Won’t people be willing when the cost of living goes up so much and all the tech jobs are gone to foreign labor that they have to work factory jobs?

There won't be any factories since all the capital will be overseas.

Most people don't work in tech. IIRC the most common jobs are retail, food service, healthcare, and education.

And we're decimating retail through tariffs, we're cutting as many people as we can out of food service, and we're ending much federal funding around education. Doesn't seem great.

In my experience, most US tech workers see the non-tech US like most of the US sees the rest of the world: they intellectually understand that they’re a small piece of the pie, but living within an attention and influence bubble subconsciously makes people feel like the center of the universe. This can make average people feel superior and above average people feel exceptional.

Like in Garrison Keillor’s Lake Woebegone, where all of the children are above average.

So you think going backwards and becoming a developing nation is a good thing?

What do you think happens when all the “developing” nations develop and refuse to get paid peanuts to make your phones?

The Vulcans come visit Earth and the Federation gets formed. How the heck should I know?

that is actually true it seems https://www.molsonhart.com/blog/america-underestimates-the-d... most american workers in today s date simply dont have a good diet and work ethics like their ancestors used to have

Pay them a decent wage and they will.

But why compete on factories if that isn’t competitive with foreign factories?

Because the immediate profits of capitalists shouldn't be the sole dictator of our economic activities and policies.

That's how you become a poor country. Every country that closed itself off to the rest of the world becomes poor.

How many of them have MAGA-style slogans though? /s

You don't have to close yourself off to the world to foster local industry.

Im with you on that. But strategically retargeting the economy towards manual labor when you're big on services and digital innovation? That makes no sense. Being entirely self-sufficient is just not a good strategy in a highly competitive world connected by trade relations. Instead, tending to alliances and partnerships, assuring mutual interests and interlinked dependencies would be a lot smarter.

It all comes down to a lot of people in other parts of the world being willing to work for far less, for far longer hours, under far worse conditions, than Americans. Anything you can make in the USA will thus be more expensive, and until you’ve re-acquired all the domain knowledge lost to other nations, these quality will also be worse. As most people don’t want to buy something worse for more, you’ll need to force them to by making it unreasonable to import foreign goods (which is already happening), but that also means you limit the market to domestic. I fail to see how that is a viable strategy, unless you aim to wage war on the rest of the world and can’t trust anyone.

Would average American citizen like to pay x3 for made in America goods instead of Chinese?

Why they don't do it now? One could easily replace 90% of consumed good with US made.

that requires giving advantage to such people - and stripping advantages from the rest

Even that's not enough, because the tariffs are hitting raw goods as well as finished products!