I like the optimism, and it is true that the US invested a lot in battery and solar manufacturing, but outside that there has been no real growth or negative growth in the other manufacturing sectors. And even in battery and solar production we're a small fish. Even the wildest interpretations of the “Inflation Reduction Act” don’t claim to change this. I said more downthread, but US battery production actually fell to third recently, between Poland and Hungary.

At the end of the day, having one or two highly specific sectors with growth is basically nothing. It’s one or two drops in one or two buckets and there are thousands of buckets and modern manufacturing relies on those buckets being literally right next to each other. US lawmakers will throw a few bucks to the sexiest and trendiest buckets but what we really need is the least sexy parts; the business logistics and the suppliers, the raw materials, the moldmakers, etc. In 2024, the cheapest way to get aluminum stock or untold many other essential supplies quickly delivered to your business is to pay consumer prices for a million individually wrapped units at Amazon and then pay an employee to unbox them. What we need is broad and large scale vertical manufacturing if we want to be competitive and that is obvious to anyone who manufactures in the US.