I agree with nearly every word of this piece on reshoring, bringing “tradable” jobs back to the United States, by Joel Kotkin and Michael Lind in American Affairs Journal. Here’s its conclusion:
To make America more productive and Americans more secure, we have to look beyond the memes of a corporate establishment that has, for all intents and purposes, abandoned our national interest in pursuit of short-term profits, foreign favor, and public relations apÂproval. What America needs is not richer tech oligarchs or more virtue-signaling by Wall Street financiers, but policies that focus on boosting dynamic traded sector production and jobs in our communities, restoring AmeriÂca’s lead in the productive economy.
The exceptions to that are
- I think we need a mixture of reshoring and “nearshoring”—an increase in the use of suppliers in Central America and the Caribbean if we are to reindustrialize in a competitive way. Unfortunately, a major impediment to that objective is that quite a number of thought leaders in the United States genuinely do not want the United States to reindustrialize even if doing that were more environmentally friendly than depending on offshore manufacturing that is discreetly out of side and beyond the reach of inspectors
- The authors pay no attention to the role of additive manufacturing in American reindustrialization. Too narrow a focus on jobs is an impediment to that paradigm shift.
The authors propose a number of strategies for facilitating that reindustrialization including investments in:
- Ports and inland waterways
- Freight rail
- North-South highways in the middle of the country
- Telecommunications
It doesn’t surprise me at all that getting through Chicago is a major impediment to transporting freight by rail. Even with improved roadbeds and rails procedures are still mired in the early 20th century. There’s a similar issue for ports. We don’t have a single “lights out”, fully automated port in the United States. Can you guess why? Australia, Netherlands, South Korea, Japan, and China all have ports more efficient than ours.
Can you guess where our least efficient ports are?
The writer of the blog “antiplanner,†argues that the US has the best, most modern, most efficient freight railroad in the world. He regularly sneers at the inefficient and outdated freight RR’s of Europe and Asia.
Whatever.
Near shoring is a big part of our deindustrialization problem. It actively hurts our workers, and wrecks our tax base. It also bleeds away our technology and our ability to innovate. China now leads us in innovation across a large number of disciplines, and maybe all of them.
To reindustrialize, we have to break the hold of the NYC financial community on our economy. They, Goldman-Sachs et al., are the problem. Offshoring, leveraged buyouts, asset stripping, and other barely legal but wholely predatory schemes generated huge profits for them, and wrecked the USeconomy.
We need punitive import taxes and severe, small or zero import quotas for all manufactured goods. Prices will go up, and growth will slow, but our workers will be better off. We also need zero immigration, and mass deportation of the 10 to 20 million illegals now here.
“Can you guess where our least efficient ports are?”
Its Long Beach/LA. The question is why? Its, ahem, multi-factorial. Paperwork and other bureaucratic issues are easy. Digitalization could help. Lesser known is that all containers must be tested for bombs and the like. Even lesser known, some of the ports are not deep enough to be stacked as high as they could be. Dredging ops are underway in Savannah for that very reason. A 60,000 ft view would say that ours are outdated and in need of modernization. Too bad the “infrastructure” bill is so light in this regard.
I was wondering, Bob, whether that was just a world class rant, or if you had something deeper. For example, how do you define “asset stripping” and do you understand how and why that practice developed, and have any material examples since the 80’s? Do you understand the genesis of leveraged buyouts and what would happen to many businesses if there was not an entire industry engaged in this “barely legal practice?”