I would have voted for a party with a program of "bring the manufacture of strategically crucial items back to the US and make it robust". This seems like it would even be Republican "bread and butter" and I don't see why either party had an issue with it.
i think a lot of people would not want such a subsidy.
Are you seriously trying to say that production being moved to China, et al. is not because of greed generally, and ROE specifically?
There is only so much discrepancy in prices that global markets will allow before buyers start rewarding the lower priced sellers for taking advantage of the arbitrage.
Many people did (only at the $450MM level/annually). It was considered standard practice to have the federal government purchase large quantities of N95 masks to have in case of an emergency. GWB started the program, and Obama distributed 100,000,000 masks during the H1N1 crisis from the stockpile. I will say that restocking the pile took a cut after 2010, Congress cut its funding and Obama's team didn't fight for it. And what funding they did get didn't seem to get prioritized into masks.
The entire industrial capacity of USA, country of 300 million people, could produce zero Meltblown, so it could make zero masks. Do you think it's acceptable?
People talk about conflict with China while we depent on them for toilet paper to wipe out butts, it's like a mentall ilness.
I think that is the point (or one of the points): it's not just logistics and spare capacity - it's a much more complex set of issues.
This isn't something accounting practices or "less greed" would solve, as seems to be implied in the Twitter thread.
Would you have voted for a party that spent $1b annually on mask manufacturing subsidies for masks nobody even bought? Who could have foreseen that demand spike?