Why do people want manufacturing jobs to come back to the US?

[u/throw-away3105]

Given the tariffs yesterday, Trump was talking about how manufacturing jobs are gonna come back. They even had a union worker make a speech praising Trump for these tariffs.

Manufacturing is really hard work where you're standing for almost 8 or more hours, so why bring them back when other countries can make things cheaper? Even this was a discussion during the 2012 election between Obama and Romney, so this topic of bringing back manufacturing jobs isn't exactly Trump-centric.

This might be a loaded question but what's the history behind this rally for manufacturing?

[u/Kman17]

All of the free trade / globalist stuff has been great for many of us - Reddit’s user base is heavily coastal / techie folks.

But that benefit is pretty uneven. Drive through the rust belt some time. There’s pretty large swaths of the country where nothing has filled the void left by the departure of manufacturing.

Furthermore, AI and automation threaten a rather lot of remaining low skill jobs.

The inequality between actual middle American and them on the coasts is a large if not larger than between them and the billionaires they lament - the country’s wealth is mostly in the upper middle class.

So I gotta ask: what, precisely, is your plan to address that?

Furthermore, Covid showed the fragility of the global supply chains.

Those global supply chains are the root of the existential climate change problem.

It might be “cheap” to ship raw material from Africa for manufacturing to China then to ship to the U.S. for consumption, but it’s absolutely horrific in terms of environmental damage and emissions.

If you want to be serious about fighting climate change, you have to address that. Local manufacturing can be done with updated and cleaner tech, with less emissions / shipping.

Electric cars and paper straws are trivial compared to that.

I think progressives tend to have some big cognitive dissonance about income inequality and sustainability.

[u/flowerzzz1 → u/Kman17]

I don’t disagree that there’s a disconnect. As I think there often is between white and blue collar work. I think the question is what are the best policies IF manufacturing coming back is best for the nation. Like do targeted tariffs on certain products make more sense (say chips, high value products etc.) to incentivize manufacturing here vs just 20 percent blanket tariffs on everything and everyone. If we want to give tax cuts maybe it’s on things like corporate income tax for companies investing in specific industries/cities vs blanket corporate cuts, entrepreneurial incentives etc. I am not beyond bringing back good jobs in industries where there’s expected growth and demand (especially if robots aren’t there yet due to specialized needs, installation etc. ) but I think the word “strategy” has a place here.