TLDR - There's going to be no return of manufacturing at any relevant scale without a fix in labor, construction, pension, currency, and tariff planning in the right order. There's a mismatch between US know how at the executive branch and relevant capabilities.
I've written before on the major issues, here I provide somewhat prescriptive solution to shutoff some of the bottlenecks to reshoring manufacturing to America.
Impact: Manufacturing planners can make better investment decisions if they know the full count on aggregate pension, infra, and healthcare taxpayer debt per capita.
Enforce the IP laws on the books that should protect US brands and sellers. (no new legislation necessary)
Impact: Kills the knock off market and sever the ability of knock-off operators to run ads. This would take 1-3 phone calls to Tik Tok, Instagram, Facebook, and a few others to limit the ads capabilities of knock off peddlers.
Tariff games.
After the previous 4 have been completed, then and only then can tariffs be explored.
Theres' also the counterpoint that by the time all of these things get rectified, the median age of an American will be 44 or 45. No country in history has defeated burgeoning pension, infra, healthcare, and defense debt per taxpayer past a certain point.
Countries devolve into chaos and people reach inwards for the coffers or the nation states tend to have endless sprawl.
Will be interesting to see how it all plays out.
A few notes on #1 - There's ~$7T worth of PE asset holders that have rolled up businesses with occupational licensure requirements that will put up a heavy fight against legislation with lobbying dollars and more. Those PE assets are all volatility laundering.
There's currently ~30 states that represent ~54% of US occupationally licensed construction labor with control of both chambers of congress that could do a 10-12 month turn around on licensure requirements being nationally portable.
I put the likelihood of this happening at very low odds.
The only people who want to argue counter to my thesis have never built, designed, scaled, or worked on anything to 100M tonnes in throughput without gov't money or without chasing fedramp'd dollars.
I believe everything under this administration is being done in a backwards order.....
The blowback from this can be devastating, maybe wars....I only speculate, but I can say with a level of reasonable confidence that manufacturing won't return at scale* to the USA anytime soon.
I outline a textile scenario here.
I've previously noted that the CHIPS act is a ruse and that the fab/foundry facilities in the USA would be endlessly delayed.
Don't ignore the math on median ages across the 3 best locations for manufacturing - Ohio, Michigan, and Texas. We'll see how it all shakes out.
