus factory line to build large military vehicles than a compact car factory.
I'd imagine this is something like the Jones Act, where if it works, we keep the doors open for rapid changeover to military production. That's not really working for ships... the market has chosen alternate transportation rather than building large vessels for domestic transport, and so we don't really have large shipyards that could be pressed into building military vessels if needed --- the shipyards that can are the ones that build them in peace time and they don't have much excess capacity.
In this case, I think that placing a tax on imports (tariff) is always preferable to an inflexible ban on imports. This is not an unusual approach in economics; it is in fact very common that economists recommend replacing bans with taxes. In fact, even the current administration, which is radical by modern standards, basically always prefers tariffs to bans.
How's American shipbuilding faring, after companies were forced to "buy american" for domestic shipping?
1) The democrats hypocritically supports offshoring while claiming to support workers
2) The republicans explicitly (prior to Trump, but MAGA is not very similar to traditional Republicans) support corporations and offshoring as a mechanism for increased profits
And so we blame "the left"?
Forcing transport authorities etc to buy local seems like clearly the worst way to subsidise industry; there is little incentive for the manufacturers to make a good or cost-competitive product.
They voted against trans rights and they voted to cause harm to people they dislike. It had absolutely nothing with buss prices or generic this. The vote for conservatives and Trump is ideological, about wish to wage culture war. It is about cruelty being the goal.
And I mean this 100% seriously. It is absurd to pretend it was about something like this.