It's annoying Americans were given only two choices - offshoring is great and let's keep doing it, and, as you say, the opposite, meth-fueled let's bring back manufacturing overnight. The kind of slow and steady protection and promotion of home-grown industry that China and most of Asia so successfully used to grow their economies was completely absent as even a talking point.
But the administration attack is so ridiculously egregious and demands an even worse, government-imposed ideological alignment, that making logical arguments in this environment feels almost pointless.
Over time, China also developed mid/high level skills, complemented their low-skill production offering with it and now competes in new industries, new tech, etc.
So...to compete with China, the country with 4x the US-population, the solution is that low-skill labor needs to return to US....?
Shouldn't instead the focus be to again foster mid/high-skill labor, moving the part that is offshored again towards low-skill labor...?
Just goes to show the administration isn't working with facts and doing the hard-nosed analysis required to drive effective policy.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/tags/series?t=manufacturing%3Bou...
The US faces a much tougher hill to climb though in regards to bringing manufacturing back. China had it easy because they had most of what you could want; a huge labor force that could upskill to manufacturing (the rural poor population), cheap labor (kind of an extension to point 1 but also includes their lower COL and wage expectations over all), and low environmental barriers.
To bring manufacturing back to the US is a way harder lift; we have a lot tighter labor market, if we shift a lot of people to manufacturing someone needs to take the jobs they leave. We (well I at least don't enjoy the idea of going back to when rivers caught fire on the regular) don't want to strip environmental protections back to a level to make it cheap to dispose of waste. The best targets are low labor, high price, high skill goods, like, I don't know, chip manufacturing!
There were a lot of slower manufacturing on-shoring incentives during the Biden administration that would have presumably continued under the Harris administration. Mainly around green energy and electric vehicle manufacturing incentives - which have successfully resulted in new auto, battery, and supply chain factories being built mostly in red states - and semiconductor manufacturing. The Biden administration also maintained and increased tariffs on specific types of products coming from China including EVs.
So I don't think your categorization of the two choices Americans were given is quite accurate.
On the other hand, keep manufacturing outside of US for cheaper labor to keep price low and having bigger margin. It's an easy choice to make.
And again this is not a US specific problem, it's almost all of countries nowadays have a massive wealth gap that makes people racing to the bottom of living / working standard.
Excuse me, but I am old enough to remember Biden's program such as CHIPS, a slow and steady protection and promotion of home-grown industry.
America had the choice. It chose wrong. Are Americans going to assume the consequences of their choices or are they going to lie to themselves they weren't given the choice? That last option would fit more with the "character" of the America nowadays, the one who voted Trump: make mistakes and blame someone else for it.
The slow and steady way that post-WW2 Korea and Japan did needs a unanimously agreed 10-20 year long game plan between industry and government, which is incompatible with democracies who change colors and strategies every 4 years where the new administration begins to tear down everything the previous administration did because they serve different voter bases and corporate lobby groups.
It is also incompatible with the US since a lot of corporations made bank due to offshoring and will fight it every way they can since they don't want to deal with costly US labor who can unionize or sue you for millions if they break a finger at work. Even TSMC Arizona had to bring half the workers from Taiwan, and it's not like they're making tchotchkes.
I think this is because China is an autocracy, so they can make long-term plans. Democracies that swing as wildly as the US currently does is no place for that, and that's not limited to the new administration.
I'm not a fan of industrial policy or the chips act, but it seems to be just the choice you are asking for.
On the other hand, I am a believer in the idea that voters get the government they deserve. So maybe we deserve this.
