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Comment by zip1234 | Hacker News Reader

I'm not even sure that it is to the detriment of our domestic laborers. It certainly makes domestic manufacturing less competitive, especially the lowest skill/barrier to entry manufacturing. However, the US manufactures a LOT still, there are loads of reasonably well paying jobs for lower skill worker. I will say that housing and healthcare costs are high in the US but those are not things that are imported.

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It also depends on what you think people want. Do they want a vast array of cheap consumer goods and entertainment, or do they want more affordable basics, like housing, cars, and healthcare?

If you go by PPP alone, the US is already in second place [0].

PPP is a horrible metric, but I’m not sure GDP per capita is any better.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PP...

More competitive US manufacturing wouldn't lead to more affordable basics, would it?

Arguably it would. Not my argument, but just listen to any of Bessent’s thinking on the topic.

His argument is pretty circular, which is e.g. not that Americans would work for Vietnamese wages but that we'd produce automation that can do the same work. But in that case: why aren't we doing that today?

The answer is that it's still more advantageous to pay Vietnam to make our clothes.

It's basically just no free lunch theorem: we can afford the CapEx of doing such a thing today precisely because we have better alternatives. If there were no better alternatives and we had to produce our own garments, we wouldn't be able to afford the CapEx to do it in a dramatically more labor-efficient manner.

You can't automate something that you can't already do manually (IMO/IME).

We could already do it, then we automated huge portions of it, then as other economies matured we handed that work to them and developed into a high-margin, high-income knowledge economy.

We can rewind back to a middle income economy if we want, I guess, but I don't see the appeal.

I'm open to the argument that we want some domestic mass manufacturing capacity for reasons of self-sufficiency, supply chain resilience, etc, but just come out and say it: we need handouts to keep certain strategic industries alive despite their lack of economic viability in the marketplace.

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