[blorsh]

You forget how it got that way. Parts were made in the USA, then shipped to China. Part production moved. Part production can move the other way, back to the USA. It tends to go where the devices are made. The same goes for raw material. The USA has resources to mine.

Moving any part of the supply chain tends to encourage the other parts to move. If part production moved, then both mining and device production would have an increased incentive to move. If mining moved, part production would have an incentive to move, and if that moved then device production would have an incentive to move. It all works both ways, with suppliers and customers tending to move toward each other.

So yes, we can put everything back in the USA, and it can be affordable, but we face an uphill battle. The battle is only lost if you give up trying.

[kuschku]

That’s a cute statement.

So, how are you going to mine stuff in the US that the US has no resource deposits of?

I want to see you move rare earth production into the US.

[blorsh]

The USA has rare earth mines in California. They got shut down because China supported mining as a strategic asset, meanwhile the EPA was pretty sadistic. Getting that going again is trivial. If we match the legal situation in China, we're back in business.

Another big source is fly ash, which we get from burning coal. This actually has a decently high concentration of the more urgently needed elements. The more coal we burn, the more fly ash we have. Burn more, and get rare earth elements as a bonus.

The amounts needed are tiny. The only trouble with importing from China is that China considers control of rare earth elements to be part of a strategy to dominate the world. China restricts exports, and threatens to restrict them more. This is of course a national security issue for every other country in the world.