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Comment by allovernow | Hacker News Reader

Hello? The entire country just recognized the folly of outsourcing literally everything to a single third world country.

If Trump isn't a total idiot (though I know many of you believe he is) this is his opportunity to return manufacturing jobs to the US, possibly under subsidy, at the very least as a national security concern.

This rampant tribalism is insane. Literally nothing the administration does now will see any credit from it's opponents. Take off the partisan blinders. Even shitty leaders can make good decisions, and deserve credit for doing so.

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What did he do that will bring back manufacturing? Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania are in a manufacturing recession. It turns out that tariffs don't work to protect our manufacturing jobs when we look at the aggregate.

Also, the US manufactures more stuff than any other time in its history, it just does it with less labor than it needed in the 80's. Even if manufacturing came back, it would not be some job boon. Products would become more expensive for the same quality that we get from China. The people employed would be higher skilled and likely need to come in on visa's because we already have a skilled labor shortage in America. Hell, our U3 unemployment rate is like 3.8% the last time I checked*.

America's problem is our intransigence to help one another move to where jobs are, and to get educated in the skills needed to fill those jobs. And I'm not talking about programming jobs here.

>What did he do that will bring back manufacturing? Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania are in a manufacturing recession.

Please remove your Orange Man Bad blinders for a minute and listen to what I'm saying. I'm not saying he's done anything for manufacturing to date. I'm saying that this coronavirus now has exposed the weakness of offshoring a substantial proportion of critical manufacturing and it's an excellent opportunity to bring back much of the capacity that is still disrupted in China.

That's also why I said under subsidy. Because manufacturing here is more expensive but it looks like a national security problem if during calamity or war we have to depend on a nation on the other side of the world for things like semiconductors, medical equipment, and medicine. Based on the way the word is being thrown around recently, think of it as "socialism."

No it hasn't. China is already returning to work. America is just starting to deal with COVID19. We would literally be shutting down manufacturing right now. The fact that we have these worldwide supply chains makes us more resilient to these pandemic like shocks because they take time to spread across the globe.

Do you really think it's a good idea to concentrate almost all of your medical and semiconductor manufacturing on the shores of one of your biggest geopolitical rivals? Particularly when they've been saber rattling in the Pacific and are already making threats about withholding manufacturing?

>China is already returning to work

Don't be so sure. This is an authoritarian regime which went to great lengths to cover up the outbreak for the first month. And they claimed return to capacity weeks ago when pollution maps still showed little to no productivity. The world isn't all rainbows and sunshine - nation states are still competitive and do not always work in each other's best interest.

None of this even begins to go into all of the IP fuckery and socialization of US companies going on in China.

When Trump does good things I have given and will continue to give him credit. He's burned all the good will in existence though so let's see if he actually does help fund manufacturing before giving him any credit.

So far he's been moving in the opposite direction though with an emphasis on overall company welfare at the expense of employees - there have been no proposals around preventing people from losing their jobs due to needing to self-isolate and no effort to make treatment federally subsidized (testing is probably free if you're not one of the millions of people without insurance, but even here the details are hazy).

>an emphasis on overall company welfare at the expense of employees - there have been no proposals around preventing people from losing their jobs due to

Do you think these companies will continue to exist if they fire all the employees who get sick from the virus? Do you think these employees will survive without their paychecks?

Do you believe that anything benefiting "corporations" goes directly into the pocket of evil 1% CEOs and confers no benefit to employees? You probably work for a corporation. Corporate well-being is employee wellbeing because corporations are staffed by people.

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