I work for an global company in the industrial automation space. Not only is there is a major effort underway to offshore jobs and manufacturing from the US, but our customers around the world are pulling way back on capital expenditures, citing US policy uncertainties as a primary reason.
A multi-million dollar company I help start, in the Midwest USA, had manufacturing, customer service, R&D, and shipping all in the same state. After being bought by Texas VCs, everything moved out of the area. They don't want to run and build a business, they want to make X millions in Y years.
To do this, manufacturing moved to South Korea, customer service to some Asian country, slashed R&D by removing QA, and shipped the other jobs to a more _cost effect state_ not in the Midwest. Everyone that had institutional knowledge was fired to reduce cost of employee salaries.
Note you want QA because it is a life safety solution. Speaking with former colleagues, the quality of the solution went down hill while the price kept rising.
In my current company, all assembly jobs were removed from in-state and shipped to a more _cost effect state_ before the end of 2025. This also affects the end user because I can no longer go to assembly and test software changes or custom hardware changes before the product ships.
Jobs are not being lost because of unskilled people, they are being lost to help the rich get richer.
> Jobs are not being lost because of unskilled people, they are being lost to help the rich get richer.
Indeed, imagine you're part of the wealthy elite. What you want is to be able to move your cash around the world, chasing cash growth. You also want yourself to be able to travel wherever you wish with your Gulfstream.
Why would they care about local midwest job growth ?
You don't have to be communist, you just have to be selective about the capitalists you engage with.
An business mentor of mine bootstrapped a highly profitable enterprise software company, growing it to 400 employees. When it was time to sell/retire, he vetted buyers not just for the money they could offer, but for the impact they would have on his team and community. He accepted an offer from a conservatively-run competitor and proudly told me that 5 years later, 90% of the original staff were still happily employed with the new owner.
These arrangements are simply not an option if you're beholden to VC, or entertain offers from Private Equity. You cannot preserve what you do not own.
Packaging. Boxes, shippers, pallets, parts transports for use within automotive and other factories, etc. Very little direct to consumer or display stuff.
Analysts use packaging companies as a canary for manufacturing in general.
Interesting! I am familiar with this space as we developed a software tool [0] to optimize packaging based on 3D packing technology we developed. If it is relevant to you, happy to chat!
We currently use ArtiosCAD and TOPS pro for load and pallet optimization. I'll check out your software and forward over to the people-that-sign-the-checks.
I mean that's a big part of why so many people want the USA dollar to go even lower. The administration has been very explicit that they want a cheaper dollar but unlike a lot of their other polices that goal has a lot of support among economists.
It sadly doesn't work that well with tariffs in play again anything done outside the USA has to pay and frankly other nation just don't spend like American's.
US would lose out significantly if this were applied by everyone worldwide. The whole of Europe + Anglosphere have surrendered their whole tech related sectors to US companies, an enormous wealth transfer.
You want to tax foreign businesses that sell stuff to you?
Ok, given you can only tax stuff when it passes into your territory what you really have there is called a "tariff", it is paid by… the customer, when they buy the thing.
The seller has an entire planet to sell to. The US has about 25% of the money to buy things with, but even then only because we all like your money. Moment we stop liking your money, that probably drops to 20%.
You may not like tariffs but it's not as straightforward as "customer pays".
Customers and businesses will part of it. Businesses will most likely give up some part of the margin and customers will pay a higher price.
>>The seller has an entire planet to sell to.
For a lot of goods US is responsible for 50% of profits. It was for me for a long time when I was selling software. Quick googling suggests some EU automakers make close to 50% of their profits in US as well.
US is the premium market everyone wants to sell to. There is nowhere else like that, especially for high margin goods.
I’m not sure why this logic isn’t more mainstream. Half the country is clamoring for tariffs, bans on H1Bs, offshoring taxes, etc. They’re not connecting the dots on how this affects innovation, the economy, debt, taxation, etc. Is it a failure of education or a culture of rejecting it?
For the US, it's not too out of the norm historically speaking. Up until relatively recently tariffs were very popular in the US despite the clear understanding by academics that they were incredibly damaging to the economy. Political movements based around protectionist economic arguments have a long history in the US.
For an example, take a look at the 1888 US presidential election, which largely revolved around tariffs. Grover Cleveland lost re-election due to being part of the pro-business wing of the Democrats, and he came to the conclusion that tariffs were a negative to the economy overall, while his opponents were strongly protectionist. After McKinley's Republicans won the election on a protectionist platform, he instituted the McKinley tariffs (average import duties of around ~50%), which were devastating to the economy despite being extremely popular with the nation in the election. It led to massive price increases which led to the re-election of Grover Cleveland in 1892 (only other non-consecutive term president aside from Trump). Despite expert opinion being fairly solidified against tariffs even at the time, the idea of "protecting American business" and "punishing other countries for their unequal trade deficits with the US" was pretty popular with specific interest groups!
Parts of this sound rather familiar, do they not? I would then argue that it points to a cultural element, out of the two options of a failure of education or a culture of rejecting it. History certainly rhymes on this point.
Serious question, if tariffs are so terrible, why did so many countries have tariffs on US (and other country's) goods?
Also, during the period you describe the US was a major export economy. Now the US economy is far more insular (even before Trump) than it was during that period (foreign trade was more than 50% in the late 19th century vs 7% today). Why would you assume that doesn't impact the effects of tariffs?
2. Quick and easy reaction to other nation's tariffs, which we saw this year when Trump announced all his tariffs.
3. Targeted at specific industries to influence politics in other nations. IIRC, the EU is actually doing this to the US, specific states that have a lot of support for Trump, in the hope those voters will make the connection and get Trump to back off.
4. Targeted at specific industries to protect domestic industries from being undermined. The USA has accused China of this in various cases, any "anti-dumping tariffs" would be perfectly reasonable where this happens. China was accused of trying basically the same thing Uber was accused of, spending (VC|tax) money to corner the market then raising prices when all the old (taxi drivers|PV makers) were gone.
5. Sin taxes. Singapore doesn't have their own car industry to protect, they make it really difficult to get a car just because they don't want lots of cars. I mean, it's more of a registration fee, but the effect there is much the same given the lack of local industry.
There's definitely debate over which specific scenarios tariffs could be beneficial, as I understand it, but the general theme is that any benefits are highly concentrated (one or two companies or industries will benefit) and the negatives are felt in a diffuse fashion(every consumer pays the tax). They are broadly protectionist and the ones that do exist usually are implemented for pretty specific reasons like the following:
1: A government wants to protect domestic industries over ones outside of the country by applying price increases to the foreign ones, with the idea being that the domestic industries just need to grow into being able to compete with the industries in other areas. This is called the infant industries argument. A central problem with this is that the industries will always benefit from the protectionist policy, and are unlikely to ever admit that they have "grown up" so to say. My general view on this is that groups will of course lobby to have benefits specific to their industry, and that there are probably scenarios where we would prefer to have things handled domestically rather than abroad, but I would generally want this to be highly targeted and time-gated(Once the industries are mature enough to compete, we wouldn't want to keep subsidizing them), and that other tools are probably more efficient for this purpose.
2: Some sort of national security argument, where production being cut off during war would be a serious concern. My general thought on this one is that if something is specifically important for national security, broad reaching taxes on all imports probably aren't as useful as targeted government interventions in those specific industries. The government can build whatever factories it wants or contract people to do specific things if it passes a law to do so. If we're worried that we need a domestic supply of beets(randomly selected example) and the government is willing to produce them at a loss for national security reasons, they should probably just do that rather than tax imports of coffee, chocolate, bananas, beets, beef, and cars in order to encourage domestic production of beets. The broad spectrum nature of across the board tariffs doesn't specifically protect any given industry, unless the specific protection desired is "nothing should be imported, only ever produced domestically."
3: Historically speaking tariffs were a major source of government revenue. There was no income tax in the very early US (and this was the case in many places), and tariffs were seen as an efficient way to raise a lot of money for the government. At the time it was also something that was a lot easier to measure than things like property value, sales, or individual income, because all the goods had to come in through a port. Pretty easy to check the majority of the things coming in, compared to other taxation methods. A major argument in the time period was actually that the government was making too much revenue, such that it was constricting the growth of the private economy! A huge debate in the 1880s and 1890s was on how the share of government revenue could be lowered, and the growth of the economy could be encouraged. Republicans argued that implementing more tariffs would actually reduce imports and lead to lower revenues, which was the stated goal of the McKinley tariffs.
The general reason some people oppose tariffs overall is that they represent an approach to economic growth based on zero-sum thinking, i.e. an idea that if another country experiences economic growth, ours must suffer economic decline. There tends to be more support from many people behind the idea that international trade allows multiple economies to grow in tandem, as I understand it, but I'm definitely not an expert in this stuff, haha. I just find the historical aspect interesting.
On your second point, describing it as a major export economy in the period I describe is maybe not capturing the scenario, because we were in the middle of a major change in manufacturing. We were major importers of manufactured goods in the preceding time period, and we exported agricultural goods! The period from 1890 to 1910 roughly(depending on when you draw the cutoff) is when the US mainly started exporting manufactured goods more than importing them, and it was a massive transition. The period we're talking about is probably best understood as when we were in the process of industrializing more.
It's fair to point out that the economy was pretty different at the time, but it was different in a bigger way.
They really don't there is a reason the EU pretty much instantly caved in the last trade "negotiation" and it's most of the world frankly doesn't have much money. There certainly isn't enough untapped demand to fill a USA sized hole anywhere.
The EU caved because they didn't want to agitate Trump too much due to Ukraine. This becomes less and less important as the EU ramps up arms production.
Anyone will tell you I'm not a regulations guy, but there's definitely a problem. When you watch these rounds of seemingly coordinated, sweeping layoffs, followed by H-1B hiring sprees, it's hard to pretend.
This is a real eye-opener. Do you know how to fix how stupid I am? Tell me what's wrong with my analysis.
Here's a report: https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/us-lawmakers-scruti.... Is it factually wrong that "In the first half of 2025, Amazon and its cloud-computing unit, AWS, received approval for more than 12,000 H-1B visas, while Microsoft and Meta had more than 5,000 H-1B visa approvals each" and that they did layoffs?
It's hard to see how H-1B hiring could move meaningfully either up or down, given that the number of H-1Bs is capped at 65,000 [1] (+ 20,000 for advanced degrees), no company is going to pay for the process of getting an H-1B visa and not actually hire into it, and if a person on an H-1B loses their job they lose their visa in 60 days. You know exactly how many H-1Bs there are in the country: it's mandated by Congress.
What has changed is that they are or will soon be allocated by pay level instead of randomly. That's going to bias hiring toward Big Tech firms like Microsoft and Meta and away from body-shops like Infosys and Wipro.
These are the companies that receive the most H1B approvals because they have large numbers of high skill employees, so it isn’t surprising that they have thousands of visas approved. But the total number of visas across the country is capped annually per the law (by Congress). All H1B workers combined are still only a fraction of a percent of the total jobs in America.
Another thing to keep in mind that these are also the largest and most innovative companies, and that’s in part due to having access to the best available talent. Those H1B workers cost the companies MORE than American workers. These companies have standardized compensation by job and level and it isn’t different for immigrants. But immigrants come with the additional costs of the immigration process, on top of having the same salary. This isn’t a cost saving measure, it’s a path to continuing to stay innovative and relevant.
As for layoffs - these are mega corps so one part of the company may be doing layoffs in their business while another business within the same company is hiring. And you’re seeing the total effects (layoffs and hiring), and it seems contradictory, but it’s actually just a bunch of little decisions that aren’t tied to each other.
The thing about all of these responses, factual as they may be, is that they don't address the issue we're discussing. Regardless of whether the number is fixed or how much the employees are paid, thousand of people lost their jobs. I'm sure a few are active on the board here. It looks bad when you request visas and do mass firings.
Your fellow Americans disagree, they will buy their stuff from whoever is the cheapest.
People need to understand that it matters how they spend. They can't expect everyone else to pay for things to be made in America when they're not willing to themselves.
Trump has made the idea of mafioso politics popular -- where you hold everyone hostage until they do what you want -- but that doesn't actually mean that it's good policy.
He has also shown that it isn't a functional policy either. Much of what he's done has backfired almost immediately after it was implemented, but much like a gremlin in a wiring loom by the time the sparks appear he's already moved on to tear out something else important. Mafioso politics only work when your concentrated power is wielded against fragmented power that will move too slowly to mitigate you. Even if there are a multitude of small groups if they turn against you even without unanimous action you're spending too much time and effort jumping from thing to thing to ever actually achieve your intended goals. The end result is a parade of violent whack-a-mole as force is used against the myriad number of small revolts that happen, exhausting the resources of the enforcement infrastructure and normalizing the expectation of violence.
Of course the four morons of the broken winds don't see this as a failure, but merely an excuse to normalize that violence until it reaches the extent that they will face little to no consequence when they push it to the logical extreme and attempt to exterminate the many opposing groups rather than simply subjugate them.
Nor is it popular once actually realized. It's mostly for dumbasses to go "rah rah" thinking they'll be at the top of the pyramid. The problem with this form of governance is it puts the most vicious, selfish, and brutal people at the top. Those are rarely the most intelligent and (obviously) never the most magnanimous.
Yes, I do want to pay more to bolster my country's domestic workforce vs subsidizing corporate shareholders and offshore workers, while also having that come out of corporate profits. shrug
What’s funny about this is that I actually can’t. 2 examples:
For years, I’ve tried to buy only American-made denim. When the Cone Mills plant closed, I bought a bunch of dead stock jeans. There was one attempt since Cone Mills closed to open a new US denim factory, but it failed. Unless you’re buying whatever’s left of that increasingly rare stock, you can’t buy American-made denim.
Another example — I’m currently in the market for custom-formulated silicone and acrylic products. Every US manufacturer I’ve approached just sends an email that says “no we don’t do that”. I have like 5 Chinese suppliers on Alibaba trying to make a deal with me.
I would much rather source domestically as soon as someone tells me how to do it.
Sure there is a (growing set) of product categories you can’t buy in the US. What I typically find though is all these “we should force people to buy US” folks don’t actually own American-made goods even in categories where it’s relatively easy.
Not imaginary, I have been sharing info with Congressional reps on this topic who are working on policy, as well as the data on H-1B fraud and use for wage suppression. I haven't even had to pay a bribe ("campaign contribution") to get their ear, which is nice.
> How many American-made garments are in your closet right now?
This is a tired argument. The electorate was told "not to worry, we're offshoring the low value work so we can focus on high value work." Then, they offshored and automated the high value work.
> You are aware we do make many things in America today, right?
As someone who owns quite a few American made garments (and has paid the price to do so), I'm amazed you got such a long response that basically dodged the question.
The US service economy is ~83% of GDP. Manufacturing only makes up 8% of jobs in the US. Why do I care about US made products? Corporations are offshoring services and knowledge work, manufacturing has been gone for some time and will not be back. If it does come back, it'll be mostly automated, lights out facilities (like China).
So! I think it makes a lot of sense to impair the offshoring of these service and knowledge jobs when there isn't a labor shortage and we're likely in a recession. If you need more data, I can provide as much as you would like on this topic.
There's more to manufacturing than just rebuilding factories. You need everything from supply chains (which are going to include some foreign materials in many cases), to people who want to work in a factory in 2026, to consumers who want to pay extra for domestically made products.
It's not as easy as saying "just tax imports" or "just tax offshoring" because that hits the average folks who are barely getting by, as every cost gets passed down to the consumer.
I live in a country that used to be heavily industrialized (back in the previous regime when the goal was to be self-sufficient). In the 90s we lost most of the domestic industry as the factories got privatized and opening foreign trade enabled cheaper foreign products to flood the market. Most factories were sold off or just went out of business.
There's been some success with small businesses doing manufacturing domestically but it's mostly niche and not near what it used to be back when every house had at least some domestically made clothes, furniture, electronics...
Labor is expensive, market small, taxes high, and lately even high energy costs and rising import fees on materials from abroad. Plus of course the fact that people can't afford to pay 5-10x for the same thing made domestically when they can barely afford the thing at 1x the price.
This comment is literally just numbers about how the US has ceded low value add jobs and dominated high value add jobs.
I am asking why this is intrinsically a problem.
Or if it's not intrinsically a problem, then what are the downstream consequences we should care about, and can we talk about them explicitly instead of just assuming the best way to mitigate them is to put our economy into reverse advancement.
You could buy US-made garments in the 80s and 90s. Just like you could buy American TVs, vacuum cleaners, computers, and everything else. In fact Americans had a great quality of life back then, arguably a better one if you go by the attainability of things like housing, affordability, and economic inequality.
Could you please name one non-food product in America that a typical consumer could buy that doesn't subsidize corporate shareholders? Name one thing the average American can buy that contributes to gainful employment at the expense of corporate profit.
Where I'm sitting, the only manufacturing that exists in the USA is, for subassemblies or components that are purchased by larger companies on a contract basis, and manufactured by lower-middle class citizens. Boeing and GE is an example. And the reason Boeing buys domestically is only because they have to in order to limit their liability, reduce labor costs, and protect their IP. If the America you're looking for existed, Boeing would happily pay twice as much for labor to make components in house. If that America existed your television would be made here too, by people who weren't being subsidized themselves by Food Stamps.
There are no consumer commodity manufacturers in the USA who provide gainful employment without significant consideration towards corporate profit. There is basically nothing at Wal-Mart that you can buy that is made in the USA by people who are living in financial comfort. That's just not how late stage capitalism works.
Cool, give me as much statute and regulation required to squeeze companies and encourage competition to drive down profits while protecting workers. This system and game is all arbitrary, we can change the rules (of course, with time and effort). If we have to kill some companies to do this, that's acceptable. As someone wise once said, "We may not always succeed. But never will we be accused of lacking the courage to try."
The way you protect workers is to create the most appealing place to employ them for people starting businesses.
Otherwise, those businesses will go to somewhere with a less regulated environment and ship it in.
The only way to truly protect workers is to increase the cost of bypassing the regulations that you want to protect them so that operating within the regulations is the best choice for the business.
This is a disconnect that we see in numerous topics nationally, like pushes to raise the minimum wage which just result in lots of job losses while companies relocate. So instead you see politicians push for a national increase to the minimum wage, so that there’s nowhere else in the US to relocate to because they are all equally expensive.
The moment you start creating policies where the first concern is making sure people can’t escape, it should be an indicator to rethink the policy.
Democratic socialists were just recently democratically elected in NYC and Seattle. Support for unions in the US is at historical record highs [1]. ~2M 55+ people in the US die every year, ~5k per day. ~3M people turn 18 every year and become eligible to vote, young people who only see bleakness ahead. 31% of wealth is held by people over 70 [2]. This is a population dynamics story, old ideas die out, new ideas come in (Planck's principle). I'm confident support for worker vs corporate policies is high, based on all available evidence [3] [4] [5]. Sixty percent of Americans cannot afford a basic quality of life on their income [6], as another data point. So, I'm unsure who is in the "pro capitalism pro corporation" corner to be honest, when you consider the wealthiest 10% of Americans own 93% of equities.
No harm should come to humans of course, but corporations, entities, and systems are all fair game.
[4] https://www.cato.org/blog/81-say-they-cant-afford-pay-higher... ("A recent survey by the Cato Institute and YouGov paints a troubling picture: 62 percent of Americans aged 18–29 say they hold a “favorable view” of socialism, and 34 percent say the same of communism.")
Your take is questionable and increasingly becomes asinine every time a boomer croaks and a young person makes it to voting age. No amount of seductive "institutions who's inner workings we will figure out late as though they don't make or break it all will provide for us" rhetoric are going to change the fact that the electorate is increasingly made up of people who have only seen institutions, both public and private, engage in accumulation of power self enrichment at the expense of literally everyone else.
I don't know what the future holds but I assure you it does not involve the people vesting yet more power in institutions that have only led them astray in their lifetimes (governments, unions and other industry groups, academia, etc). As the evil among us like to say "demographics are destiny" [1].
Given how Trump’s second election seems to have been driven by the youth vote, it seems like an overly optimistic take to assume that youth vote is in the bag for progressive ideas. And we’ll see what Mondani has in store in terms of actual progressive policies that he can enact, but corporate death penalty is not on the table last I checked.
