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To build on this, I want to just quote Kelsey Piper's tweet discussing jobs programs versus domestic manufacturing https://x.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1907980342272852436:
"well, we need to bring manufacturing back" this isn't how to do that. "well, how would you do that, then?"
First, think about what you are hoping to accomplish. Is this a jobs program? Is the point to have high-paying factory jobs for the non-college men who used to work in those jobs, independent of whether the output of those factory jobs is cost-competitive or quality-competitive with foreign-made goods? You can run a jobs program, if you want - America is absurdly rich, we can really do absolutely anything at all that we choose to make a priority - but you can't serve two masters here. If the point is a jobs program don't expect high quality goods or goods that are competitive on the export market, because that requires embracing automation and new mechanical processes and the people working these jobs have no incentive to go full speed ahead on that, and since you've chosen to give them a captive market you don't have a good way to push them on quality or on price.
To my mind, if we're going to do a jobs program it's silly to make it a factory jobs program. Factory jobs kind of sucked. My own quixotic dream of a jobs program is to put our national muscle behind fixing our perilously broken education system. Kids benefit a lot from one on one tutoring; hire a million Americans to offer one on one tutoring to every student between the ages of 5 and 9 to fix our horrifying collapse in general reading ability. Boys learn better if some of their teachers are men, so make sure half of your hires are men. There, jobs program, and the work isn't 'undercutting Vietnam in the garment industry', it's raising the next generation. If you don't like my personal idea, fine, but I think if you list the pros and cons of five different jobs programs you thought of in ten minutes apiece 'take back the textile industry from Vietnam' isn't going to be the most appealing of any of them.
What if your aim isn't a jobs program? What if it's defense? That's also fine, but keep in mind you still can't serve two masters; if this is about defense then we are going to laser-focus on defense production, and we're not treating this as a jobs program at all. Go to every manufacturer of munitions, planes and cars in the country. Ask them for all their suppliers. Acquire those companies, or partner with them, or hire a bunch of their leadership, and pay them to start up a plant in the US. Instead of scaring our allies with bizarre threats to add them to our territory, which has made many of them back away from commitments to the American defense industry, build those ties very strongly and start asking them for purchase agreements. Find really good CEOs who grew a complex logistical business in a related industry rapidly - yes, Elon Musk absolutely qualifies here, frustrated as I am with him - ask them to take responsibility for a supply chain and 10x production in the next two years, and give them the resources they need to do it. Send Ukraine an obscene amount of materiel, enough to actually win the war instead of just be stalemated in it. Make advance commitments to buy the munitions to do that, to support those companies in growing capacity.
What if your goal is neither jobs nor defense, but fostering the growth of an industry in the US that could stand on its own two feet once it existed but will never get started? Here's where tariffs actually make sense, but they should be relentlessly narrow, specific and targeted. What do you want to sell? Who in America is trying to build it? What inputs do they buy from abroad? Make it a priority of our trade policy to get them those inputs cheaply. Most of what you're doing is, once again, buying bits of the supply chain and hiring people who know how to do it, plus subsidizing them, but tariffs will be part of the picture. The CHIPS act was this done well. Every single tariff and every single subsidy should have an incredibly specific objective in mind, and if it isn't working to achieve that objective should be adjusted.
What if your goal is to negotiate a free trade agreement? Well, we've successfully negotiated lots of free trade agreements, it's not exactly a totally unknown art form. Have smart, competent, skilled negotiators with knowledge of the other side's constraints, resources, political concerns, and where we have leverage. Have bilateral negotiations; emerge with a deal; have Congress ratify it. Trying to do many-to-one negotiations doesn't work because it is so visible that a country's behavior to date has nothing to do with the tariffs that were imposed, because the way the tariffs were imposed puts many other countries' leadership in a position where doing what we want would be deeply unpopular at home, and because no one involved knew anything about the countries they were throwing tariffs at.
Again, we can do any of these things. We are not a country on the brink of becoming a failed state; we can execute on ambitious, ludicrous, serious things, and we absolutely should. We just have to figure out what we want and then line up the levers to get it done. I've always found something beautiful about the capacity of healthy societies to change gears on a dime, to set down their knitting and go do a shift at the munitions factory, to build cities in the dust overnight. We can reshore
Endquote (I'm too lazy to do the block quoting for all that.)
I actually disagree with her - I think we have proven relatively definitively that jobs programs in the United States currently do not work. Not because jobs programs are a bad idea in a vacuum, but because the government and the way we as citizens interact with the government has become so corrupted, that major government programs are doomed to fail horribly in my opinion.
Then again, perhaps a blatant jobs program would be better than the corrupt crap we have going on today?
Also, I don't think that manufacturing in the U.S. would lead to low quality. Yes we would have automation, but we would also need people to staff the plants. And the fact is, young men just tend to enjoy and be more drawn to working with their hands than working on computers all day. For the most part, at least.
Her take reads to me as a very well thought out, but stereotypically feminine and coastal elite view of the problem.
This is the part that is wrong. We actually can't do any of these things, at least not to any degree of scale and competence. There are too many veto points, too many interest groups, and too many fief-building bureaucrats for anything that requires coordination beyond an executive order. And, there is insufficient faith in competent government execution and trust in expertise even if these things were not true, such that it would probably fail from lack of good-faith cooperation anyways.
That doesn't mean that tariffs are better than nothing. I appreciate Althouse's dictum that better than nothing is a high bar. But for all the people who cry that we have to do something, well, this is something and it can be done.
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Yeah, that's a good point, but the problem is, for example: the kind of guys who would have gone into teaching instead of doing blue-collar work, because their families wanted them to get out of the manual labour grind and improve themselves, are still going to go into teaching today, but the guys who got a job on the assembly line instead of becoming teachers are not going to do that today.
It's not a simple choice between "well gee will I study to become a primary school teacher or get a job in the box factory, I have the skills and aptitude for either". The guys who got a job in the box factory were not academically qualified to be teachers (I'm not saying they were stupid, I'm saying they were never going to be teachers and they knew it, their families knew it, everybody knew it).
So it's a bit like the "learn to code" mantra - if there aren't any box factories anymore, those guys are not going to be teaching nine year old boys how to read gooderer.
So there is going to be a tranche of people who would have done manual labour/blue-collar work, but now manufacturing is either off-shored or automation is coming for those jobs. What do you do for them? Some of them may be able to start up small businesses of their own (there is certainly plenty of room for 'local guy to do small handyman jobs around the town') but not all, and certainly not all of them are going to be able to pivot into teaching.
AI is probably coming for the white-collar jobs as well, but there may be more wiggle room there for "okay so maybe I'll re-train as a teacher". I think something like a jobs programme probably is the best we can hope for, and there is a ton of work in the voluntary/public sector that could be done under the aegis of that, but it'll be tricky to implement: local government that isn't cutting the grass or filling the pot holes because of lack of budget to do that kind of work. Voluntary services that need a handyman/janitor/caretaker but don't have the funding to employ one full-time.
These are called community employment schemes over here, I don't know if there is an American equivalent, but if manufacturing/heavy industry is now dead as a source of employment, unless you're expecting everyone to start becoming an Uber driver or the likes, then some kind of government jobs programme is what is needed. The ideal would be "these are real jobs where people are employed at market rates and get health insurance and pension benefits" but the problem of course is no money to pay for that, so that's where government has to step in and then we're talking about spending even more on social security/social services which is another problem in itself: where does the money come from to pay for that, unless we're expecting the Miracle of Superhuman Intelligence AI to make things so cheap, and the economy so booming, that there is the magic money fountain flowing to pay for all this.
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Whom do you plan on hiring for this? I can assure you, the median underemployed/NEET man is not a fit for the role.
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