[stochastimus]

Genuinely curious, HN folks - for those who downvoted this comment, can you share why you did so? I don’t personally mind sarcasm as long as it’s not aimed maliciously at an individual, and I read this comment as a sarcastic way of saying “how come American leadership in general doesn’t have a similar plan”. Do folks just downvote sarcasm as a rule?

[Kye]

It's just inaccurate. The US has been working on insourcing since at least the Obama administration.

https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2012/01/11/everyth...

I'm in the area with the very Caterpillar plant mentioned there.

[Dig1t]

You can also find some quotes from Obama saying “those jobs are just not coming back”.

The tiny amount of manufacturing they have tried (and mostly failed) to bring back pales in comparison to what the US used to produce.

[bee_rider]

I’ve never studied economics so there is a very good chance I’m reading the plot wrong somehow, but it looks like US manufacturing has been increasing since the 70’s at least.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/tags/series?t=manufacturing%3Bqu...

It takes up less of the economy of maybe, and we might focus on upscale things that have less consumer visibility like industrial stuff, but manufacturing in the US seems to be in an OK spot.

[Kye]

It does seem like a situation where the pie just grew around it. There are so many kinds of job now. Even manufacturing is skilled work, more than it ever was. Their skill might be the ins and outs of a particular machine (like one of those big green injection molding machines), but it's as skilled as any kind of office work.

[bee_rider]

Yes.

Also the rest of the world’s pie grew, which is also fine.

The US made everything… for a while, after the rest of the world had blown up all of each other’s factories. Nobody is hoping for a repeat of that whole mess!

[ajmurmann]

As I mentioned in another comment, this view is skewed. Even China has lost more jobs to automation than the US has lost to China. There will just be fewer and fewer jobs in manufacturing, no matter where it's done.

Further, from a purely economic sense, outsourcing makes the most sense. Most people will be able to by everything for much cheaper which more than compensates for the lost jobs in one area. We also have record high employment. So from a purely economic perspective, we are doing great!

To me the real issue is the strategic importance of certain manufacturing areas. China can build 200 military ships in the time we build one. 20 subs in the time we build slightly more than one. We need to get our military supply chain back in shape if we want to remain globally dominant and keep us and our partners safe!

[hikingsimulator]

I don't have the ability to downvote yet but I can pitch in an explanation:

Setting China as an outlier that does reshoring/industrial planning at the expense of the [American] worker is a politic fantasy. It forgets that reshoring is a global phenomenon also found in democracies [1] that is rather the result of a more uncertain world where logistics change with the success and wanning of political favors and alliances.

[1] https://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/en/french-foreign-policy/econ...

[fsflover]

I didn't downvote, but: Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[jncfhnb]

It’s lazy and inaccurate both on trends and policy direction

[stochastimus]

I got downvoted 2 points for asking this question LoL