TPP died for good reasons because it for technocrats by technocrats.
- would have removed US govt general requirement to buy goods produced in america
- would have moved jobs to vietnam (lower min. wage than china) instead of back to US, putting downward wage pressure on US manufacturing workers
- protect more investments in offshoring than NAFTA does (read: incentivize offshoring) in both manufacturing and services
Alternatively, we leapfrog a generation of manufacturing processes and go straight to high speed 3D printing and clothing made from recovered landfill materials by nanobots.
I don't know if what we need is more protection or faster innovation. The two tend to work in opposite directions. Certainly they require different training and expectations.
But yeah, really good for American workers so we can buy more shitty products which we can throw into the landfill...
War requires a lot of basic manufacturing capacity, and geopolitically those aren't good things to lose.
Nations with all the manufacturing and farming they need to survive regardless may not feel so restrained. And countries can always form self-sufficient blocs.
A lot (if not most) of military machinery is still manufactured in the US. Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman build our planes. General Dynamics, Oshkosh, and others build our tanks. Raytheon makes some of our missiles. In fact, here's full list of who's building our defense tech: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_defense_... -- As you can see, it's mostly home-grown and home-based American companies. We've done a very good job of keeping our most critical and sensitive manufacturing jobs inside the states.
It's mostly consumer goods manufacturing that's moved abroad. I don't see any particular benefit in bringing it back stateside. Making things in low-wage countries like Vietnam or China dramatically slashes costs for the consumers, allowing us American consumers to live a more lavish lifestyle. Forcing consumer goods to be manufactured in the U.S. would dramatically drive up their prices, and in effect be an indirect tax on the American consumer. Moreover, the U.S. is nearly at full employment. Who's going to staff the factories that will make consumer goods? With the extreme hostility to immigration we have under the folks in charge now, I don't see any new immigrants being let in to work at these new factories. Companies would be forced to build fully automated factories (due to labor shortage), and there'll be jarring period of high consumer goods prices while software engineers write code for new robotic/automated manufacturing of basic goods. Maybe in the end, this newly written software will (with its development cost amortized over time) allow us to undercut the prices of even low-wage human-requiring manufacturing and become a reigning manufacturer of all sorts of things -- but that benefit feels fairly remote, far-fetched, and hard-to-achieve.
I understand someone struggling who needs to buy the no name soup made in China but your 1,000 dollar cell phone only costs 250 to make. If the price went up to 400 your phone would still be a 1,000. That's what people will pay for it. If people cannot afford more the price will stay the same or go lower until Apple can't make a profit.
The jobs and spinoff businesses and increased security better environmental conditions worldwide vs Apple adding more money into a bank account. Cellphones are a bad example.
People who have given up and are not looking for work, but instead (for example) move back in with their parents and live a lower quality of life -- not counted in employment figures.
Also these numbers don't take into account underemployment. If you got a 30 hour a week job that pays a quarter of what your old job paid, you're still considered "employed", even though your financial situation is much worse. Ditto for if, to make ends meet, you now have to work three jobs, 12 hours a day, 7 days a week. Yes, those people are "employed", but might be much better off if there were mid- and low-skill manufacturing jobs that have often been the staple of the middle class and working class.
Look at groups of people at a more granular level. On average, the economy is more efficient when goods are manufactured overseas.
If you're living in Wisconsin and you aren't a highly skilled knowledge worker with a college degree, and have been watching your community go from people with good factory jobs to minimum wage fast food and Walmart employees, it's a disaster.
The middle of the country needs quality jobs and options. It's not enough for small groups of people to do extraordinarily well while everyone else falls by the wayside.
And people don't want government handouts to fill the void. They want dignity, purpose, and control over their lives. In America, the only way to have that is to have a reasonably well paying job.
I'm aware of this, but I'd assume that they're all setup for peacetime manufacturing rates and would have difficulty scaling up. My concern is more about a lack of slack manufacturing capacity (and skills!) that could be repurposed in wartime.
IIRC, the US's slack manufacturing capacity was one of main things that won the war for the allies in WWII.
> It's mostly consumer goods manufacturing that's moved abroad. I don't see any particular benefit in bringing it back stateside.
That's true for some things, but not others. I'm thinking specifically about consumer electronics and some related areas. Where the capacity could be redirected towards military products (e.g. electronics for smart bombs and drones).
Even more broadly, consumer manufacturing may carry with it supply chains that are more militarily useful to have than the consumer product manufacturing capacity itself.
> Making things in low-wage countries like Vietnam or China dramatically slashes costs for the consumers, allowing us American consumers to live a more lavish lifestyle.
I think we've been letting this consideration drive too much of our decision making. It's one factor, but not the only one that matters.
Also, you have to think about the day when Vietnam or China runs out of people who are willing to work cheaply enough feed a system of labor arbitrage.
And these are the types of jobs that provided a decent living wage for the middle/lower-middle class, of which a lot of people in the midwest and rustbelt use to do, and the loss of such jobs has decimated these communities. Service sector, warehouse fulfillment, and gig economy jobs don't provide nearly the value, nor do they provide the types of benefits that former jobs did.
Edit - Not sure why my comment is being downvoted. A lot of the jobs in the midwest were things like basic factory work of plastic products, textiles, CNC machining, molding (of which my dad was previously employed doing), and other things of that nature which have been outsourced over the decades. These jobs not only provided a stable livable wage, but most of them also provided benefits such as health/dental insurance for not only the workers but their entire families. These jobs have left over the years, and nothing which provided the same standards of living has come into replace them. States such as michigan, illinois, ohio, wisconsin, and others in that area have been hit hard over the past few decades because of these changes in the global economy.
but, for whatever it's worth, the average US growth rate for advanced technology product exports was higher before Jan 1 1994 (NAFTA) than it was afterwards up until most recent data, 2018. i didn't look at imports, but suspect that the rate of import is higher/increasing. there are various interpretations of that, one of which could be that global demand for high tech stuff is simply slowing outside the US, but that seems unlikely given how much tech is blowing up generally.
another one of which that seems solid is that manufacturing "body of knowledge" / infrastructure probably allows tooling up the workforce and chipping away at high tech sort of stuff that the US may have had a dominant position in.
Maybe we'd actually have cost-effective mass transit then.
Things aren't exactly simple, and I am not convinced that the tariffs + tax cuts have helped the American worker at all. US Manufacturing is down for two months in a row now, and I don't see it getting any better any time soon.
We're at a point where the Trump-defenders need to start explaining exactly what these tariffs are supposed to do and why they think the tariffs are helping. The tariffs have been in effect for well over a year, do you have any evidence that they're helping yet?
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Frankly, I don't care how much we hurt, or help, China. It was supposed to be "American First". So lets talk about America and whether or not these policies help Americans.
On the contrary, if the US economy was hurt, then its a failure. The point of "America First" is to care most about America, not about hurting others.
> Then, if manufacturing moves back to the US and other Western hemisphere nations that's another level of success.
No. The only success is if manufacturing moves back to the USA. For example, Ford moved to Mexico. This is NOT a win for USA.
We don't want jobs just to come to the US. We want to help build the economies of the people scrambling across our border too. So jobs in Mexico is great, as long as there's also new jobs in the US.
Yes we do. Full stop.
> We want to help build the economies of the people scrambling across our border too.
No.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier_Air_Conditioner_move_t...
Carrier moving their jobs to Mexico was a key element of Trump's platform, and a major reason why Trump got elected. Trump's base does NOT want the jobs to move to Mexico.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-01/trump-s-v...
>The Republican presidential nominee rolled out the new talking point during a surprise trip Wednesday to Mexico, and explained it further on Thursday. In his telling, a prosperous Mexico and Latin America means less illegal immigration to the U.S. and more markets for American exports.
Actions speak louder than words. What did Trump do when Carrier was moving to Mexico? No American is willing to give up jobs to Mexico. Period.
You can try to whitewash Trump's actions as much as you want, but the Carrier issue is done and dealt with.
https://thehill.com/policy/finance/424078-trump-supporter-ey...
> A supporter of President Trump is considering moving his company's production headquarters to Mexico in an effort to avoid Trump's tariffs on Chinese imports, according to The New York Times.
...
> “I just feel so betrayed. If we fail because the company is being harmed by the government, that just makes me sick," he added, saying that he expects that his profits in 2019 will be cut in half because of the tariffs.
This is the actual politics of the people. Now go ask all your Trump supporter friends if this move was a "success" for Trump's tariffs, an intended result.
There's another set of jobs which is the massive manufacturing base in China which provides goods for the US and elsewhere. We would like those jobs to come to the Western hemisphere, including and especially but not limited to the US.
Regardless, I don't know how you quantify "if the US economy was hurt" in a consistent and accurate way. I'm sure some would want to use the S&P 500 or our GDP as a single measure. Neither of these things would immediately account for whether the obvious goal (not having IP stolen) or less obvious and quantifiable goal (dominance and global influence) are maintained, or suppose there's some other goal I don't know about, but it's more complex than saying we produced more value this year than last year.
I picture someone saying, "Look the S&P 500 went down, therefore the 'trade war' failed, see!" I'm not saying you would say that, I just think your definition, "if the US economy was hurt, then its a failure" leaves room for vague interpretation, where virtually any metric could be selected as proof of failure.
The Midwest doesn't care about intellectual property rights. IP rights is mostly a west-coast (ie: Hollywood / Silicon Valley) thing. Ford and GM aren't the ones having their tech stolen by China... its Cisco and Apple who have to worry about that stuff.
Frankly: we all know why the trade war started. The trade war started because Mr. Trump got elected and ran on the platform of starting a trade war. Its that simple.
Now its up to the supporters of this platform to put up and explain to the rest of America the situation. Its been three years, and election year is next year. Its time to show off your results.
Are you sure about that? Have you asked John Deere, Spirit Aerospace, Cargill, ADM, Citadel Investments, ...?
The Berlin wall fell nearly 30 years ago and the USSR has collapsed shortly thereafter.
China's method of governance isn't anything like the communists. They're actually building advanced economies, as the builder of iPhones and lots of other equipment.
China is authoritarian, and probably best described as "legalist" (medieval Chinese philosophy). China engages in a system closer to capitalism, see Alibaba, Huawei and Baidu.
China's "communist party" is only communist in name. Although they're against human rights, they are welcoming of capitalists. Its why Tesla is building a factory there, even with the threat of Tariffs, because the rising Chinese middle class is actually working for that country. China is unfortunately, discovering an "authoritarian capitalism", some kind of crony capitalism which benefits the party and ultimately builds markets (Chinese Stock Market and Chinese Mega-corps are on the rise. Foxconn, Alibaba, Huawei, etc. etc.)
China introduced some elements of capitalism and liberty into its economy, but clearly retains government control over what would otherwise be independent companies.
Whether it chooses to exercise that control is immaterial -- the CCP obviously believes very strongly that if needed it has that control.
And legally, it does.
In that respect, China looks much more like the late-stage Soviet Union, where a diversity of political power groups (some allied, some opposed) give the illusion of a free market to a command economy.
Theyre an advanced economy yeah I agree with that. However, their markets are not open to foreign companies at all. Not a single western company can compete in China because of the tech theft and spying, and most of all because all the big companies are not private at all, theyre just communist institutions that are disguised as "private companies". If any western person uses an app like WeChat they would be so weirded out by the UI. That is because companies like Facebook and Google evolved that big organically, while companies like WeChat or Weibo or whatever evolved unorganically, their users are forced to use those apps.
And on top of that all, theres just no doubt whether theres tech theft. Most of the big companies in China are that big due to the fact that they blatantly just stole the tech and theyre not even trying to hide it. Theres countless of instances of this occurring, and its very surprising to me that the West just woke up.
Look at Hong Kong. Because of the West, HK has had a taste of what freedom looks like, and they would fight a lot to get back their liberty!
Fraternité, Égalité, Liberté!!!!!!!!! You can only compete with bullies if you are a bully yourself. With fire with fire!