Made for you.
With new technologies we can make stuff cheaper and faster than China if we wanted to. If the government would stop punishing work and investment, we would see a real ‘great leap forward’. (sorry to any commies who feel sore there)
Hopefully we won’t keep giving away domestic jobs to illegals and H1B visa holders.
It’s about darned time, for America to bring back manufacturing.
Last year we set (yet another record) of outsourcing to China. -342,632,500,000.00 Why should we buy stuff from China, and make China stronger and more powerful.
Bring it back. America needs to be stronger and more powerful.
Just saying.
I would add that “free trade,” which numerous presidents of both parties have advocated, has actually been pretty one-sided. We have actual free trade, whereas most of our trading partners have set up barriers of one sort or another to avoid losing all their manufacturing jobs. The result is that America has been bled more than any other country. And the Chamber of Commerce guys love it.
Quality vs Cost fundamentals. If you improve efficiency while maintaining quality, for one thing, on-shoring can be a Very Good move.
I find it interesting this article, is posted from Forbes, which is after all (to the best of my knowledge anyway...)
Now Chinese.
The only way to get politicians to take action on bringing manufacturing back to America is to convince them the illegals need the jobs.
I assume Mr Roemer will shortly be investing his own assets in a manufacturing start-up in the US.
More American manufacturing! Yes! This stuff should be built by AMERICAN robots!
*
Manufactures require workers ...not privileged citizens they are told to hire and can’t fire without political fallout/payoffs etc.
The dynamic has changed for one reason and that’s fuel cost. It began during the spike in fuel cost immediately after the crash because container shipping got expensive to the point that the challenges of offshoring to China became a questionable trade off. With the advent of the fracking revolution and the associated cheap natural gas, there came a cost advantage to domestic manufacturing. That’s the long and the short of it. If that goes away, then it’s down to labor cost plus transport and China still wins there, not as advantageous as it once was but the numbers still favor.
It’s not going to equate to jobs though. It’ll be automation.
Yes, I understand there are hundreds of thousands of manufacturing robots looking for work.
They don’t mention the fact that China is highly regulated and in some cities you can only certain typed of manufacturing operations in designated zones. This means to manufacture something in China, you may need up to 6 buildings and will have to have the product moved back and forth to create a product. That’s a lot of trucking before even shipping it to the United States with an 8 week lead time.
To begin with, this is another issue where the states can expect the feds to stick their big noses into intrastate manufacturing because of the ill-conceived 17th Amendment imo, corrupt senators helping the corrupt House to make constitutionally indefensible laws that screw things up for USA manufacturers.
In fact, consider that when the country was first established that the rich paid all the federal taxes to keep the feds operating.
“The rich alone use imported articles, and on these alone the whole taxes of the General Government are levied [emphasis added]. … Our revenues liberated by the discharge of the public debt, and its surplus applied to canals, roads, schools, etc., the farmer will see his government supported, his children educated, and the face of his country made a paradise by the contributions of the rich alone, without his being called on to spend a cent from his earnings.” —Thomas Jefferson to Thaddeus Kosciusko, 1811.
I suppose that if I were a corrupt, tax-hungry federal politician that I’d try to think of laws to discourage companies from manufacturing things in the USA so that feds could raise more revenues from imported goods.
Next, while we do need state governments to act responsibly and take care of the environment, it remains that the constitutionally undefined EPA is going look for ways to make it difficult for prospective USA manufacturers to be economically competitive, until company owners wise up to the fact that the EPA has no constitutional teeth to tell anybody to do anything.
In fact, the same thing can be said of intrastate labor. While manufacturers need to work with state lawmakers to make laws to assure workers of reasonable wages and working conditions, how long will it be before patriots wake up constitutionally clueless manufacturers to the idea that the feds have no constitutional power to regulate intrastate wages and intrastate working conditions?
Or is Mr. Roemer possibly anticipating robot-based factories?
So given the unconstitutional federal policy obstacles that prospective new “MADE IN USA” manufacturers will be facing, I’m not sure why Mr. Roemer is seemingly optimistic about it at this point in time, especially since lawless, pro-union Obama is still in the Oval Office.
Otherwise, what am I overlooking?
Some one needs to investigate and discuss how much the eco-warriors have contributed to the war on industry, my gut feeling is that it’s a good amount.
After the dollar crashes and a Chinese Pez dispenser (and everything else at WalMart and Target) costs $1,200 you can be DAMNED SURE Manufacturing will blaze a flaming trail back to the USA.
It will make Carl Lewis seem like a tortoise.
There will be a tidal wave of on-shoring.
Thanks for the article.
It is not just several good arguments about why manufacturing should come back to the USA from China (reshoring) - it is actually happening.
Investment in new manufacturing capacity in the USA has grown in the last few years, and new money has pretty much stopped going to China. Lower cost producers in Asia have picked off a lot of China’s low-end investment, and the USA is getting some high-end, and some close to the source type of products.
They mention the USA’s cheap energy advantage from fracking, but oil and gas are also feedstock materials themselves for making some products like plastics, fertilizers and a bunch of chemical processes.
The price of oil and gas may fluctuate, but other factors which the article points to will likely increase steadily. Increasing speed in the supply chain and lowering of inventory and transportation costs demands local supply. Increasing automation/robotics will dramatically narrow the labor cost differences, which was the major reason for off-shoring.
Rapid technical innovation is something we excel at, and which the Chinese can pretty much only steal - another reason that companies have been starting to avoid them.
We won’t gain as many jobs, but we will gain some very good ones, a nice shot to GDP and additional tax revenue.
China will be well and truly screwed. The Government there may have to try to convince a hundred million young adults to go back to rice farming or something. They won’t have the big trade surpluses to spend on their military buildup, without printing excess money.
So we are well positioned for an economic boom if a good President comes in next term, and the Republicans hold the Senate (it will be a tough cycle). A few reforms could bring a flood of investment and growth.
The United States still manufactures the best guitars in the world. They are very expensive because they take a lot of man hours and man hours in the United States are very costly.
You want to bring back manufacturing into the United States? Then we either lower our wages down to third world rates, or we introduce tariffs.
Either that or just make sure Americans buy American built stuff. We can’t compete with people who make 50 cents an hour when we have to pay them 100 times that.
Are we as Americans willing to pony up the bucks to buy a widget made in America that costs $100 when we can get it from China for $5?