So how come Russia hasn't annexed Ukraine yet? And why spend literally hundreds of billions of dollars a year maintaining a conventional military when you already have nukes?
And when are you going to press that button? Do you nuke Eurasia the second they cease diplomatic communications? When a cargo ship heading to LA founders for mysterious reasons? When a small detachment plants a flag on Little Diomede Island? When they capture Attu Island? When they land troops on Hawaii? When they declare war? When they are walking in San Francisco? When they capture Salt Lake City? When they are 15 minutes away from the missile fields? When DC falls?
What do you imagine the world is going to look like afterwards? If you fired too soon, how are you going to stop the revolution breaking out after you've killed hundreds of millions of innocent people? If you fired too late, why bother? The country is lost already, surely you're not going to nuke yourself?
Besides, that's assuming the existential war happens in the US itself. The US isn't self-reliant, and it will never be. Are you going to nuke any country refusing to sell critical materials to the US? Sure, the US has started wars in the Middle-East for oil before, but nukes?
Russia is not fighting for their survival in Ukraine, even though Ukraine is.
Sitting in the Whitehouse facing the red button, you ask yourself which city are we willing to trade by pushing that button? Millions in New York or Los Angeles? That's why they will never use nukes. To retain world hegemon status and protect your interests, you need conventional military strength. Because if your aircraft carriers are sunk and the vast majority of your fleet is disabled or destroyed, what will you do? Your shipbuilding capacity is so low that you've basically already lost, you can't project power overseas without a fleet and you can't reproduce it fast enough. What are you going to do then nuke them? They will retaliate, and every decision maker knows that. No one will choose to kill millions/tens of millions of their citizens because they lost a fleet thousands of kilometers from home.
sure in the sense in which operating an airline or high speed rail network makes you less money than running an ad or porn website but the world doesn't run on money, it runs on infrastructure. I believe we have a term for civilizations that value money over power, we call them decadent.
If you're content living in Mark Zuckerberg's slop metaverse that's a possible route to go down but it's important to understand that the world will belong to countries that focus on what powers that entertainment dystopia, and the US has some competitors who have the good sense to understand that the material world matters.
Airlines and high speed rail systems are also services. Heck, even Tesla's real value isn't in manufacturing, it's in the (delusional, but nonetheless) belief that they're going to make an absolute killing on services at some point in the future. They could probably sell off their manufacturing arm and their stock price would increase.
What would be awesome is if half-assed finance bro speeches weren't being thrown around as serious macro.
Part of the problem is that a lot of the extra wealth ends invested in the house market. This increases the cost of terrains for both old and new homes. It is also not very productive just to buy one thing to extract rents from it. ( There is value in handling the rent, building or reforming and old house).
The urban land is limited and requires government infrastructure to connect it.
Another big cost is the university.
I can't find numbers from earlier than 1980, but 18-44 _is_ lower, though again the rate in 1980 was just a few percentage points higher, and not nearly high enough to imply that home ownership out of high school was in reach for the majority: https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/data/charts/fig07.pdf
Americans actually want unions back, but because anti-union propaganda is so prevalent, they confused themselves into thinking they want manufacturing jobs back
People thinking they can go back to making good money in a widget factory is like thinking because you had an ascendant economy in 1836 exporting wood before global electrification, then that lucrative job is always waiting for you even in 2025.
Does not compile.
The main argument would be if you are relying on other countries and you can't produce anything yourself then you need to rely on other countries being good trading partners. If the relationship with those trading partners fails your economy is in trouble.
No single country can produce everything it currently imports much less compete globally on every product.
Does the government just prop up every industry with subsidies? Or use tariffs to make everything as expensive as domestic goods?
A house was 2 years salary.
There are issues with national security, reliance on less than friendly nations etc. For instance, we'd want to grow our own food, even if importing would be cheaper. But those surely aren't the majority of manufacturing jobs.
Given the choice of increasing the number of high paying, high skills jobs or the number of relatively low skill, dangerous manufacturing jobs, why wouldn't we choose the former?
I'm curious about your reasoning on this. China was not the one at the top of my list of "Major world powers likely to have a civil war sooner than later"
Of course some things are more sensitive and should be made domestically even at lower efficiency / higher cost. But if that’s applied to everything then we are just shooting ourselves in the foot. Plus the opportunity cost of not doing something else that we are more uniquely positioned to excel at.
If you have no leverage during a negotiation and your counterpart has can say 'no' without having to give up anything then you're screwed.
America doesn't have to be the best manufacturers, but we do need to have the ability to say, "fuck it we'll build it ourselves" when the other side of the table says something we don't like.
And anyone living in the fantasy utopia where the whole world agrees on everything and there's peace all the time... read more history.
If China wants to play hardball then Vietnam can make the goods. This is the great system we had until Trump decided he'd piss off every country. We had a very much you vs the world when doing diplomacy as USA but now it's just you vs USA which is a much weaker position.
There's always a Vietnam.
Even now with all the talk about "rare earth minerals". They're not rare, everybody has them, its just nobody else wants to pollute their rivers mining and refining them when China is willing to.
Idk, the trend in manufacturing seems to be towards more and more high skilled work and less dangerous or low-skill work as time marches on. Your post also positions it as a binary choice, where we must either increase IT service jobs / web services or manufacturing, which doesn't seem to be true given the landscape of the job market these days.
Personally I would like it if there were a more diverse array of job opportunities in general for people looking to gain and employ skills in machining, fabrication, factory automation, production, etc. "Just learn to code, bro" has been a meme since I was in college, but at this point at 33 every single person I know who is doing even 'kinda ok' has either gotten a tech job or gone into nursing. Exactly 0 of these people actually care about technology or are interested in computers at all, but it feels like the only avenue available anymore for Americans. That doesn't seem good or sustainable.
No matter how much of a cash cow the tech industry has been, is it really a virtue to be totally anemic in such a basic function as ability to produce actual, physical goods?
I have no idea what this is supposed to mean other than individual rich people started outsourcing labor to poor countries because they were allowed to import the products of that labor back into the country cheaply.
> Now there's a populist making political hay, throwing out numbers about trade deficits, which ignores revenue from services.
This is just nonsense. The trade deficit includes services, and grows a negative balance of payments that has been growing for 50 years. It would be different if that money were used for investment, but that money was just given to the wealthy. Reversing the trade deficit will not be enough. It's not that the government is debt-ridden, it's that the nation is debt-ridden. We're borrowing foreign cash to buy foreign imports. All we have left is to sell off land, buildings, and exclusive franchises.
But that's populist. As in the population that won't just be able to move to a country that isn't broken.
I mean, every single part of this is wrong, and there's nothing in it that resembles an economic argument. We need to bring manufacturing to the US because we need to produce something in order to be paid. We have no advantage in services, we only pretend to have one because we have wealthy people who import talent and who are themselves immigrants. We are not only not working, but are badly educated. I have no idea why you think that the world will continue to feed America for free, forever. What we're doing is selling the furniture and the fixtures, and pretending like everything is just fine.
And the people who inherited the furniture and the fixtures are like, yup, nothing's wrong.
I would even say we need to produce something in order to remain a sovereign nation. If we buy everything from China, we're governed by China.
Do not underestimate this as a real population.
Here's a graph of actual private investment money going into factories in the US since 1950. It proves my point:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/C307RC1Q027SBEA
I guess the tariffs are serving some other purpose, like forcing foreign governments to bribe him under-the-counter(?) That'd explain his rapid increase in net worth since taking office.
Now there's a populist making political hay, throwing out numbers about trade deficits, which ignores revenue from services. Yes, there is have a trade deficit on goods, that was a long-term strategy because services were a superior investment.
Manufacturing is an inferior way to make money unless you're planning to go to conventional war, and since the US is a nuclear superpower it's never going to get into an existential boots-on-the-ground Serious War again unless it just wants to cosplay. Nukes make conventional war for survival irrelevant.
So: it took decades to burn the boats with manufacturing, and trying to rebuild them in a few years is a hilarious folly. It absolutely will not go anywhere, and honestly shouldn't anyway. There is real danger, however, that the US burns the boats on the carefully crafted service sector as well.