No president can force shuttered mills to reopen, or companies who've left in search of cheaper labor to relocate to the United States (or those who have come back to choose expensive humans over cheaper robots).
I've closed factories in Mexico and brought those jobs back to the United States. I've closed factories in Canada and brought those jobs back to the United States.
The Industrial Revolution was about making physical things. Many of the manufactured goods that were once tangible objects have now been reduced to bits and bytes of data.
All you have to do is take a look at Carrier air conditioning in Indianapolis. They left - fired 1,400 people. They're going to Mexico. So many hundreds and hundreds of companies are doing this. We cannot let it happen.
China is still our largest trading partner; however, complementarity between our economies is decreasing. We had the ability to organize a manufacturing process, and then we moved our manufacturing capability to China to make use of their labor pool.
Manufacturers...gradually shift their places, leaving those countries and provinces which they have already enriched, and flying to others, whether they are allured by the cheapness of provisions and labour.
American jobs are being lost to foreign countries, and U.S. companies are urged to move their manufacturing plants, new technologies and headquarters overseas.
The reality is if something were to happen that cost China jobs - like, if they upwardly revalued the currency a lot - those jobs aren't going to come back to the U.S. They would go to Vietnam; they would go to Thailand. They would go to whatever country was the lowest cost.
I've gone to China, bought a manufacturing company and moved it to America. Now China wants to buy back some of that new technology from me. That's a great story for America.
Technological change always accelerates. It never stagnates over time. Which means we are going to face the fact that, if nothing in the States changes, we will find ourselves dependent on other countries for almost everything that can and will be manufactured in a quickly approaching future.
This was the period when I used all the influence I had to get the British to abandon their export trade, and as much as possible convert all of their manufacturing facilities to the immediate needs of the war, including civilian, as well as military requirements.
It is the Germans who are responsible for the fact that I became a fabricator of arms. If not for them, I would have constructed agricultural machines.
Repatriating the Ram HD is the right thing to do... it should never have been moved to Mexico. This was owed to the U.S. government - and the taxpayers.
It used to be that American and European companies built their products in low-wage countries, separated by great distances from the innovators who developed the products and the markets where they were sold. But companies increasingly find that is an outmoded way of doing business.
Look at Mexico. Many, many factories, many plants. Nabisco's now moving to Mexico, their big Chicago plant. You look at Ford is building one of their biggest factories in Mexico, one of their biggest assembly plants in Mexico. So Mexico is not only beating us at the border, they are also beating us at trade.
One of the objections most frequently urged against machinery is, that it has a tendency to supersede much of the handlabour which was previously employed; and in fact unless a machine diminished the labour necessary to make an article, it could never come into use.
See {43974} for a succinct statement of the objections.
Just as the music industry couldn't combat the financial impact of digital piracy, major corporations will have to rethink how to maintain margins when many of their most profitable items can be easily manufactured at home.
Many large brands are now just marketing machines for what's being made offshore.
By offshoring the production of their products, U.S. corporations transferred technology, physical plant, and business knowhow to China.
I think Taiwan's economy needs an overall structural readjustment. Our new model focuses on innovation and research. This is different from our growth model in the past, which was centered on the manufacturing industry.
Plants and factories are already starting to move back into the United States, and big league Ford, General Motors, so many of them.