Not sure where you think I said Trump using cheap Chinese labor is OK. But I am actually wearing U.S. made products right now – socks, shoes, shirt, and pants.
The death of American manufacturing is vastly overstated. We build a lot of stuff in this country, still, and send some of it overseas too.
What we don’t do so much anymore is to build a lot of the low-end low-margin stuff, and neither do we use a lot of low-skill labor to do it. That stuff comes from China, or Bangladesh, or … (follow the race to the bottom)
In fact, where our manufacturing sector is thriving is generally where we can apply automation, technology, and vastly fewer numbers of significantly more skilled workers.
Manufacturing is alive and well here. Manufacturing jobs, especially the kind you can get if you barely made it out of High School, not so much.
That’s the rub. Even coal mining, which the current incumbent seems to love so much, employs a lot fewer miners per ton produced these days. Those jobs were never coming back, no matter what happens with environmental regulations. What to do with all of the hard-working but not very skilled or educated folks who are displaced in the current economy is a hard and complicated problem.
Oversimplifying doesn’t help.