Offshoring and the myth of the "added value manufacturing industries".

[Sen. Walter Sobchak]

13. And how many people do you propose employing doing tasks already automated?

At the memory card and usb stick factory the only production workers were about a dozen people who ran between machines changing out the component reels and about half a dozen technicians waiting for something to jam and trying to look busy as they went through every possible chart template in Excel. So how precisely does bringing this work to the US result in a windfall of employment - unless you are a southern republican neo-feudalist intent on matching the wages and regulations of the third world?

But for instance at the begging of the IT revolution most American vendors had to go to Taiwan for PCB's and other components because the manufacturers in the US were tied up making components for consumer electronics and couldn't be bothered with a bunch of bearded nerds from San Jose. Foxconn got their big break making components for Atari that they could not source in the US. Others went to England and West Germany for the same reason. Founding the industry that would define the last twenty years of the 20th Century and creating the Taiwanese based conglomerates we know today in the process was a tremendous drain on the economy. The up and coming industry was hindered by a substantially waning industry - even then. In Europe and Japan national industrial polices strongly encouraged companies to make the right decisions. Free Market America in this period batted 1000 on making the wrong ones.

You insist on trying to impose an economic paradigm that was build on having bombed the rest of the industrialized world except for Canada, Australia and South Africa into rubble and predated modern automation. Further the idea that any tangible number of Americans would embrace or even tolerate a tariff regime that would decimate their material quality of life is laughable.