Senator Chris Coons recently critiqued policies of president Trump by saying
"Trump promised to lower costs on day 1, and yet as prices keep rising on everything from gas to groceries to health care, he calls affordability a "hoax".
It doesn’t need to be this way. Americans deserve leaders who care about affordability and are willing to do something about it."
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/186KVFsrQ9/
He is right. Affordability has become a problem in the USA and the best way to improve affordability is to start manufacturing goods again instead of importing it from Asia.
But there are several problems with that.
American consumers are not willing to pay increased costs of manufacturing due to rightful demands by workers to increase wages
This is understandable. The marketplace can be brutal that way. Especially in segments that are highly contested. This is why it is important to continue to build new industries that can sustain growth. The energy and power sector is right now the most promising way to offer large scale employment at moderate operating costs. This can easily spur manufacturing in the USA and enable entirely new chemical,materials and appliances manufacturing plants. The DOE is doing reasonably well but the potential is limitless. If you look at the history of the US industry in the last 100 years it has always grown via innovation.
The founding of silicon valley, the emergence of NASA and the creation of the space industry and before that development of the aeronautics industry,the telecom industry and the electrical industry. These have all been massive ground breaking innovations. That's how the standard of living increased and ironically led to workers demanding more wages. It is not the first time in history that workers are demanding more payment.
A similar crisis was encountered at the start of the 21st century too when the assembly line was first introduced and the workers simply didn't respond well to it. Ford doubled their wages and still made a massive profit that enabled the organisation to become one of the most profitable ones. Even if you take the wages into account there is a much better way than to export industrialisation to Asia. Set up factories in Mexico,Puerto Rico,Nicaragua and other states in LATAM. Labour and land are both cheap here. It will take years to build infra that will provide the USA a sustained period of growth and distribution of technology to nations that are friendlier and looking to co-operate not to compete.
On the claim that industries were shifted because labor was cheap and environmental regulations were not in place
These are very important points about costs and pollution concerns. But the manufacturing industry is not staying static. Things are changing fast in what products we build and also what materials we build it with. I partially agree with you that "old" manufacturing would be hard to bring back to the USA without making the changes that you suggested. But the USA can absolutely create new manufacturing techniques that are more circular. Without getting too technical carbon and cellulose based materials do exactly that. Both of them are proven in niche segments. Regarding the concern about labour:- I don't know the ground reality but I was under the impression that it was already highly automated.... So labour costs weren't that much of an issue. Apparently they are?
On the claim industries demand subsidies and workers demand more jobs and increased pay so there is not much interest in automation
That's a real problem. But there are counter examples too. Right now the USA is building massive data centers and suddenly the costs associated with land,labor and electricity have vanished. What's more there seems to be increased demand for electricity that would most likely involve upgradation of infrastructure, more wiring,more Transformers etc. This has led to immense profits for servers and router manufacturing companies like HP, Cisco and obviously corporations like Nvidia have struck gold. These components are built from foundational materials like steel,plastics ,glass meaning all the companies that work in these sectors are getting a cut of profits too. Corning is prospering as more data centers mean more optical wires. Electrification in general has huge momentum behind it as states scramble to build more charging stations for EVs. There is a backlog of orders for gas turbines and manufacturers are actually struggling to meet demand. Then there is push towards magnet manufacturing (recent comment by Pres Trump highlighted this) and an intensified search for alternative materials to copper that can lower the costs associated with new infrastructure development. The big problem of course is that other corporations like France's Schneider electric have been capturing markets by importing cheap Asian goods. The fact that it's not even an American company shows you how deep the problem is.
A small price difference doesn't matter much in the long run. Appliances and goods last for decades so the extra 10 or 20 dollars that you pay or state subsidises won't even register in your accounting. Despite all these issues in the last decade the USA built 2 entirely new space startups Blue Origin and SpaceX. Prospects in the energy sector look extremely promising with excitement in Long duration energy storage. Manufacturing has undergone a massive change which has affected all sectors.
Local politics don't often give a truthful big picture view. Energy and materials are 2 industries that have the potential to generate sustained long term, nearly limitless economic growth that addresses one of the biggest flaws in the US industry that moving up the value chain means letting go of building cheap consumer goods. The energy sector will have to do both. Large scale industrial generation and small scale home generation. This is where you could see activity in the coming decades. At least it looks that way with all that has happened this far. But I could be wrong.
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