What it would take to rebuild U.S. manufacturing might (axios.com)

I can’t read the full article, but the snippet (6%gdp/$2T) seems not that expensive? And you could read that either way ”cheap so we should do it” or “if we end up needing to do it, we can do it”.

I get why the government is keen to do this, but what sane citizen wants to live anywhere near those factories they want to bring back? Nothing like contaminated drinking water, poor air quality, acid rain that ruins your cars paint, noise and light pollution etc, etc, etc. Not to mention they'd surely be built with automation in mind to rug pull and wishful thinking about job creation. No thanks.

The future of manufacturing is automation, not jobs. Wouldn’t it make more sense to nurture multiple suppliers for critical items?

To start with, they’d have to be willing to pay more in Walmart for us made goods…

How do you compete with China? You loose on regulatory costs before you even consider anything else.

Cheap electricity. Like a 10x-15x reduction.

We can't change material cost at the moment, but this is something we could have influence over. Recycling steel and aluminum would be dirt cheap. We'd leap even farther ahead in training AI models. We'd reduce carbon emissions from shipping. So many beautiful outcomes.

I can dream. If there's one upside to the AI boom, I hope we see a plethora and overbuild of power infrastructure and a second coming of nuclear energy. Alas, both blue and red hate nuclear when both should love it.

US industrial production is actually quite strong https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/g17/ip100_f2.svg

Fairly modest tariffs and incentives would probably swing things. It needs to be planned ahead though as training and building factories takes a while. One reason China is strong now is they trained a load of engineers 20 or 30 years ago.

Rebuilding US manufacturing might would take the same thing that built it in the first place. Very high universal tariffs.

Meta-question, are all Axios stories written by clankers or do they just have an editorial policy that they have to look like they are?