Bringing American Jobs back

 

BRINGING AMERICAN JOBS HOME EASIER SAID THAN DONE. Taiwan semiconductor has built the world’s largest chip factory in Phoenix.  But they are delaying opening a year because of worker shortages. Other plants in Ohio have the same story.  Trump wanted manufacturing and especially electronics & chips to come home for our security. Obvious strategy is to have control of chips and let the rest of the world supply us with things chips go into. Congress passed the CHIPS Act for huge federal subsidies.  Trouble is, USA has a deficit of 67,000 engineers and STEM workers and there are only 70,000 who graduate each year.  This is big stuff since deficiency makes the difference between good productivity and labor costs stable vs. high costs and low productivity in our STEM industries.

    It’s more than a slim workforce.  If you put tariffs on China, you might score new contracts with India and Thailand.  But what if the plants there are buying lots of the parts from China? In some cases, stuff from China gets repackaged and a third world country simply acts as the middleman. Mexico, our supposed ally does a lot of this. Supply chains get more complex, stuff gets higher priced from another middleman.  And now many of the smaller Eastern countries are becoming good friends with China, the supplier, and not USA.   They distrust USA who won’t work on new trade agreements.

    What to do? First, work with Puerto Rico, once the chief source of pharmaceuticals. They are us and need jobs. Next tariff content.  If parts came from China in a device made in India, assess ‘em.  Third, work on trade agreements with the Far Eastern countries. (Yet Trump didn’t want these and Biden/Blinken are too stupid to do them).  Fourth fix the broken borders and fix the visa program to allow educated foreigners to come here for jobs. (Biden tolerates chaos and Trump didn’t want many foreigners getting Visas)  40% of semiconductor jobs are filled by foreigners since US kids don’t take enough STEM classes (Ungh! Too hard! I wanna party through college!) Fifth, concerning Defense, the manufacturers are dragging feet about replenishing weapons and ammo we gave the Ukrainians.  That’s because Dems defunded for years.  This also risks losing our edge in new military technology if research investment is stifled.  A more steady purchase stream needs to be worked out with weapons manufacturers (lest in time of war we suddenly have idled plants). 

   There is more to this than Trump and Biden’s tariffs. We need to play this game smarter.