What's more viable than trying to return to Made in America is to get other developing countries to improve their manufacturing industries. That's the key to any capitalist market system - many suppliers and many buyers to promote competition and drive down prices.

We don't have to make everything here...we just need to use common sense and not depend on our enemy for vital products. Trump was actually getting the message out and had the ball rolling. We can do much better, but every time 'we' elect a leftist, it's three steps back.

quote:

Originally posted by 220-9er:
Reality is that the Chinese can't loose the American market either. They simply need our money that selling all that crap brings in.
We have about .3 billion mouths to feed in the US, they have 1.3 billion.

This is why they are buying our farmland and processors to ship food back for themselves.

Of course, if we weren't eating it, then there would be even more.

This started in the '90s, major brands were subverted to Chinese production, and the average consumer is absolutely clueless over it. Many still post about it yet have no idea where most of their possessions come from. Most of the American clothing is not made in America, so much so the Army can't find a running shoe maker to even bid the contract. They had to subsidize and prop up a maker to give it to them.

Shoes? Korea. Upscale hiker clothing, mostly China or subsidiaries off shore. Seen any US made overalls? Round House, the rest are made in Vietnam, Ukraine etc. Carhartt? Very little US made but still top tier pricing. Stanley, Schlage, etc hardware? Chinese. The lumber has been coming from Canada for decades. Electronics? It's like people gripe about it yet China is their first choice.

You can find $55 work boots from offshore, but US made is $125. That is basically because DOD is required to buy American and those still in production can supply that, leaving the balance for civilian models to sell. But they don't get cheap foreign labor with no medical plan, who work 6 - ten hour shifts, no vacation no benefits. Not even. And we dont' get free prison labor either unlike other countries, which is why Iphone etc still have plants in China . . .

Oh my we dont want to even know. We might get called racist or something knowing about it.

We CAN change, stop buying fashion clothing and wear what you have until it's unserviceable. Buy classic. Same with automobiles, the day of three years and a trade in are long gone for most of us. Get off that payment plan to be socially "acceptable" and start facing the reality we are getting milked for the interest, too. Cell phone for $500 for a multiline multiyear plan, nope. Mine costs $100 a year - less than $10 a month. Do we really need to stream Mayberry RFD for lunch? I dont even want to discuss $20 a pound coffee because it's named for the AR15 - Starbucks is cheaper, and that isn't even scraping the bottom of the barrel.

How much of our lifestyle is deliberately choosing to Display A Lifestyle? Where did all the bead bracelets come from worn in watch pictures, nobody on a construction site, garage or tradesman wear them much. Bouncing beads and lost time picking them up. What we have are citizens trying to dress to the level of the Image they think they need to project. Its shallow materialism.

Quite a few million over 55 have said screw it and quit work already. Enough. We know Amazon isn't our friend - I buy USED from ebay more often than not - and my attire is about 87% DAV. I might be 18 months behind the style curve but I'm dimes on the dollar not spending much at the mall either. After 50 years of seeing the constant recycling of styles we are about where I started. I could have just saved my clothes from when I was '30 and worked harder at fitting into them. So could many others and we'd be far better off.

We are constantly barraged with enticements and commercials to buy something we dont need, and the result is furniture sitting at the curb in the rain, because our rented storage is too full to keep it. There were not rental storage units growing up, the furniture store took in trade ins, walk upstairs and you could pick used - this was The Way 50 years ago. Not so much now, junk gramma's solid wood Made In America furniture and pick up bonded wood fiber ready to assemble manufactured from a traveling ship that cruises from Portland to San Diego.

Got to have that stylish current look. Old retro is Fudd, nobody has no time fo dat.

I'm just not seeing a return to US manufacturing like we had when I was a kid back in the 50's. You wanted a car? It was a GM, Ford or Chrysler. I remember one Christmas when I was around 6-7 years old and someone gave me a cool spaceship that rolled around on the floor. My dad was looking at it then saw on the box it was made in Japan. He swore loud enough to get my mom's attention. He was a WW2 Navy vet. I didn't understand at the time so I thought it was a cool spaceship nonetheless.

Another thing to consider is do we have an upcoming generation of young people willing to don coveralls and a hard hat to work in these factories? Maybe, but I'm not so sure.

I'll answer the question with other questions.

Do we think we could fill the manufacturing jobs with the necessary people in their twenties through fifties?

How many people would be capable, willing, and have the desire to do those jobs?

I don't doubt we have the CAPACITY to fill the jobs. My thought is that we don't have the WILL to fill the jobs. The America of the '50's where everyone was happy enough with a 1000 square foot home and one car is gone.

An extreme example:
In Mississippi we have counties where the vast majority of people have never worked a day in their lives. Not most of the counties, mind you, but over in the Mississippi delta, where the slaves were emancipated after the Civil War.

These people's forfathers were freed with no training or direction and for many with nothing to do, they just... stayed. Some sharecropped, did odd jobs, raised a few crops off whatever corner of land they might be sharing, but many did nothing much at all, had a kid, and time and generations passed. The former slave owners did little to nothing for them unless it behooved them, and the freedmen barely survived through the generations until welfare came along. These people became forever attached to this government teat for their meal ticket, with seemingly no motivation or vision to extricate themselves from the situation despite attempts to offer college funds, job fairs, vo-tech jobs, etc.

IF we could find a way to make some of these folks, and people like them who exist in other regions of the country (Appalachia for example) take an interest in working instead of riding the government cheese train, that'd be the miracle we need. Of course, if I could get a money tree to take root and grow in my back yard, I wouldn't have to work any more, either.

quote:

IF we could find a way to make some of these folks, and people like them who exist in other regions of the country (Appalachia for example) take an interest in working instead of riding the government cheese train, that'd be the miracle we need.

That's right.
But most people are inherently lazy. They will take the easy way. If they don't have to work, they won't. That was the idea behind welfare reform in the early 90's under Newt Gingrich. It was working... but the idea was jettisoned before too long when the Democrats took back control of the House.

Then came the Obama years and the whole idea was branded as "racist".

quote:

Originally posted by chellim1:

quote:

IF we could find a way to make some of these folks, and people like them who exist in other regions of the country (Appalachia for example) take an interest in working instead of riding the government cheese train, that'd be the miracle we need.

That's right.
But most people are inherently lazy. They will take the easy way. If they don't have to work, they won't. That was the idea behind welfare reform in the early 90's under Newt Gingrich. It was working... but the idea was jettisoned before too long when the Democrats took back control of the House.

Then came the Obama years and the whole idea was branded as "racist".

It's simple enough as long as we get control of the House, Senate and Presidency.

Make a new law. You don't work, you don't eat. That should fix things in a hurry.

Yeah, I know, but I can dream.

quote:

Originally posted by Skins2881:
On a consumer level, probably not. We created a monster that we can't defeat because we are addicted.

For things of national security we better try. Start with medicine, follow it by computer chips, then continue down the line. It would be expensive as hell to bribe or punish production to come back home, but it's a pill we need to swallow.

The run-up to build plants and train people to run them would take no less than three years to do, and we'd somehow have to continue to buy things from them for years after taking on such an endeavor. Not sure how we'd get them to sell us what we need for our independence.

Lastly is the question of raw materials such as rare earth minerals which we would never be able to source with out relying on them.

How many people would be willing to not only give up their cheap goods, but also damage our economy for nearly a decade to pull it off?

You are on the right track here. We need to prioritize strategic industry's first.

Pharmaceuticals are an obvious one. Semiconductors as we are seeing the global supply of these things is easily disrupted.

Rare earth metals. Energy.

Things like spatulas and napkin holders can come later.

I am hesitant to say it but the way forward for these lower end consumer goods is very highly automated factories and 3d printing.

When it is as cheap to produce it here as it is to produce it in China and then ship it here, it will be produced over here.

quote:

Originally posted by slabsides45:
I don't doubt we have the CAPACITY to fill the jobs. My thought is that we don't have the WILL to fill the jobs. The America of the '50's where everyone was happy enough with a 1000 square foot home and one car is gone.

This ^^^^^ is a big reason.

Kids for a couple generations or more have been taught that, unless they go to college so they can get a posh job pulling-down big bucks, so they can have big homes, a pair of new cars in the driveway, etc., etc.: They're failures.

Chasing dreams is wonderful. Chasing money because you have to chase money: Not so much.

I remember, back when I bought our home, one of my best friends telling me "You can afford much more house than that." "But I don't need any more than this," I replied. He didn't get it. Somebody else: "That's a nice starter house." "Starter house?" I said. "I plan to die owning that house." He didn't understand that.

Another friend: "You could be making much more money than you are if you did this or that." "But I'm happy doing what I'm doing," I told him. He didn't get it, either.

In the end: I can say I was satisfied, if not happy, with what I did most of my career; I retired when I was ready to retire; we own our home; have insignificant debt; and, in retirement, we're able to continue living in the style to which we'd become accustomed.

It really doesn't get any better than this, IMO.

I’m going to go against the grain by saying that I don’t fear China wrt manufacturing as much as most. People are fearing China today the same way they feared Japan in the late 1980s. China, like Japan before it, is teetering on the cliff of a demographic catastrophe. China won’t be the source of most of these goods in twenty-five years. They won’t have the surplus population to work for cheap labor in the factories that produce those goods.

I believe the Chinese collapse has already begun, but the world hasn’t woken up to it yet. Most of their economic growth has been through the sale of real estate, and with the collapse of Evergreen, the writing is on the wall. To mix metaphors, the music has stopped and everybody in China is scrambling looking for that last chair.

In fifty years, the bulk of the Chinese population will be beyond retirement, and we’ll be wringing our hands about every good being produced in India. My biggest concern now is that China will turn belligerent in their decline. Germany in the 1930s had no choice but to expand in order to cover the costs of correcting their economy. The bill was due, so Poland was invaded.
I hope the world doesn’t have to fight a war due to China’s (and Russia’s, to a lesser extent) failing demographics. That one child policy is really coming home to roost.

We didn't buy American 75 years ago because we were more patriotic. We did it because it was cheaper or the only option. We bought American televisions because they were the only ones there were. We didn't buy Asian-made clothing because it was still cheaper to pay American workers to make it here and not have to ship it.

Then, there began to be other options. There were Japanese tvs. And it was cost effective to ship them from Japan. And then it became possible to ship those cheaply made Asian clothes from Asia to here for a cost low enough to make it be profitable.

Here is an example. Igloo coolers makes most of its hard coolers near Houston. You might think such a simple product would be made in Asia. But it costs a lot to ship coolers. They are bulky, and are mostly empty space. It costs too much to ship them from Asia (or anywhere else) to offset the savings that would be realized from making them in low wage, low cost, low regulation places.

We can't make $15 tee shirts here because people won't work for the wages that make it possible. The land to put the factory on is too expensive here, and regulation also is an economic burden. We could lower the economic burden of regulation, but wage pressure and the other costs of infrastructure are not going down. It just can't be done.

This is all about price. As long as we are rational economic actors, we will buy the roughly equivalent $15 tee shirt in preference to a $20 tee shirt.

You may argue that this is short sighted and we would be better off in the long run to buy an American-made tee shirt. Whether that is true or not, you can't get people to think like that, especially over disposable goods like tee shirts. The present cost decision is the most important.

It is pretty simple if you understand basic microeconomics.

China had the Covid release and they made sure it spread worldwide. If China has a population drop of young people, they may ensure other countries have the same to keep the market tilted in their favor

I’d love to have more goods made in America, but short of that, how about a bill that requires all US companies to pull out of there in, say, two years, and manufacture in countries that are actually friendly to us? For chrissake, we keep building up our enemy the ChiComs. I was emphasizing to friends and family back in the late 80’s to stop buying ChiCom stuff, as we were just building them up, and look at us now.

I am not suggesting and do not support the Solyndra "Crony Capitalism" approach of subsidizing some favored businesses. To do this _not_ on the backs of taxpayers, you'd have to make it cheaper to put a product on the shelf made here, than it currently costs to be made in Elbonia and shipped here.

Is that impossible? No. But it's not going to happen solely because a slice of the consumer market has the means and preferences to want it to happen. There is a lot of business being done at the 'dollar stores' and that's not because shoppers enjoy the decor.

Unfortunately, there is insufficient political will among those currently in power to help make it possible. Removal of restrictions and regulations that raise the costs of doing business here would change the economics some. Lower taxes, federal, state and local would also help. When you make a decision about where to put a factory, those things matter a lot.

In other words, governments are currently in the way. For things to change, they need to step out of the way, and decide that a business owner risking their funds investing in business activity in their area is actually a positive development, and not underhanded selfish behavior from a class enemy, aimed at exploiting the downtrodden.

That business activity is what generates jobs. If you ask a politician why a business created a new job, they would shrug. However an economist will tell you: it's because that additional hire made the owners of the business -gasp- more money than not hiring.

And if a profit is seen as bad by those in power, then nobody should wonder why jobs are floating away.

It’s a lot more than macroeconomics or the desires of buyers. Lobbyists. That’s where it’s at.

quote:

Originally posted by vinnybass:
Do we think we could fill the manufacturing jobs with the necessary people in their twenties through fifties?

If they get hungry enough.

The straight answer is no, because most people in the manufacturing business, especially for consumer goods, have no interest in manufacturing in the US. Companies now make goods where it's the cheapest to do so, and sell where the get the best price.

The average factory wage in China is under $4/hour (and this has been rising for a while.) And they have very little to none of the myriad of regulations we have at the state and federal level. There are a lot of products that probably couldn't be made here that could sell for a price most people would be willing to pay, and make money.

And if manufacturing did come back in any big way, it would likely be highly automated, to counter the high labor costs. But this means more upfront investment. So it likely doesn't pencil out vs offshoring.

The only way manufacturing makes sense in this country is for highly profitable, highly complex products, and even that isn't what it used to be. Look at how Taiwan took over chip manufacturing.

At some point, China may price or regulate their way into driving manufacturing somewhere else. But that will likely be to even lower cost countries (Viet Nam, Bangladesh, etc.)

Of course the government can institute a lot of protectionist policies. But that hasn't proven to be a positive thing in the past.

I am trying to do like Para suggested. Buy less stuff, learn to do with less, seek quality in all you buy. Living like this does seem to have the effect of reducing my need for Chinese goods, and increasing my desire for domestic or European goods.

Chinese fuel cans? Nope. I buy Latvian made NATO Wavians from www.roverparts.com (Atlantic British LTD), or JustRite cans from the U.S. Nothing I can do about JustRite saying "assembled in the U.S. from domestic and foreign parts." Probably some Chinese parts in there somewhere. That's the problem. You can't always know.

quote:

Originally posted by vinnybass:
I'll answer the question with other questions.

Do we think we could fill the manufacturing jobs with the necessary people in their twenties through fifties?

How many people would be capable, willing, and have the desire to do those jobs?

This is such a great question. How many people in our current work-force just move data around? My company is FULL of people that don’t do shit other than fill out reports, schedule things, order and monitor inventory, email people about other emails.

30% of my company is carrying 70% of the heavy lifting. The rest is just shoving emails and trivia around the network.