Comment by whereismyacc
7 days ago
America got richer and outgrew the phase where tons of factory jobs made sense. It seems pretty clear to me that well-paying manufacturing job in developed countries were the product of a particular moment in time where poorer countries couldn't do it yet. Now they can. It was never going to last.
I live in NJ and people often make a lot of noise every time there's a report of people moving out of NJ because of high taxes and high housing costs (yet NJ's overall population has increased).
To me, it makes sense: NJ is a place where you live to make a high salary (proximity to NYC and Philadelphia) and raise a family (very good public school systems as a result of those high taxes). When you no longer have a need for those circumstances, you move.
Likewise, the US is not a great place for certain types of manufacturing because the labor and raw material supply chain simply isn't there. Why not focus on the things that we are good at instead?
It was never going to last if the US allowed for very low cost imports from those countries. This is literally one of the largest points of tariffs - protecting domestic manufacturing. We could have had high tariffs the whole time and offshoring would have been much less pronounced. I'm not saying that would have been a net positive, but to say it would never last is only true under certain circumstances.
You were still going to lose export markets as international competition grew, and you were still going to shift to higher value-added service jobs as the economy developed.