US industrial output is much lower than it has been relative to our consumption. We should mostly make in the country the industrial products we consume.
We are a consumer nation because we are more prosperous than our peers. It's the same reason you buy your food at a grocery store.
Generally, the clamoring for domestic production comes down to:
1. Employment. But because we are more prosperous, our employment is aimed elsewhere. We have jobs for people that are less dangerous, less manual, and better paid.
2. A fear that without domestic production, we're at a strategic or military disadvantage. But it's not that we _can't_ produce in an emergency, we can and have historically (see: oil in the 1970s). What protects us most is hegemony, which is threatened by things like across-the-board trade wars.
3. Nostalgia for the good ol days. Look, if you want to work in a factory, we have lots of them here, still. Nobody will stop you from putting on the hard hat. But in all likelihood you have a less stressful, less dangerous, and better-paying job today.
There really isn't an argument for this. Our trade was - as all trade is - mutually beneficial. Right now we're pushing the glass to the edge of the table when it was perfectly fine where it was.
One other important note: there are things we literally cannot produce domestically due to lack of natural availability (food products, certain textiles)
I think people look at "national debt" as though we're buying trillions of dollars of stuff and not, fundamentally, two things:
1) mandatory saving for future, like a Social Security for the country (which is ironically also comprised of Social Security)
2) investments made into the future of the country. People buy T-bonds because they're reliable returns. Low risk, relatively low reward. If suddenly our future looks less bright, our debt will slow, but it will be a pretty telling canary in the coal mine.
It's baffling to me that people generally don't grasp this. They treat it as though we're just ... buying stuff on a credit card.
Manufacturing as a share of GDP is bound to fall. It is inevitably going the way of agriculture.
The US is in the envyable position of having developed a globally dominant service sector. Putting that at risk of retaliation by imposing tariffs on all imports, including the lowest margin stuff like screws and bolts is utter insanity.
> We should mostly make in the country the industrial products we consume.
You state this as fact that we should all agree on. Why should we do this? Why not rely on our allies and friends to do what they do well, while we continue to do what we do well? Is trade not the basis of peace? If we stand alone, we must ask why we must.
I'm curious, are you personally volunteering to work in the factories? Or is it a situation where we need industrialization to come back but you personally are not willing to see it through?
I mean, is the poster in question a senior robotics engineer? Because that's whose going to be working in any factories that open. Maybe they'll have some security guards and janitors, I guess
By looking at where things are made rather than by using hedonic adjustments to multiply up INTC revenue until it hides the problem (or whatever the strategy is today now that INTC is flagging).
Assembly is one example of manufacture, so that distinction isn't really the one you think it is. Output is tracked by value added, so the mythical "car comes missing a single bolt which gets added in Flint" doesn't really show up in the output numbers, if that's your worry.
Interesting, so basically no growth since 2007 if you exclude computers, even with increased productivity. And the drop in employment is insane and it's no wonder that there is a huge political movement with fixing that as a pillar. Not even to mention regional problems that have been going on longer in the Rust Belt. Yeah I find it pretty disgusting when workers in service based industries like here have no sympathy for the workers in these industries.
That it's relative share in GDP is down during that time means that other sectors were growing even faster (think Google, Netflix and so on, so services instead of things). That the service sector gains in relative importance is actually a sign of an advanced economy, every modern economy looks like that, not just the US.
In the end, the problem is that China manufacturing output is $4.6 trillion according to those numbers while the US is $2.5 trillion, while it was around the same back in 2010. This, along with its decline in percentage of GDP is causing the perception, and it also is causing decline in employment in manufacturing. The perception matters ideologically and the employment issues matters materially, and so we have these tariffs as an effort to bring manufacturing back to the US.
Basically if you ignore computers, there was zero growth in manufacturing sector. If you take computers into account but ignore processing power increase, there was zero growth. So pretty much the only driving force in the manufacturing sector for the last 20 years was Intel, AMD, Nvidia. This is even with the increased productivity per person in manufacturing sector (so there was also massive reduction in employment).
It is highly concerning and the numbers were very much cooked up.
It is. But it's really a lousy conversation to have you two going back and forth several times, with each of you asking the other to substantiate their position, and neither of you actually doing so.
Jobs is not the same as production. Many of the jobs are lost due to automation. If you bring manufacturing back to the US you’ll be “hiring” a lot more robuts than humans.
