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Comment on Do people really think setting up domestic manufacturing in the USA is easy?

FabledAepitaph@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

And we haven’t even addressed the whole reason manufacturing left in the first place. It’s so much cheaper to do it overseas, even accounting for shipping. It will cost America much more to produce items internally–and who is going to buy these extra-expensive items? America is a service economy and most people are working at Walmart or McDonald’s. These people can barely afford the cheap Chinese version, much less the expensive American version.

So I guess they’re hoping wages will increase more than the extra expensive incurred by making our own items? Not going to happen, not in a million years.

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prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
That’s where the child labor comes in. I wish I was kidding.

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gandalf_der_12te@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
Consider:

scenario today:

labor cost for product is $3, which goes to a chinese worker. total product cost is $5.

scenario “manufactured in the USA”:

labor cost is $6, which goes to american worker. total product cost is $10.

the product gets more expensive, but the extra expenses partially go to an american worker, which again will spend the money in the US economy, so it doesn’t really cost the national economy that much.

however, the extra $4 in the “manufactured in the USA” scenario go to american middle-management and “investors” a.k.a skimmed by the owning class. that is why the people would still lose out. that is why “home-shoring” in itself is not enough; a wealth tax is also needed.

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- FabledAepitaph@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  Of course it works out if you throw any numbers in that you want. Minimum hourly wage in the US is 7.25-ish in Alabama and the rest of the decrepit South, to 16-ish in California. I googled minimum wage in China and its roughly 3.40-ish at its highest. At the worst, China is half as expensive, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the disparity between the actual industrial areas of China and Califonia/Colorado for example might be 8x.
  
  Whats happening here is that the poorly educated South is wanting me to subsidize their lack of marketable job skills by making me pay extra for American goods instead of Chinese goods.
  
  And don’t forget that the extra money these Americans earn will be partially consumed by the extra cost of living anyways. Not to mention the years or decades of investment it will take to get factories set here anyways, all for low-skill, physically demanding, and mentally unengaging employment.
  
  Manufacturing should be automated anyways because nobody should have to sit at a conveyor belt all day and toil their lives away assembling dumb trinkets.
  
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yarr@feddit.nl ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

And we haven’t even addressed the whole reason manufacturing left in the first place. It’s so much cheaper to do it overseas, even accounting for shipping.

Well, I think the idea is that with the tariffs this will no longer be true. There will be a Chinese widget that cost $5 from China with $90 of tariffs on it (making it $95 to the end user) and an American product that costs $55. That American one is only cheaper in a tariff’d world.

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- Ciderpunk@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  The other problem is that the $55 American made one will mysteriously become $94 because doing anything else would be leaving money on the table and therefore unconscionable to American business owners.
  
  Tariffs have a nasty habit of making local goods increase in price accordingly too.
  
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  - Prok@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    This is exactly the thing I can seem to get anyone to agree with me on … Imported goods will never become significantly more expensive than American for the reason you just said…
    
    There’s a lot of money in figuring out the right margin below the imported product such that they’ll lose some sales but ultimately profit more because of the increased profit margins. Not that you were seriously saying it would be a dollar cheaper but most I talk with tend to think that difference is much bigger than I expect which tends toward single digit percentage differences
    
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- FabledAepitaph@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  But they’re not going to increase wages to account for us having to spend 55 dollars on something that used to cost 5. So the end result is just that people end up with less overall. I’m cool with limiting consumerism, but this isn’t the way to do it imo. And it’s not going to make us “richer” as a nation.
  
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- CompactFlax@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  In both scenarios the profit margin is removed, or the customers are bearing the significant increase in cost. Hence the recession - the stock market plummets or inflation goes up. Or both.
  
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