Got to thinking about manufacturing, jobs, environment, and money just now–I was researching environmental impacts along the supply chain resulting in big pieces of equipment. A few manufacturing trends are supposedly cold truths that we are supposed to recognize and move on with. I’d be obliged to have some help thinking through these. The main cold truth is something like:
- domestic manufacturing has declined because importing supply chain items is cheaper than making them in the U.S.
I acknowledge naivety here, and have read enough economist/industry accounts to know that it is common knowledge that , despite transportation costs of bringing engines or wheels or metallic what have yous into the U.S. for finalizing production and sale is somehow cheaper than just putting together the supply chain items here. The transportation costs are, I hear, overcome by the savings in labor cost, environmental compliance cost, taxes, and so on.
What I would like to see, then, is a chart of these costs in some representative industries to get a holistic sense of the costs and benefits of importing supply chain items over domestic production.
For the environmental compliance cost, for instance: the benefit of not paying that cost in the U.S. results in either that cost being paid outside the U.S. (and so sent along to the consumer anyway), or in the cost being of a different nature (environmental damage, either localized somewhere [we transfer the cost of pollution for our toys, which seems childish] or global greenhouse gases, ocean pollution, and so on). If we can evaluate the total benefits of transferred environmental compliance or pollution, we might better evaluate the sort of demands we place in treaties. In any event, a proper holistic approach to this seems warranted. Say you are willing to buy a truck made with an engine made in a country allowing all sorts of wastes to flow into its rivers…you don’t plan on visiting the rivers, you think, so sure. But would you eat a shrimp at Red Lobster that might or might not come from that river? Would you ask the government to place country of origin labels on all your food products? Would you assume the cost of checking if the food comes from the specific field adjacent to the specific polluter providing your specific engine? Seems expensive, all that research.
Other aspects of the hard truth above, I just can’t dismiss my skepticism…and so will need to see numbers on taxes, wages, and so on. And for those, I want a similar holistic account. What can’t we have in this country because of the loss of corporate taxes (assuming there is a loss of taxes resulting from the importing which results in manufacturing decline). And what is the exact wage difference? What’s going on in those countries with the low wages?
Any thoughts appreciated.
