The actual killer is the pay and working conditions, and the problem is fairly intractable.

If you are smart enough to be a good tool maker, you are likely smart enough to be a good 6-figure keyboard-all-day worker. Losing a finger (or three) and breathing VOCs all day for half the pay is not very enticing.

These industries aren't glamourous for investors either. The business proposition sucks, the cost and liabilities are intense, and the margins would need to be negative to be truly competitive.

And worse than anything, the stuff that comes from China is not only 1/10th the cost, it's also now better quality.

At this point, even if die makers started making 300k a year, there isn’t enough master die makers left in the USA to bootstrap the capacity in less than 5 decades. The only practical solution at this point is to max out apprenticeship and somehow incentivise the industry so that we could flood other countries with apprentices as well. Then, we might be able to start getting things balanced in as little as 2 decades.

Otherwise, completely homegrown manufacturing is essentially dead in the water.

If we want to regrow US domestic manufacturing, we need to throw about 100B at scholarships and incentives, or figure out how to capture remaining diemaker empirical knowledge into ML / robotics.

Or maybe we could spend 10B on immigration incentives for qualified Diemakers? Idk about the global state of affairs and how that would work. At any rate we need at least 100-300k new diemakers if we really want to rebuild 100 percent domestic capabilities overnight. And then we need a career path for them 20 years farther down the road.

It was really, really foolish to allow strategic industrial capability to wither on the vine.

The problem is that these jobs are hard and the pay is crap.

SmarterEveryDay attempted to make a grill scrubber in the US. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZTGwcHQfLY

tl;dr He did it, but it went very poorly.

Yes. Realistically speaking the value that a diemaker brings should easily be worth 2x or more their current scale.

The SmarterEveryDay piece was disheartening for sure, echoes what I have been singing from the rooftops ever since the government dropped the USA origin of manufacturing requirements for all purchases. Sure, it was a kind of corporate welfare, and it made for a tricky incentive misalignment, but it kept a lot of strategic industries on life support. We would be in a way, way better position now if it hadn’t ended.

As far as I understand you still have to buy US, and need approval if you cannot source domestically.

All our military work still uses US electronics shops and machine shops.

The window has shifted as to what constitutes “us made” though. For most things “US assembled” is the norm, and when you get out into things like office supplies, vehicles, and construction materials it’s often far from true domestic manufacturing. For strategic military stuff it’s better, but often at the cost of using 1990s tech because we don’t make the newer stuff here. (It also has the effect of making things more repairable, but that argument gets weaker and weaker as time goes on)

At this point I think in practice it’s a preference for US manufacturers but a long way from robust enough to establish domestic supply chains.

Also -a lot- of military purchases are local, discretionary on a credit card, and there is no oversight on the origin there- it’s whatever they need from office max or the hardware store.

That may be the case in many industries, but I don’t think it applies in this case. The industry isn’t flooded with people looking to move up, it’s starving for interest. The problem is that you can farm out the work overseas for much less than you can do it locally, because our automation is decades behind China.

Chinese skilled labor wages aren’t that low anymore. The reason they can do most work for 1/10 of the local cost is advanced automation, government VC investment, and somewhat less c-suite greed. The incentive alignment of the government VC is also distinct from typical US VC.

We can’t even build the machines that would enable that kind of automation in the USA. We’d need to buy them from China, IF China was willing to sell them to us. Unlike the USA, China is probably not going to be stupid about diluting their advantages. I’m sure the CCP hasn’t forgotten the decades where we were unwilling to sell them high precision machine tools lol.

Unfortunately, we are more likely to see a slow deterioration of the US economy and infrastructure, until we hit about a 5-6x wage advantage over China which we could potentially use to copy the Chinese playbook and rebuild our presence.

I really hope I’m completely wrong lol.