The U.S. government began investigating China’s dominance in the shipbuilding industry, where it manufactures as much as 75%-80% of fleets, during the Biden administration.
Steep levies on Chinese-made ships arriving at U.S. ports have been proposed, up to as much as $1.5 million, as part of a plan to bring more ship manufacturing back to the U.S., a policy which has bipartisan support.
This madness should be taken as antithetical to every “free market” conservative out there. And yet: crickets.
The US got complacent with outsourcing any kind of manufacturing. It drove up profits for corporations while cutting out jobs for Americans. This all happened on the back of the dream of “trickle down economics”. Of course, nothing trickled down. Everything trickled up. Thank the GOP for all of that, as a start.
Now that it has made the US completely reliant on outside manufacturing, in particular from China, there’s an obvious need to bring back manufacturing: but there is no real way to do it without investment and subsidization of such efforts. It is a process that, even with the proper support, would take years if not decades.
The populist part is there (“bring back our jobs!”). But the realistic part is that, ultimately, you cannot fix this by simply locking out the external supply. The economy will fail long before manufacturing could possibly return in any real way, at scale. It could be mitigated with FDR-scale programs, but any of that would be viewed and demonized as “socialism” by the Trumpers.
That’s where we’re at.