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It's hard to understand shouting about America not manufacturing textiles or steel, because that's just not true. Polartec is an American textile producer, best in the world, in fact. Nucor steel, right here Down South, is an American steel producer, best in the world, in fact.
If capital investors wanted it, we could do it all tomorrow. But capital investors want more profits, and labor costs are the #1 expenditure in commerce.
Internationally capitalized multi-national companies, like Ford or Carrier, aren't particularly American. Sure F-150 are assembled down here, but not one part is manufactured here. In Carrier's case the assembly is done in Mexico under NAFTA definitions that allow using 'made in the USA' labelling, but the company is actually Japanese.
Take mattresses for example; there used to be at least 30 American mattress manufacturers, recently. Today there are 2-3, but they are capitalized not to increase manufacturing, but to reduce it. The capital investors then raise prices and reduce labor costs AND introduce structured consumer debt - financing - into the market to create greater profits.
It's really evident that the fastest growth is in sectors selling debt. For example GM financing, Ford financing, Volkswagen financing are all larger and more profitable than the companies they service.
Or healthcare, where preventable diseases are the baseline for the hospital architecture, which is driven by the debt hospital corps can take on. So a trillion dollar industry making built environments for physicians to work in is rewarding only physicians that treat lifestyle driven diseases, and accomplishing it all based on leveraged 'growth'.
Education costs, housing costs, construction etc. all trend tightly along these lines.
It's not a problem of Americans can't. Americans DEFINITELY CAN. But we aren't, and there are reasons why we don't.
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