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Comment by azinman2 | Hacker News Reader

I wish Amazon let me filter by country. In fact, I’d love to see some kind of meta shopping experience do exactly that. All I ever find is random small time websites that are outdated and minimal content for “made in USA”. For certain categories I’d prefer other countries or at least some options. I’m surprised the “America first” lobby hasn’t tried to accomplish something like this. Vote with your wallet if you really want manufacturing back.

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What's made here anymore? Even if it touches US soil during production, it's probably just for assembly of components made elsewhere.

All the actual brains of electronics aren't made here. At most you'd get, what, American plastic?

Actually a lot of things are made in the US, it tends to be higher up on the value chain. Even starting with assembled is better than nothing, but I’m also interested in various other allied countries as well. You might be surprised when you explicitly look for this that often there are options other than China.

Do you have any examples? I can't think of any off the top of my head when it comes to consumer goods.

Even cars, I would trust the Japanese companies more. Computers aren't made here. TVs aren't. Furniture isn't (except maybe the fancy real wood kind?)

What's higher up the value chain? Planes? Spacecraft?

https://madeinamericastore.com/hardware/

Hammers, stickers, Murica swag, and WD-40? Lol, this is the kind of stuff I'd expect to find in airport tourist-trap gift shops. Not exactly the kind of things "higher up the value chain" that GP mentioned, more like a shallow parody of Americana and a pretty far cry from the manufacturing powerhouse Asia has become...

Even looking at an old-guard American think tank's report, it's pretty dismal: https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/separate-country-top-500-us-m...

Basically petroleum products and cars, along with electronics assembly where most of the hard manufacturing is done offshore. Military stuff seems to be the only major thing we still produce here.

I mean, is this really controversial? It's been happening for decades and only recently has there been some (very limited) executive action to try to bring it back. I'm all for it, FWIW, but it'll take some time (and a lot of willpower and money) to really make that happen.

So your point is that there shouldn’t be a way to search for made in the USA stuff because not enough or what? That the USA shouldn’t try to bring back manufacturing, or what? At least the military stuff seems to be working pretty well.

No, I'd love to see it come back. It's just not there right now. Searching for made in USA stuff is not helpful when most everyday things aren't made in the USA.

I'm not from US, but I tried to find some product "made in US" on Amazon because it really suppose to be of higher quality and I utterly failed.

For electronics, I think the Asian manufacturers actually have better quality and precision these days. It's been their bread and butter for decades and they have way better factories and tooling and production experience.

We still make cars, I guess, but even those are rarely competitive vs Japanese and Korean models.

Sounds great in theory, but how would you validate this? I can see sellers slapping stickers on their goods.

Who is going to pay for the cost of manual verification?

All product already have this labeled.

I have seen some tiny movements on that direction- influencers always highlighting when a product they endorse was made in the US as something positive and the reverse “I could not find anything US made so I had to cave in and get a Chinese mower”. The America First collective unfortunately has a lot of folks that see themselves as fundamentally rich, (or temporarily poor). They self identify more with Jeff Bezos than with their fellow (poor) countrymen. His success is “theirs” on their mind.

> influencers always highlighting when a product they endorse was made in the US

Which is often bullshit. The fine for lying about this tends to be $0, and it's likely to be years before you get caught.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/05/us/politics/made-in-the-u...

Wow. I’m shocked actually - I would have thought the penalties for lying were quite severe. It’s also unclear to me how widespread this actually is. It’s also from 2019 - did anything change with the FTC?

Not enormously, and it's a very tough moving target. Catch a Chinese manufacturer claiming to be "made in the USA" and they'll disappear and reopen as a new name the next day.

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