[crispyambulance]

I certainly would like to see more American made products and manufacturing, unfortunately, making that happen is not just a matter of shuffling money around, capricious tariffs, and the president posturing for "deals" like a real-estate shyster.

Our current situation is the result of decades of deliberate greedy systematic outsourcing of everything that can be outsourced. It's our own dumb fault. And it will take decades to reverse it if it's even possible. It's not a "short-term" kind of thing.

[potato3732842]

>It's our own dumb fault

Our being the office working city/suburb living HN posting white collar types who have no visibility into the non service parts of the economy beyond what is made available in our investment account dashboards.

The industrial workers, the farmers, the blue collar tradesmen, none of them wanted this even back in 1995 or 2005, the evidince that rampant outsourcing was bad in the long term just wasn't concrete enough for their opinions to gain traction and there were other seemingly more important issues that decided elections back then and we did make a lot of money selling our economy out so everyone was willing to let outsourcing hum along even if they didn't like it.

The people who made bank shipping industrial tooling to the far east and bulldozing old factories, the middle managers coordinating with overseas suppliers, etc, etc. didn't want to do any of those things, they were uneasy about the long term impacts but they did it anyway because the managerial class structured the economy such that that's what they had to do to keep the lights on.

[nine_k]

These same workers, on the other hand, do enjoy the inexpensive consumer goods (clothes, electronics, home appliances, etc) produced in less expensive places like China or Bangladesh or Vietnam.

These countries also were lifted from poverty and into relative prosperity by this. It looked like a win-win, under a certain angle, back in the day; the US would turn into an innovative economy producing high-tech gear, doing high-grade R&D and engineering, and producing software, all the stuff the Bangladeshi or even Chinese were not supposed to be able to do comparably well. It just turned out that the engineering and development thrive next to the actual production capacity, and can be studied and learned. Now Chinese electronic engineering rivals that of the US, same for mechanical, shipbuilding, even aircraft / space and weapons.

A similar thing once happened to Japan, then to South Korea: they turned from postwar ruins and poverty into high-tech giants competing successfully with the US by exporting inexpensive, good-quality stuff to the US. But these are politically aligned with the US and the West in general; places like Bangladesh or Vietnam, not so much, and China expressly is not.

[JoeAltmaier]

'Dumb' is probably the right word. That's how a free market works - every actor works in their own interest. If you try to do something moral but it profits less, then you'll be competed to bankruptcy. Just how it works.

We want a more 'just' system, it requires regulation, so everybody is playing the same game.

Oh! We've deregulated. That's supposed to help make folks more profitable. But, whoops, it's the same playing field no matter the particular rules. So deregulation helps who? Big players, international players. Not you and me.

[aurizon]

Look at the Auto work force in 1960 and in 2025. Wages became so high that it drove automation/robots and created the Japanese/Korean/European auto industries. Had huge tariffs been enacted we would still have some of those jobs in the USA, but those lost to robotics would still be lost due to the basic economics of fabrication. Can this all be rolled back - All the King's men and all the King's horses can not put Humpty Dumpty together again. I can see a possible future where people are all paid the same $$ and you can not 'shop for slaves' as we do in Asia. This level field would take a while to achieve - even now wages in China have risen a lot and they are not the cheapest labor country now, but their assembled physical plant still dominates. China now has excess physical plant and must replace the USA as a large buyer. Other countries feel the same pressures and erect tariffs of their own. I see many years of this levelling to occur. USA will have to reduce these high tariffs because the USA needs many things and it will take 10+ years to create the physical plant that was allowed to rust away over the last 20-30 years - even now a little has returned, but the 'rust belt' has been melted down and it will return slowly.

[gruez]

>Our current situation is the result of decades of deliberate greedy systematic outsourcing of everything that can be outsourced. It's our own dumb fault. And it will take decades to reverse it if it's even possible.

How would you reverse it?