Posted on 05/15/2025 9:07:39 AM PDT by Kazan
“Oh, sure,” I hear you say. “We knew that already. We already knew that all our clothing and toys and housewares and home décor is made in China. We can live with that. It’s not like it’s a national security problem.”
But that’s the problem. It is national security.
We make our own washing machines and dryers, our own cars and planes, our own metal working machines and food processing equipment. That’s what counts, and it’s made here.
Yes. But these machines are made here only if we can get the parts. And far too many of the parts, for far too many years now, are made in China. You can’t make the refrigerator without the compressor. You can’t make the washing machine without the motor. You can’t make the home furnace without the heating element.
Remember four years ago, during what they named “the supply chain crisis,” when Chairman Xi Jinping kept shutting down whole cities for a month at a time, allegedly due to COVID-19 outbreaks? Huge manufacturing centers like Shanghai and Shenzhen, Wuhan and Chengdu were locked down, with manufacturing and shipping banned, in some cases multiple times.
Because of those distant lockdowns, our American automakers were shut down, too — not of their own choice, but because a vehicle that’s 95% finished still can’t roll off the lot if it’s waiting for a dashboard, or a starter, or a printed circuit board to be shipped from a city that’s been frozen by a distant dictator.
People started to realize then that it wasn’t just American retailers that are too dependent on China; it’s American manufacturers as well. But the Biden-Harris regime tamped down such talk and blamed the containership lines or the seaports, saying the problem was unorganized transportation.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Brilliant analysis!
I had an electric smoker under warranty that needed a new computer. Put a claim in with the manufacture and it took about 2 years to get it because it was being shipped from - drum roll - China. I threw the smoker away after about a year and when the computer came, put it on eBay and sold it NIB for $100.
A lot of our current problems are due to prior administrations and Congresses (plural for both) absolutely crapping on not just the manufacturing sector but the chip foundry sector. In fact, they hit the chips harder than they did traditional manufacturing, in part because they were mostly oldsters who did not (and in many cases, still do not) understand the importance of silicon prowess in the current era.
We do not hate Congress enough.
That’s news to me. All our maytag, LG, appliances are made in China.
There are still some made here - but in many cases they are hamstrung by the need for computer chips made overseas. Why are the chips made overseas? Because both Left and Right ran off US tech production of all kinds.
We don’t hate Congress enough, no. We also don’t hate the obstructionists/idiots on our own side enough.
It’s (the loss of tech manufacture and chip foundries) not all the Left’s fault either. (To give an example of the Right screwing things up:) In the early days, Apple had several US computer factories. They ended up moving and closing most of them for various reasons. The one in Carrollton, Texas closed because the locals decided to be idiots.
The plant opened in 1980. One of the benefits of working for Apple at the time was that no matter who you lived with, they could be on your health insurance. Didn’t matter if it was your spouse, your live-in significant other, your sibling(s), etc - they could be on your insurance. Many people benefited from this - being able to get things like cancer treatments and life saving surgeries for their families and loved ones (the factory began operations pre-AIDS epidemic). Well, the local Biblethumping Idiot Club decided that this meant that Apple was promoting ‘living in sin’ and homosexuality and went out of their way to make doing business difficult for them. They picketed, protested, obstructed everything they could in city council and generally did the Handmaiden’s Tale shaming routine, even though almost none of the employees was gay. Eventually Apple got tired of the crap and closed the plant at the first excuse they got in 1985. The Biblethumping Idiots Club were very proud of themselves and were looking forward to a “right-thinking God-fearing tech manufacturer moving in to the facility.” Well, that didn’t happen. No tech manufacturer would touch Carrollton after that, even pleas to Texas Instruments to move in fell on deaf ears and said Club members were moaning for years and years about how they didn’t understand why no new major tech company would move in. This sort of thing happened in more than a few communities in the US and that contributed to companies choosing to not open new plants in the US. And oh, yeah, a bunch of people died with the cessation of their health benefits, which was an actual human cost. (DFW in 1985 was *not* a place with a lot of large employers that had health insurance that would have household benefits. The oil crash happens the next year and the economy promptly went to crap.) But the Idiot Club was really happy about how they’d driven off that immorality!
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Carrollton *still* doesn't have any major manufacturing employers, and it's mostly a bedroom community these days as a result. And while Apple has recently been opening a couple of US plants again, they're still leery - and for good reason. Most of the problem of that particular Idiots Club were solved by time/death and now we don't have that as so much of a problem any more in Carrollton - but even so, the factories never came back.
We need to police our own better.
Your post reinforces the need for stiff import tariffs. We will force traitors to do the right thing, or .....
Don’t disagree, but we need to roll them out progressively (and I don’t mean ‘like the Left’). We can’t afford a supply chain break again now, especially since we’re rearming from the Biden draw-downs and dissipations (military and civilian) but we need to encourage domestic sources to crank up *and* we need to get Congress off its ass to repeal bad laws they passed in the past. A slowly, progressively increasing tariff system would be the best way to do it, as it can take years to spin up an industry - eighteen months to two years to get even a 10nm chip foundry working even at the best of times. And we need ones that can do 7, 5 and soon 3 in order to be competitive. The IBM-developed 2nm process that Intel is trying to make a production reality has run into engineering snags and probably won’t be a leapfrog forward by the time Intel gets it working. In fact, it’s likely that TSMC will get 2nm working as a practical production reality first by not a small margin.
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