[triactual]

This is pure fantasy. Minimum wage in the US is 2-10x what it is in low cost regions. Not even touching regulations. US experts travel to those regions to hand-hold every step necessary in order to make any product not forced to be built in the US by taxes or regulation. I did this for years and I hate it. I have worked for years in both American and foreign factories and I can assure you that they can automate just as well so there is no hope without government intervention in the form of tariffs. US labor currently competes on a global market.

[tsimionescu]

Sure, but the problem is it's not just minimum wages that are 2-10x higher in the US. It's all wages. I don't know the manufacturing sector personally, but I can look at the tech sector.

I am a senior software engineer in Romania working for an American company. I am well appreciated and currently have a significant hand in designing major pieces of one of our bigger products, working with a Romanian team, a US team and a team in India. I'm explaining this just to make it clear I am not some contractor code monkey working in a sweatshop. My salary though, which is quite good for my country, is 5-10x smaller than the kinds of salaries software devs expect in California, and even Atlanta or Austin. I am higher up the corporate ladder, and better appreciated, and have brought more value to this company than many of those people - and so have many of my colleagues from Romania and India.

You can't tell me that it's OK for software devs to make 150k+/year, for sales people to make similar salaries (with bonuses), for layers and layers of middle management (who often have negative value for the company when evaluated objectively) to do the same, for executives to make tens or hundreds of millions, for shareholders to make record profits; but then if the assembly line workers get 31k/year, THAT is what's bleeding the company dry.

You're not wrong about the lack of US manufacturing, and the lack of motivation for it. But you are dead wrong about the reasons behind it.

[robomartin]

While I absolutely understand and sympathize with what you are saying, the issue cannot be analyzed by simply comparing executive pay to that of the lowest paid employees. I know it is popular to make these comparisons, I get it, one gets a sense of righteousness from discussing things in those terms. However, these comparisons make no sense at all.

Wage scales are what they are for a reason. Simple example, in the US an engineer might graduate with somewhere between $100K and $300K US in student loans. That, right there, starts to impose a baseline on what someone can reasonably earn in order for it to be worth it to have that job. Just like a business isn't going to exist to just break even, people tend not to work just to break even. Everyone has to make a profit.

To that you start adding professional and personal necessities and you might quickly realize that $150K a year living in Los Angeles might very well be equivalent to 1/2 or 1/5 of that salary elsewhere in the world.

I'll give you another simple example: It costs my family $1200 per month for healthcare. It used to be $600 per month. Then Obamacare was instituted --under the laughable "Affordable Care Act"-- and our healthcare tripled to $1800 US per month. We eventually moved to a $1200 per month plan where we accept greater risk and higher costs. I did the math, we have to spend somewhere in the order of $25K in a year before our health insurance really starts paying for things.

In other words, context is always important in judging how much people get paid.

An executive that is responsible for managing hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue should make enough money to reflect the degree of responsibility he or she has. If they don't do their job, hundreds of people lose their jobs. You simply can't compare executive pay to that of a warehouse worker who is operating at an entirely different level of responsibility and accountability.

The problem isn't pay scales. The problem is the overall cost structure, which starts at artificially forced costs --be it wages or regulatory-- imposed in complete violation of free market principles.

Here's an example of these costs, something I learned about a couple of decades ago and just astounded me. In Los Angeles County (for those outside the US, the region where the city of Los Angeles is located) we have a tax called "Los Angeles County Business Property Tax". What is this? Well, to put it in simple terms, look around your office. The County of Los Angeles makes businesses pay taxes on everything you see: Your desk, your computer, your printer, fax machine, chair, table, lights, trash can, even any improvements you may have made to your building (dividers, painting, electrical, etc). LA County makes you pay a tax on every physical product the company owns. FOR FUCKING EVER.

This is some of the context that is missed from most of these conversations and the kinds of things only people who have to deal with them would know. As is always the case, life is a complex multivariate problem that is never well represented by a single simple variable.

[robomartin]

It has been my experience that most folks commenting on this matter on HN have no clue whatsoever what they are talking about. None. They comment based on pure ideology or, possibly worse, a delusion driven into their heads by our lovely universities.

Those of us, like you, who actually have or had skin in the game --real experience actually trying to make real things in the context of the real world-- know better. We know and understand exactly what's going on and where this is likely headed. Nobody here wants to hear about it. The reaction ranges from the most uninformed comments to flagging and effectively cancelling what they don't want to hear.

The worse of it is that reality doesn't care about flagging comments and down-votes, reality keeps moving forward. The path we are on is 180 degrees from what we should be doing if we actually want to have a shot a maintaining a reasonable standard of living for generations to come.

To be fair, at this point, it is almost impossible. The kind of leadership and cultural shift we need in order to do the things we have to do might be impossible to achieve given what we have done to our society. This is the most disconcerting part for me. We have devoted years destroying this nation from the inside. Europe hasn't done much better than this.

[triactual]

It’s genuinely terrifying. There seems to be no recognition that you cannot have labor unions and environmental protections with out tariffs to even the playing field with less scrupulous countries. We are rapidly approaching a time where only the military industrial complex retains any manufacturing expertise.

[robomartin]

I have designed and manufactured systems for aerospace applications. I spent months dealing with ITAR issues due to the reality that you simply cannot build almost anything out of US/European components. The metal and a few high-tech items, mostly in the materials domain. Almost everything else is not made in the US or Europe.

I thought that people were going to wake up to some of these realities when they finally saw reality in the form of not even being able to manufacture face masks in the US. We don't make the cloth and other materials, we don't even make the machines you need to manufacture them.

This and related realities should have been covered in great detail by our media. For people outside of manufacturing this was news. Most people go through life having no understanding whatsoever of how and where the stuff they use every day comes from, how it's made, etc.

The pandemic should have shocked everyone into pushing for massive changes that would, over time, increase self reliance. Yet, none of that happened. It was starting to, at the highest levels, but then political forces changed and now we are more concerned about giving people free money than actually securing their futures and that of the next generation. Brilliant.