“Bush II protecting steel is a major reason for loss of Rust Belt manufacturing jobs”
No, nothing could be further from the truth. The actual reason was free trade where we literally gave tax credits to companies to relocate manufacturing offshore near sources of destitute 3rd world labor and then send the products home tariff free. And usually from nations that impose tariffs on us!
I was referring to the specific Bush II policy on sheet steel used to make the shells of washing machines and similar appliances.
I was not referring to the bigger picture. The bigger picture is about a lot more than cheap labor. US Labor regulations, US EPA regulations were more costly to many companies than labor differential
US Labor Union control of work rules was more costly than labor. The work rules would not allow high paid workers to do what needed to be done. They sat idle waiting for work to do.
But EDUCATION is behind a lot of our problems. In the 1950s many Eastern Europeans came. They couldn’t speak English but were good at math and excellent for tool & Die and Machine shops. Due to the Iron Curtain and 1965 changes to immigration rules, that source of good math skills disappeared.
US schools were not producing enough people good at math. Draw a line from Chicago to Rockford and you had the Machine tool and Tool&Die Capital of the world in 1950s and 1960s.
But in the 1970s, and increasingly in the 1980s there were not enough qualified mathematically inclined people to staff the high skilled end of manufacturing.
The high math skilled, high priced jobs went to Asia first. It then became cheaper to locate the low cost labor closer to the high cost labor.
We are in even worse shape now. It is amazing the number of IT workers with BA/BS, and even MA/MS who cannot do simple 5th grade math. They don’t know the mulitplication tables. They don’t know common 5th grade concepts such as transitive closure.
One problem with our labor is that much of it is not worth high wages.