> If we were to start that ban many of Walmart's non-grocery (and some groceries) shelves would be empty for considerable time.

I always point out the price difference for the two models of the Purism Librem 5 phone. One model is manufactured traditionally and costs $749. The other model is manufactured in the USA and costs $1999.

Americans talk about bringing manufacturing back to the country, but I'm not sure anyone is ready to pay 2-3x for their goods.

The problem isn't much about labor costs in the US, but the dismantling of the supply chain. Even Apple had problems sourcing screws when building a handful of its computers in the USA, which is well documented. To re-build a domestic supply-chain, one has to start somewhere. China started by exporting 'low-tech' products (plastic utensils, some toys) and it inexorably moved up the chain while USA and Europe eventually divested of much of their manufacturing infrastructure.

Yep this is a good answer. And it follows that if you’re serious about this issue & don’t just like to hear yourself talk, you should go do the work at the low level. It peeves me off to no end to see the lack of seriousness around this. It’s the same exact lack of seriousness that people had before the iraq invasion, and I pitched a fit then for no gain and I’ll do it again too!

It doesn’t have to be manufactured in the US. It just can’t be from a country with such horribly lopsided market policies.

Yeah, first comes assembly of parts. "Assembled in USA", frankly, USA brand has diminished so may we should do a bit of a friendly competition of branding between states. "Assembled in Texas" or "Assembled in California".

Once assembly lines are automated (even using Chinese parts), there is incentive to achieve local production of those parts.

There is nothing that China has, besides precious metals perhaps, that USA does not.

I would kill to buy an iPhone made 100% in USA. Or even in Germany or France or any EU nation.

As Elon said - "We've forgotten to build stuff. Someone's gotta do it. Might as well be us."

if china closes, we can move manufacturing to other 3rd world countries. It's not just China or US. that's a false dichotomy.

It would be a painful transition but we must do it to avoid the extremely painful long term costs of continuing this horribly lopsided arrangement with China.

Americans are famous for their love of sacrifice and compromise; this should be no problem.

What's most likely to happen if we try an outright ban is that Vietnam and similar developing countries will start slapping on a "Made in Vietnam" sticker on Chinese goods and exporting them to the US.

And then we fix this next problem, right?

That is no argument to avoid a policy. That is an argument to prepare for the next steps.

Because the US can't provide consumer goods or because the US can't provide consumer goods at below cost to manufacture and distribute?

Often times it's raw ability to produce the product. We cannot suddenly produce the iPhone in the US. Other times the products produced are just too expensive. Go to your local Honda Powersports dealership and price a motorcycle then go to your local Harley-Davidson dealership and price a similar motorcycle. Even a made in Japan motorcycle, with Japan's most premium motorcycle brand, will be much cheaper than the made in America variety. Made in China is significantly cheaper compared to made in Japan. Finally it's also the raw quantity of products we important from China. $539.5B worth of goods imported in 2018. Producing this much would put a strain on our infrastructure, on our labor force, and on our ability to manage cultural shifts.

https://ustr.gov/countries-regions/china-mongolia-taiwan/peo...

Say we want to manufacturer some item, say cellphones, in the US. Start out with a small tariff on imported phones of 5%, then announce a schedule of slowly raising tariffs until phones manufactured in the US are cheaper than imported phones. Add a definition of manufactured in the US that includes something about the percentage of parts that must be manufactured here to prevent companies form only assembling them here.

For phones if there was a profit motive, I think it would take somewhere around 5 years. Repeat for any item for which we want to ensure a domestic manufacturing base.

Or what about just adopting the Chinese playbook? If you want to sell phones in the US, mandate a certain amount of key manufacturing transfer to allow it.