How can the US re-industrialize? It's a simple question with no clear answer as of yet. However, the US must do so if it is to remain a global superpower. We shifted from a Production economy to a Consumption economy without appreciating the consequences of that shift. Steel is now mostly imported from China, and most of the advanced machines and technology either comes from Japan or European nations like Germany. Consumption is only good if you can pay for what you consume; without creating products or processing raw materials that others will buy from you, you're engaged in a destructive cycle of syphoning capital with a dwindling value out of the country while importing increasingly more expensive products in. The currency continues to devalue while at the same time products and foreign exchange rates become higher for many reasons, but among them is deindustrialization; we no longer produce to use and sell which would increase our international value and credit, we now just continuously buy. What it is, is making other nations wealthy at the expense of your own, and that process is not sustainable. Production creates wealth, consumption takes that wealth from you. National production and industry allows a country to be self sufficient, consumption and constantly importing products from elsewhere make us needlessly and dangerously dependent on others.
High costs of living, high healthcare expenses, high insurance prices, high numbers of university graduates and soaring university costs, increasing employment specialization, decreasing numbers of tradesmen and women; all these factors and more make US labor astronomically high and encourage us to find increasingly cheaper labor elsewhere at our own hidden expense.
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