Im with you on that. But strategically retargeting the economy towards manual labor when you're big on services and digital innovation? That makes no sense. Being entirely self-sufficient is just not a good strategy in a highly competitive world connected by trade relations. Instead, tending to alliances and partnerships, assuring mutual interests and interlinked dependencies would be a lot smarter.
It all comes down to a lot of people in other parts of the world being willing to work for far less, for far longer hours, under far worse conditions, than Americans. Anything you can make in the USA will thus be more expensive, and until you’ve re-acquired all the domain knowledge lost to other nations, these quality will also be worse. As most people don’t want to buy something worse for more, you’ll need to force them to by making it unreasonable to import foreign goods (which is already happening), but that also means you limit the market to domestic. I fail to see how that is a viable strategy, unless you aim to wage war on the rest of the world and can’t trust anyone.
