Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

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The US service economy is ~83% of GDP. Manufacturing only makes up 8% of jobs in the US. Why do I care about US made products? Corporations are offshoring services and knowledge work, manufacturing has been gone for some time and will not be back. If it does come back, it'll be mostly automated, lights out facilities (like China).

So! I think it makes a lot of sense to impair the offshoring of these service and knowledge jobs when there isn't a labor shortage and we're likely in a recession. If you need more data, I can provide as much as you would like on this topic.

America’s missing manufacturing renaissance - https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2026/01/06/a... | https://archive.today/3qQUq - January 6th, 2026

The U.S. is losing thousands of manufacturing jobs, analysis finds - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jobs-manufacturing-trump-tariff... - October 1st, 2025

Trump’s Trade War Squeezes Middle-Class Manufacturing Employment - https://www.americanprogress.org/article/trumps-trade-war-sq... - September 5th, 2025

USA Facts: What does the US produce? - https://usafacts.org/articles/what-does-the-us-produce/ ("Over four-fifths (83.3%) of value added to the US economy in 2024 was via services, for a total of $24.3 trillion.")

USA Facts: The diminishing role of manufacturing in the American economy - https://usafacts.org/articles/diminishing-role-manufacturing... - October 16th, 2020

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

There's more to manufacturing than just rebuilding factories. You need everything from supply chains (which are going to include some foreign materials in many cases), to people who want to work in a factory in 2026, to consumers who want to pay extra for domestically made products.

It's not as easy as saying "just tax imports" or "just tax offshoring" because that hits the average folks who are barely getting by, as every cost gets passed down to the consumer.

I live in a country that used to be heavily industrialized (back in the previous regime when the goal was to be self-sufficient). In the 90s we lost most of the domestic industry as the factories got privatized and opening foreign trade enabled cheaper foreign products to flood the market. Most factories were sold off or just went out of business.

There's been some success with small businesses doing manufacturing domestically but it's mostly niche and not near what it used to be back when every house had at least some domestically made clothes, furniture, electronics...

Labor is expensive, market small, taxes high, and lately even high energy costs and rising import fees on materials from abroad. Plus of course the fact that people can't afford to pay 5-10x for the same thing made domestically when they can barely afford the thing at 1x the price.

You want Americans doing non-competitive work in an increasingly competitive global economy?

Why?

Reddit is that way ->

This comment is literally just numbers about how the US has ceded low value add jobs and dominated high value add jobs.

I am asking why this is intrinsically a problem.

Or if it's not intrinsically a problem, then what are the downstream consequences we should care about, and can we talk about them explicitly instead of just assuming the best way to mitigate them is to put our economy into reverse advancement.

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