[idrathernot]

As a buyer of low volume metal castings from both domestic and foreign foundries that my company finishes and sells to the energy industry in the US, our customers often tout that they’ll pay any mark-up for a domestic casting. We then have to explain to them that regardless of their willingness to pay up, there are literally no domestic companies that are willing to produce this stuff, let alone at a reasonable price.

To give more detail, one casting is a low precision structural attachment that connects an heavy anchor chain to a floating buoy. This part is cast from 316 grade stainless steel in China for ~$50/ea. For GSA work in the US, we have to use the same part cast domestically from A897 Ductile Iron (a far inferior material in a marine environment) because none of the few remaining US foundries who do stainless are willing to take on the work.

Unless the government is going to take the tariff revenue, and immediately incentivize more domestic competition and investment in manufacturing infrastructure (dirty industries frowned upon by VC tech bros who have no idea where any of the physical items they rely on to survive come from) at a level greater than FDR’s New Deal, then the result is simply going to be extreme inflation and massive scarcity.

I’d love to just start a foundry making our stainless castings right here in the USA, but anyone with the time for that doesn’t have access to the funding and anyone with the funding doesn’t have the time for the lengthy payback period of building a factory. Industrial prowess in a America is basically far too gone to catch up at this point and even the high value and cutting-edge R&D stuff will fall off as we don’t have all of the legacy “heavy industrial” know how that unlocks the latter part of the value chain.

[qazxcvbnmlp]

Yup. We are starting to fall down the slippery slope of not even knowing how to produce goods, not even considering cost.

[lotsofpulp]

> dirty industries frowned upon by VC tech bros who have no idea where any of the physical items they rely on to survive come from)

Everyone knows where it comes from, it just doesn’t make business sense to plow money into high liability, low economies of scale businesses when your competition has far lower labor and environmental compliance costs.