[omnivore]

We're handing manufacturing over to China in other ways also. Like excessive environmental regulations, lawsuit mania over harmless things, we're making our own obstacles and the Chinese are smart enough to take advantage where we screw up.

If you want to build a steel mill, are you going to spend years hassling with EPA, OSHA, similar state-level agencies, and local-level busybodies, before you can even break ground in the US? Or just go to China, maybe pay some bribes, but get the thing built and going relatively easily?

All I'm saying is, there are more than just economic-incentive reasons, why this is happening. Part of it is subsidies and screwing with currency exchange rates. But another part of it is just the accumulation of decades of counterproductive legislation and regulations that have been building up in America, and have finally reached the threshold where there are a lot of kinds of businesses that just can't start up here, and can barely stay alive at this point.

[MSF BU]

Nucor has got the code cracked on building steel mills. One pitfall that our manufacturers face here are the unions. Nonunion manufacturing is actually doing fairly well; Nucor has cracked that code too!