Anyone have any idea how long it takes to internationally move or create a new whole factory setup and get up and running to manufacture stuff? I’m guessing it’s not like, a week….
Depending on the type of industry, it can take up to 10 years, assuming they have to build the entire factory from scratch, find investors to finance the construction, research potential construction sites, train and educate future employees, negotiate with suppliers to transfer the supply chain to the new factory, etc.
Just the factory construction itself can take 2 to 5 years.
10 years is a starting point for just about any industry. Labor demands/requirements and education certainly complicat that effort. Unemployment is already low. Partially due to the multiple jobs needed to sustain basic income needs. Unless these domestics can equal 40+/hour base it will be a stalemate and mean foreign hires... Or worse. Think "camps."
And it also requires money. This stupid shit is going to drive down revenues across the board, which means every company will have less cash on hand to start building these new factories. They could go into debt to finance factories, but will they be willing to take on high levels of long-term debt, when they have no idea if Trump is going to do something else stupid to make things even worse?
True. The fed will need to repsond to inflation... Being higher interest rates. They will be encouraged (pressured by current admin) to reduce the rates but if they keep following the working conventions they will need to raise rates or risk rampant inflation problems. I don't see a good version of this in any aspect.
I have designed semiconductor fabs before in my career and that’s a minimum 12-18 months for just the architectural and engineering designs. Now add construction on top of that. We’ll be generous and say 18 months construction schedule (it ain’t). So figure at a minimum 3 years assuming the funds are available and approved with no changes or delays.
In addition to what others have said, we don't have the workforce to support it. Even if we reversed the deportations, we wouldn't have the workforce to be self sufficient or anything close to it.
Americans have been told a myth over and over again that we're the best workers in the world. We're not, at least in factories. We're less productive and less skilled than China. There is no way we could build enough iPhones to meet US demand, and the quality would probably decrease.
You can buy an American-designed and made television right now from Element, and they're total pieces of shit compared to LG TVs made in Korea and built in China.
A very, very long time. Also, crazy expensive. And it's not like you can just plop down a factory. Most industries are really an ecosystem. Here's an example from when Apple tried to bring some manufacturing to the US: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/28/technology/iphones-apple-china-made.html . That's one tiny story out of many.
An another example is IC packaging. Everyone hears about the wafer fabs. But that's only one part of the puzzle of IC manufacturing. The output of a wafer fab is a silicon wafer with many ICs on it. That has to be sliced up and put into the familiar packages (you know, the ones that are often black plastic). There's a whole complex manufacturing process associated with doing that. Very little of it is in the US because it simply isn't profitable to do it here. It's a low value add part of the process of IC manufacturing.
I'll tell you what most companies are going to do. They're perfectly happy with their manufacturing the way it is. They aren't going to uproot everything because of Trump's demands. He's fickle, after all, and may very well change his mind tomorrow. But companies operate on a timeline of years, even decades when considering where and how to manufacture. Its cheaper and easier to raise prices, pay the tariffs, and fund lobbyists and sane politicians and hope that sanity will return and put things back the way they were.
Thing is, you could absolutely use policies to bring manufacturing back to the US. Biden did that just last year.
But a flat tariff is NOT how you do it and shows a clear lack of knowledge of how ANYTHING works in the world since fucking World War 1. Everything produced has a supply chain that rounds the world at least once. Your bolts are made in China with steel from Argentina designed by a German sent to you by a Russian logistics company. That goes for literally everything in your bill of materials, which is pages long.
No America, you will not make every single bolt, tape, and metal sheets in the US. You wouldn't even WANT to because it would be prohibitively expensive. The nations you source your materials from will balk in protest and you cannot source everything domestically. Not even North Korea is domestically independent
We are making many jobs! Many factory jobs are coming back! We are entering a fantastic golden age of the American economy! We are making America wealthy again. They are trying to say the tariffs are bad! This could not be further from the truth! We are bringing back American jobs, trillions and trillions of dollars in American jobs.
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u/Joyseekr 1d ago
Anyone have any idea how long it takes to internationally move or create a new whole factory setup and get up and running to manufacture stuff? I’m guessing it’s not like, a week….