Ask Lemmy

We see the same thing in the U.S., where every president promises to restore the American manufacturing base, then comes up against the reality that U.S.-produced products made by U.S. workers paid U.S. wages cannot be competitive with something built in Southeast Asia and shipped overseas for less than $100 per ton.

That is the lie they tell us. Meanwhile we do everything we can to make we don't have an industrial base.

• We zone factories far away from everything instead of allowing them to be in normal commuting range
• We tax the land they are on the same way we tax commercial property. Which you might think is fair but we don't do that to farmers. Especially considering how easy retail gets it, with governments willing to give plenty of free roads and police protection to them
• We treat inventory as taxable which punishes factories that want a buffer and rewards the quick turnover of fast fashion places. Ever wonder why they never have your size and you have to go to the website to get it?
• Thanks to our shit medical system any workplace injury is going to be devastating which means that the insurance as a whole will be very high.
• Factory investments take longer to pay off which doesnt mean much when we all think quarterly. A tax on rapid stock trading could probably fix that but that isn't going to happen.

There are other factors as well. We don't hire women to do factory work which limits the labor pool. There is still a lot of discrimination against Latinos and African Americans. Which again lowers the labor pool and kinda leaves us with...well the kind of people who feel only comfortable only working with white Christian men.