It's funny you say that, because we talked about literally that. No joke.
No, he does not and would not want to work in a shoe factory, but he remembers when he was 16 and his first job was actually in a local shoe factory. He said it was a terrible job, but taught him how to keep a job. And he appreciated being able to buy shoes that were made by people he knew. . . . "I want that opportunity for my grandson."
It doesn't have to make sense, it just has to exist in quantity.
The US already makes highly advanced goods like cars using robotic manufacturing.
Wouldn't an entrepreneur be able to figure out how to make something as simple as a shoe factory? And wouldn't that also result in fairly high paying union jobs, such as the people to maintain the machines and software?
The question really is if such entrepreneur made such a shoe factory that still employed union labor at fairly high rates of pay, why wouldn't they just install that factory in a place where labor costs less?
If the goal is union jobs at fairly high rates of pay, we can make high-productivity jobs like CVS employee (~$1.2mm revenue per employee IIRC) into good high-paying union jobs by incentivizing CVS employees to unionize.
Even the type of high-value manufacturing present in the US tends to be less productive with labor than Costco (~$30k net profit per employee) or Delta (~$56k net per employee) or ADP (~$84k net). Since our labor pool is decreasing, it is even more critical for Americans to work in high-productivity jobs rather than moving the other direction.
Clothing is hard because it needs to have stretch. Iron is easy to automate because it doesn't stretch (well it does but not by enough to worry about). Thus we have been automating steel for a long time, and clothing still has a lot of manual sewing done on it. To the extent we have automated sewing it is often has a significant quality reduction.
Hopefully somebody can solve the problem. There is a lot of work on it, and progress is being made. Don't ask me how close they are, I don't work in that space.
and one of the ways to do that effectively is with intense automation and integrated supply chains regardless of geo-political borders. Neither of these is attractive to this circus
Why would an entrepreneur even think about building a factory when building materials might potentially skyrocket? Anyone who is considering something like this is just going to wait until Trump isn't in office so things can stabilize. If you said, right now, I'm gonna build a factory, it probably wouldn't start producing anything until 2028 at best.
What? Of all the non-high-tech things you can manufacture, shoes actually seem pretty complicated. You have a mix of different materials, if you want to go more traditional you need a higher level of employee skill, you need a big variety of styles and sizes to be competitive, and if people have one bad experience with your product they'll probably never buy from you again. Also the margins and competition are brutal.
How is that any different than hourly wage slave jobs now? It's better than being homeless or spending imaginary bucks printed against a debt that will never be paid off
We can build a factory in a month, including permitting, acquiring the land, planning the building and constucting it, as well as procuring or building the machinery and setting it up in the factory, programming it and hiring and training the workforce during high employment? That's very impressive!
tbh, as far as I'm concerned the hollowing out of the USG is why we can't do things fast. How many times has your boss had the entire team submit a proposal on how long it would take each member of the team to complete a JIRA ticket and then use that bidding as to who to assign the ticket? Like if you could build bridges and stuff in-house then you really speed things up.
Given that something like a factory is probably going to require eminent domain to get a large contiguous tract (or built in the middle of nowhere so no counter-lawsuit) it seems fine for the government to build the shell of a building and then sell it off to be customized.
11 months is truly impressive but of course a far cry from a single month. A bridge also needs no machinery and workers permanently dedicated to it. IMO it's absolutely crucial for the US to cut down red tape and silly regulations to allow all construction to get done much more rapidly. I also wonder how this translates to building many projects like it at the same time. I understand construction capacity and backlogs are a huge bottleneck and we are in the process of deporting large numbers of people who could work on it while never having been good at growing a strong workforce in trades that require certification like electricians because we won't give out H1Bs for those.
I have a metal lathe in my shop, if I thought it was worth it I could turn it into a factory in 10 minutes - including the time to change my clothes. I could a factory to build simple toolboxes in about a month - not much space or equipment needed. Building a car assembly line - one month if you will accept a production rate of 1 every year. Want to turn out a new car every minute and it will take a lot longer.
In order to save its industry from the Nazis, the USSR moved over 1,500 large factories eastward in under six months in 1941. So the US in 2025 could certainly build at least a few factories in under a month. It would be a complete waste of government resources and certainly should be spent on something more worthwhile (like eradicating homelessness), but it's not impossible.
It’s not possible without seizing the means of production. An electrical switchboard that can power a factory has a minimum 24 week lead time, probably more like 52 weeks.
In my local construction market everyone is already working. There’s no slack manpower, particularly in the skilled trades (mech, elec, plumbing)
The above also ignores the fact that nobody wants to lend capital for such projects, so the government will need to finance it.
If you have ever been involved in new factory construction for anything that's more than light manual assembly, this statement would be very amusing to you.
He said, "It's just not that hard to get these factories back to the states. We can get that done this month."
The amount of cognitive dissonance and just outright believing the lies is astounding.
Trump won't say that states need to build those factories. He'll tell governors that they're failures for not having done it already.