There's a big hurdle for the US manufacturing sector in that many products are much cheaper to produce in China or Taiwan. Part of the reason for this is that those countries have much less strict standards on things like pay, employee working conditions and pollution controls. Another way of looking at it is that US companies are saving money and skirting important social and environmental rules by outsourcing their manufacturing to countries which don't have these rules - with excellent consequences in terms of increased profits and cheaper products, but disastrous consequences in terms of the environment, the welfare of those who make the products, and US manufacturing jobs.<\/p>\n
It seems to me that the US government should use its power to tax imports to level the playing field for US manufacturers by removing the incentive to manufacture elsewhere. In other words, the import tax on something should be the difference between what it costs to make something in the US and what it actually cost to make due to laxer regulations. Then, manufacturing for things sold in the US would (over time) move to the optimal locations based on where they were being sold and the where the raw materials were mined or recycled.<\/p>\n
Suddenly making all our electronics more expensive by (maybe) a factor of 10 would be enormously disruptive so I suggest ramping up the tax gradually over a period of (say) 10 years or so. That would lessen the blow and give the US manufacturing companies some time to bootstrap. It also gives a great incentive to China to improve working conditions and emissions since doing so essentially wouldn't cost them anything (it would be covered by the corresponding reductions in import taxes).<\/p>\n
In the long term, I would expect that the final cost of the manufactured products in question would stay about the same or even become cheaper than what they would be without these taxes. That's because as it becomes more expensive to hire people to do a menial job, it becomes more cost-effective to automate that job. The machine costs more to begin with (you need clever people to build and program it) but once it's up and running the unit cost per produced item is much lower.<\/p>\n
There's a lot more to it than that, of course - China still has a big advantage in the expertise it has developed in building things, China sells to other places besides the US, and there are currency, debt, and trade treaty issues which further complicate matters in ways I don't completely understand. Still, I think it's an interesting idea to consider.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There's a big hurdle for the US manufacturing sector in that many products are much cheaper to produce in China or Taiwan. Part of the reason for this is that those countries have much less strict standards on things like pay, employee working conditions and pollution controls. Another way of looking at it is that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1588","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1588","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1588"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1588\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1589,"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1588\/revisions\/1589"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}