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this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2025
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No Stupid Questions
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Honestly asking: what other way would anyone suggest to bring back outsourced manufacturing jobs?
I’ve always heard broad public support on both sides of the aisle for bringing back those jobs. Wasn’t that always going to make things more expensive?
ETA: the downvotes lead me to believe a lot of y’all are caught up in the nationalism of the arguments, and refuse to consider the logistics of what you want. That goes for both Red MAGA wanting recklessly applied tariffs, and Blue MAGA wanting to start WW3 without any existing domestic production. Neither of you are thinking shit through.
Lol. Please expand on this.
Dude, I don’t even know where to begin. I guess with their support for a live-streamed genocide that escalated tensions with every country in the Middle East. Full-throated support for a proxy war that threatens to turn nuclear with Russia. Threatening hot war with China throughout the Biden admin. Escalating tensions with the DPRK, and backing a coup attempt in South Korea. Continued support for destabilization of leftist countries in South & Central America.
I don’t know how you missed Dems escalating in multiple theaters of war throughout the Biden presidency. Especially his last couple months. After Harris lost the election, the State dept immediately canceled all leave for foreign service officers, and they went absolutely fucking wild from November-January.
At least they’re pretending to take a friendly approach in Africa, as our reputation there continues to deteriorate and they grow closer with China.
It’s going to get worse. The DNC keeps bringing in more & more former CIA agents to run, and they’re welcoming in neocons like Liz Cheney. The anti-war movement is absolutely non-existent within the Democratic Party now.
I don't think there is any way to bring back those jobs. You guys are dreaming if you think you can just go back to an economy of the past.
The world has globalized, America can't just pretend it hasn't. Sure you can try and bring everything in house but by alienating allies there are lots of things you just can't get yourselves like many raw materials, and then you need to worry about exporting to actually bring money into your economy not just move it around in circles.
Plus, think about the logistics of that.
Goods produced in the US are categorically more expensive due to infrastructure, cost of living (and therefore wage expectations). If we could wave a magic wand to transplant an effective manufacturing facility from Pakistan and place it in rural Mississippi, hire Americans to do the work, and begin pumping out goods, the price to produce the goods would increase substantially.
Americans wouldn't be able to afford American made goods, which is true even now. Many Americans try to buy American "when possible", but cost quickly outweighs patriotism.
Your last paragraph is completely off course and backwards. Americans can’t afford American made goods precisely because of the outsourcing.
We’re proposing the Henry Ford model of paying your workers enough to be able to afford your products.
Yeah this line of reasoning doesn't really gel with actual reality considering Trump is now talking about repealing the chip Act. He's not actually trying to bring back Manufacturing. Trump has never cared about that. He doesn't give a shit about Outsourcing manufacturing jobs and his boss Elon Musk certainly doesn't.
I'm having a hard time following. How is the trade war going to lead to recovering outsourced jobs? Isn't it more likely to cause businesses to decrease their US operations?
The reason why jobs are outsourced is so companies can take advantage of cheaper labor and operation costs. Other than sending the us economy into a downward spiral that makes people want to work at slave level wages.... Not seeing the connection.
Canada isnt a significant threat to US manufacturing, so why the tariffs on Canada?
China would make sense, but Canada? Why?
I haven’t seen any explanation that’s convincing. I think partly it’s a personal vendetta with Trump not appreciating the criticism from Canada of his administration. I think it’s also partly that Trump is fairly isolationist in foreign policy, and there’s a lot influence from the military industrial complex in the upper levels of Canadian politics.
My gut feeling is that this is all connected to capitalists flailing and taking any wild swing they believe will bring back the past glory days, and re-establish a unipolar world with the US at the top. Democrats believe they can do it with another world war, and Republicans believe they can do it with a trade war.
The reality is most of them haven’t really thought things through, and the ones who have are just hoping to delay & kick the can into a future profit quarter to deal with later. Neoliberalism is dead/dying. No matter how much they want it, we can’t go backwards. We’re at a fork in the road, and the options are neo-feudalist fascism or socialism. If we let the capitalists decide our fate, it’s gonna be fascism.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. In the years since Reagan, the only thing we’ve consistently invested in is military supremacy, so it’s really the only trick we’ve got right now.
You do it by incentivizing building factories, up to the point where a company can be competitive with those outsourced industries. Something kind of like the CHIPS act that Trump just axed. Random and blanket tariffs will not help. Tariffs can mainly only help prevent an industry from leaving. For example, we have huge tariffs on Chinese EVs because they would outcompete every US manufactured EV and we would lose those jobs.
The reality is that it's very difficult to take a centrist position here. Trump's tariffs make no sense. They will not bring back any jobs because no one is going to build a factory in the next 4 years if there's a chance the next president reverses Trump's decision.
It's also a bad move to tariff our main allies because not only does it make things more expensive for Americans, it erodes trust in our nation and destabilizes our position of dominance globally. In the eyes of the world, we've gone from stable and reliable to dangerous and unpredictable. It will take a lot more than 4 years to recover from that.
The big worry people have is a potential incoming economic crash. We're already dealing with a very weak labor market, uncomfortably high inflation, irrational stock valuations, and high housing prices. If now a huge wave of federal layoffs, which will likely result in instability of federal programs many Americans rely on, hits at the same time as what will essentially be artificially caused inflation through tariffs, it could send things into a downward spiral.
Well said and I agree :)
Probably with some sort of long term plan instead of randomly turning sweeping tariffs on and off.
The bigger question is "do Americans actually want these jobs?" According to the JOLTS surveys for the last several quarters there's about 100,000 open manufacturing jobs that are not getting filled, in a labor market sized about 500,000. Simply put, it's abundantly clear that people don't want the manufacturong jobs that do exist
I also saw this from the inside when I worked my last job with a company that does contract cleaning services for industrial facilities. Nobody wants to work industrial sanitation, and they end up primarily hiring immigrants and ex-convicts as they're the only people desperate enough to take these industrial sanitation jobs. And it's not for lack of pay or benefits, the fact is the nature of the work sucks!
No, a lot of those positions are left unfilled on purpose. Lots of ghost jobs. Lots of jobs left vacant in the hopes they can fill it with an H1B.
Your last point is also completely wrong. It’s not that people aren’t willing to do the jobs. They just want to be properly compensated. Hell, I’d take those jobs for the right pay level.
Maybe something like the chips act ... which he just repealed.