> Everyone seems to be saying it's "tough medicine" and will help bring industry back to the USA
Everyone just assumes that bringing manufacturing back would be a good thing. I can't see why. It will make everything cost more, and our unemployment was already as low as it could be. Our problem was inflation, not a lack of low paying jobs.
U.S. manufacturing was already near an all-time high. Bringing more manufacturing onshore will just get us more robots, not more jobs. There's a steel plant a few hours south of me, outside of Corpus, it runs at a few % of nominal capacity, and generates 2 millions tons of new steel per year. It has 200 employees, mostly for regulatory purposes. How many thousands of people would a plant like that have employed in 1980? I can tell you: at least 10000 at current nominal, without overhead, just on the floor; at full capacity it'd be 100k+.
Similarly, our naval yards are inefficient because we're fucking with last minute change orders, because there's no effective oversight. (And, due to DOGE, none, now.)
China produces vast amounts of manufacturing output because it's a huge country. So does the U.S. So does India.
I believe that a significant portion of this is gender coding. The political parties in the US are segmenting by gender. Manufacturing is coded male and service jobs are coded female. Once you drill in things get more complex, since something like garment manufacturing would still be coded female, but this is correct at the largest levels. So a political movement that is soaked in a desire for a return to some idealized past of traditional masculinity concludes that manufacturing is virtuous while service roles are not, independent of whether manufacturing actually creates greater economic prosperity.
"Email jobs" are disdained as valueless. Hawley compares manufacturing to God's Creation in his book on masculinity and concludes that men must carry on this legacy of creation to fulfill their purpose. That's not an economic argument but a moral one, which concludes that it is better to be paid less pressing steel into sheets than to be paid more teaching undergraduates.
Services, in my mind, is a broader thing than just market exports (which I agree are largely tech). Consider the pejorative term "nanny state." The government bureaucrat testing your water for lead is part of this system. Bessent is very explicitly saying that the administration is deliberately shredding jobs in the federal bureaucracy and expects those people to go work in the factories they hope will be created based on these policies.
While there's definitely an "ugh, not everything has to be about gender studies" reaction to some of these ideas I personally can't stop seeing it over and over and over in the new administration and social reaction to it. Zuckerburg saying that we need more "masculine energy" in tech and rebranding his image. Mel Gibson saying that Trump is "daddy" returning home and taking off his belt to beat us back into shape. Vance and Musk's obsessions with childless women.
I'm back at +1. HN has a small enough population that one or two votes can't really be taken to mean anything.
I would not be surprised if there is a general resistance to this sort of framing among some HN readers, but I'm not going to take snap decisions of one or two people to mean much.
Everyone just assumes that bringing manufacturing back would be a good thing. I can't see why. It will make everything cost more, and our unemployment was already as low as it could be. Our problem was inflation, not a lack of low paying jobs.