Quote:
Originally Posted by Schwarzer Ritter
The basic question being avoided by the left is shouldn't our strategic goods be manufactured in the United States? If you think that we should rely on China for electronics and metals then you are a fool. If you believe that everything down to combat boots should be made in Dallas then how would you do it?
We have one shipyard for aircraft carriers and it takes a decade to build one. The Kaiser shipyard in Los Angeles could build a Liberty ship in eight days during World War II. A Liberty ship is hardly a modern ship 1100 feet long but I think the point is made. What happens if one of our carriers is seriously damaged or sunk? Remember the ship destroyed by fire pier side a few years ago? Do we put everything on hold for ten years or try to pull back a recently decommissioned ship...if some environmental democrat hasn't sunk it to make a reef somewhere. Amazing that the sea made reefs for millions of years before we came along.
Bottom line, we need our production back in this country.
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Well, at the risk of being redundant, why didn't Trump do anything about our dependence on China for rare earth elements when he was in office for four years. Or Biden for that matter.
Please note that if you have a diversified supply chain, that encompasses multiple countries that you can depend on, like Canada, Australia, and the EU, that helps national security. You're not as subject to natural disasters, labor strikes or sabotage wiping out your supplies.
As to the larger issue of what you're getting at with metals and aircraft carriers, if we're paying lots more for steel and aluminum, we're not going to cost effectively produce tanks, battleships and the like. The Chinese can afford to build a lot more of those than we can if they're paying a fraction of what we do. Our imports of aluminum come mostly from Canada. The top suppliers of steel are Canada, Mexico, Brazil, South Korea, and Japan, in that order. In other words, it's not like they're coming from places like China, which theoretically could cut off supplies if we get crossways with them.
We don't have big resources of rare earth ores, and a lot of what we do have is in California. Fat chance we'll mine or process the ores there. It makes a lot of sense to encourage development of deposits in countries or territories like Canada and Greenland that we can depend on. Invading other countries and incorporating them into the USA would be huge overkill however IMHO.
About electronics, yes, you've got a point, but only with respect to some items. There are a lot of low end consumer electronics assembled by women on factory floors in Asia. It's mind-numbing, repetitive work, not something that most Americans want to do. And most of it's not important to our national security.
The irony is that, China excepted, Trump placed the highest tariffs on countries like Cambodia, Vietnam, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. The bulk of what they send us, like garments and consumer electronics, isn't relevant to national security. Companies have incurred huge costs building factories in those countries because of the Trump/Biden tariffs on China. Now they'll end up doing the same thing again, in countries Trump hasn't targeted yet. It's insane!
I'm not sure how inefficiencies at the U.S. shipyard that's manufacturing aircraft carriers is relevant to this discussion. That sounds like fuckups on the part of the American shipbuilder, the Navy and our federal government.
