First, find several dozen billion dollars.

More seriously, find a low-performance niche application and make chips on old technology for it. Differentiate yourself on the basis of being easy for your customers to work with, a natural advantage for US-based companies. Then you only need several dozen million dollars.

> First, find several dozen billion dollars.

Some electric car companies have not had trouble tapping into capital markets. Even Transmeta, a fabless IC maker, could tap $275m in 2000.

If you were a super talented engineering firm with the ability to spend $2b on a fab, you could tap finance for it.

> More seriously, find a low-performance niche application and make chips on old technology for it.

This seems like the opposite of any winning strategy, and the opposite of what the government should subsidize. TSMC is so successfully because it relentlessly focuses on performance chips. If you are enjoying American subsidies it better be for the cutting edge, what the hell else are we paying for?

> Differentiate yourself on the basis of being easy for your customers to work with

The only customer that matters is Apple, and your only competition is Samsung and TSMC. Everyone else is using "foreign chip manufacturers" as a way to launder low Chinese labor costs, not because there is inadequate supply or poor competition in specifically semiconductor manufacturing.

Perhaps that's what people want - a manufacturing hub, i.e., assembly of chips, not the chips themselves. I don't know if that's super important.

Starting from zero and competing directly with TSMC's top end processes right now is basically being at the "President Kennedy said we're going to the Moon" stage of landing on the moon. You are going to need many, many billions and billions of dollars and years of engineering and manufacturing (and failures) to get there. This is not something you just turn on the money spigot and solve the problem overnight. It is spectacular engineering at the smallest atomic level to produce in mass quantity the chips from TSMC today.

The US has an overabundance of brilliant physics PhDs most of which are probably pretty sick of academia's bullshit at this point. Let's give 2000 of them a 100k/year job plus $5B, cheap/free access to federal land, energy, and water, and see what kind of fab(s) they could make. I bet they'd get to TSMC's level pretty quick. If we offered Taiwan a mutual defense pact, we might even get their help to get there.

They'll turn it down because they can make $250k a year writing code for Facebook/Google/etc.

And it's really more talent in process engineering that you need, not in the physics of chip building. We already know what has to be done to make transistors. It's the how to do it at scale and with high enough yield that's impressively difficult.

Haha. No way. I don't think anyone who gets a physics PhD is excited by the prospect of solving ad market problems. Or financial market problems (because you forgot to mention the $500k quant jobs). Physics PhDs aren't, in my experience, particularly motivated by money. How could they be?

A project like this would a) let them use far more of their training than coding ever would and b) it is for a good cause, effectively a peaceful version of the Manhattan project.

You might want to check the bio of Antonio García Martí­nez, who has a physics background, and subsequently worked in both finance and adtech.

This is the right idea. But like I said, most of the value is in exploiting cheap Chinese labor, not the chips, which is why really none of that would work accounting wise - like you’re talking about a valuable economic enterprise but not one that would produce a lot of profits for shareholders.

They have spend decades to fine tune the process to be just right. Just money isn't enough, and then we can also look Intel and their 10nm and that is company with experience, history and some workforce in place. Reaching that level from fresh isn't simple thing.

>What the hell else are we paying for?

Are chips for industrial equipment or cars? When you say cutting edge I think desktop / phone / servers.

Starting a semiconductor manufacturing company is 1 thing starting 1 that will be competitive will require 100s of billions of dollars.

Very carefully. And as of 2021, also with the aid of a time machine.

This question makes me think of another question: is there a difference between a rich tax credit and a poor tax?

Yes. The difference is in how it is perceived, but in an economy, perceptions actually matter. If you give a tax credit to the rich, the poor don't perceive it as a tax on them even though the strict monetary effect is the same in both cases i.e. a wealth transfer from the poor to the rich. But because the poor don't perceive rich tax credits as a tax on them they are less likely to object.

That type of thinking is political suicide in the long term. Big meddling government that doesn't attack the fact that we have far more demand than supply problems is going to get thrown out.

They aren't related at all, because the federal budget and revenues don't need to balance. They rarely ever do.

On the other hand, tax credits can be (but arent guaranteed to be). That is, if a tax credit incentivizes creating jobs that would not have existed (in the US) otherwise, those jobs end up also stimulating other economic activity. Tax incentives at the state level tend to be closer to zero sum (or a net loss) if the jobs would have been created anyway, or when thr incentives aren't strictly tied to quantifiable completion metrics like factory completion, number of positions filled, etc. (Much ado about Foxconn in Wisconsin, etc)

Huh? Yes federal debt doesn't matter but that's why they are similar—they are both shifting power to capital away from labor.

The fact that governments try to do Keynesian by making manufacturing jobs in 2021 kills me. We're decades past the point where those sectors were sufficiently unproductive to benefit the workers as they did in the glory days. Boost demand directly (UBI), keep an ey on imports, and let private capital fend for itself.

> they are both shifting power to capital away from labor

This doesn't make sense to me. There wouldn't be labor to empower if the tax credit was one of the factors that determined whether the plant would be opened here or not.

Zero-sum would imply that, were the tax credits not handed out, the revenue would instead go to some other program- except that in this scenario, there is no revenue without it.

Sure, we could get into a trade war with the rest of the world by taxing or banning imports, but that would definitely leave everyone worse off.

> There wouldn't be labor to empower if the tax credit was one of the factors that determined whether the plant would be opened here or not.

Think owners vs non-owners. The non-owners don't cease to exist if they are unemployed (or underemployed). We live in a world with massive material surplus, so the idea that we can't afford these people's basic needs without the plant is just wrong.

From that perspective, if the government is propping up businesses without propping up a weak labor market (either by more demand or fewer working hours), it's perpetuating system where employers have too much leverage.

> Zero-sum...

Right now the US federal government is uniquely capable of running deficits. I'm not worried but zero-sum in that sense.

> Sure, we could get into a trade war with the rest of the world by taxing or banning imports, but that would definitely leave everyone worse off.

Yeah I don't want trade war, I want race to the top. Higher wages, fewer working hours, etc.

Really the US should pay for UBI in Germany, south Korea, etc. to boost export prices there so it's a race to the top.

This would require an international clearing union.

How so?

Copyright and patent laws make it near impossible except for a few thousand people.