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Good point, but you are out of touch.

Foundry operations, molding companies, & basic manufacturing all over the country have already closed right and left because they can not compete with overseas competition... that is unless they find a way to make their services more valuable in some way. In short, we have already lost much of what we had.

This era requires manufacturers to be very creative to compete while remaining in the US. What results is that domestic manufacturers are now often the best performers, yet they must be selective to use US resources on only items that they can add enough value to lower total costs to the customer. They have overseas partners that can take the other projects.

While we still have an enormous manufacturing capacity, I find it astonishingly improbable that we could ever be the arsenal of democracy as we were in the late 1930's and early 1940's. However, in the early 20th century, numbers were everything... conscript your own population to build your army's size. Now, quality matters far more than quantity.

Perhaps we do not need all the capacity to support our national security.

that is unless they find a way to make their services more valuable in some way.

That's corporate semantics for, they need to lower wages to match those overseas and pay Americans 27 cents an hour. That's something you can't say openly to an American audience if you value your hide. So, you couch it in semantics that ultimately otherwise have no real meaning. It's a clever way of saying, try as you might, that America can compete with forieng labor by going out of business.. or by some other etherial non-substantial means which we've yet to discover in modern science or labor practice. You can't undercut lower production costs overseas in a tariff free situation unless you employ overseas labor yourself or destroy the wage level in your own market and impoverish workers.

The reason people have to be strongarmed in Congress and can't talk plainly about this in public (or will not) is that the public would lynch these guys in a second if they understood all the implications and most want to anyway. Congress and the president have become quite unpopular and of the blood boiling type around my neck of the woods. People understand it here very plainly.

The king of England Killed colonial tariffs on product shipped from England such that the King used lower imperial cost to dump product on the colonial market and subvert the market - putting colonials out of work. That's what fueled the revolt against the King. It was all about the king playing games with Tarrifs to subvert the colonial market by undercutting local pricing.. and with no representation. The King would not listen to reason. Congress is now the King and doing the same thing to America that the King did. Tell me.. do you expect a different result this time?