[jbay808]

Why is this downvoted? Seems to present a cogent argument (whereas its parent is a mere assertion) and I'm interested to see any well-sourced rebuttals to it. Anecdotally, I have had a similar impression -- it seems to me like across a wide variety of product categories, it's rare if even possible to find American manufacturers. Go even to a high end department store selling upmarket goods and check where manufactured items are made; very few complex products seem to be in the US.

Edit -- by comparison, when I lived in Japan I found it extraordinarily easy to buy locally made products of all sorts; pots and pans, coffee mugs, water bottles, stationery, clothes, shoes, electronics, tools, injection molded plastic items, paper products, everything. Even in their equivalent of dollar stores. Sometimes they were a bit more expensive than those produced in China/Vietnam/Indonesia, but often they were price competitive. It was weird coming back to North America and adapting to not being able to find anything locally made.

[analognoise]

I work in defense. I've literally watched a team put together a factory line to build fighter jets fuselages. We can build whatever we want, and the numbers reflect this.

We don't build low margin anything because nobody would buy it if it costs more.

Japan is a good example - they setup all their car factories in the US in the South specifically to avoid union labor costs! Many Japanese cars, for our market, are made... Right here! Because the shipping and labor overhead would make them uncompetitive.

[jbay808]

Are iphone margins low?

Fighter jets are almost a cost-is-no-object project, so to me at least, it isn't a good proxy for a country's manufacturing prowess.

Your ability to build something is measured by how cheaply you can build that thing. This means that if I can make something more cheaply than you can, I'm actually better at making it than you are, assuming the end product is the same. (You can also cheapen something by cutting corners on the design or materials, but then you're making a different thing).

[analognoise]

Without an integrated supply chain? Yes.

Can we make an iPhone? Yeah, we design not only the chips here but the circuit boards. They're prototyped here!

Can we increase our margins by throwing the chemicals into the local river and having people manually stand there for 12 hour shifts breathing in toxic chemicals to manually polish them? Yup.

[jbay808]

Having a sophisticated supply chain in place is a big part of manufacturing prowess!

[lazulicurio]

But the skills to build low-volume, high-margin fighter jets are distinct from the skills to build high-volume, low-margin toasters. They'll be some overlap, don't get me wrong, but quantity has a quality all of its own.