As someone with a tech founder, finance and real estate investing background, I am hopeful that a new U.S. manufacturing renaissance can bring back jobs and investments into parts of America that have been devastated. It will not be a surprise to many that millions of Americans involved in the huge manufacturing sector and states that rely heavily on it will benefit greatly from a renaissance.
While robotics have advanced, and AI demolishes service industries, the idea of a "lights out" factory -- meaning there are no human workers -- is not quite there yet. People are still required in these state-of-the-art factories, although admittedly of higher skill and fewer numbers. That could translate to a lot of American jobs if manufacturing returns here. But there are several hurdles and considerations.
Trump has always stated that he intends to pursue tariffs on key imported products unless they build their factories here. Economists say those tariffs will only make products more expensive. But if those manufacturers agree to bring those factories and jobs here, Trump has said the tariffs will not be imposed, effectively making it a bargaining chip. In general, when you increase the input costs of a manufactured product for various reasons, including adding tariffs to components, equipment and materials, the product price will increase. For imported finished goods, once a tariff is applied, the final price will increase -- unless in both cases the company decides to absorb these added costs and not pass these on to buyers, but only if their profit margins are sufficient.
Making manufacturing totally based in the U.S. is not that easy. The supply chain for building airplanes, chips, cars and other sophisticated tech products can be a complex network. On the contrary, building these products and moving their supply chains all to one country requires herculean selection, coordination and monitoring of expert suppliers from different parts of the world. It is probably impossible to expect that everything in the downstream (or upstream) supply chain can be manufactured in the U.S. for these products, but the key ones with sophisticated intellectual properties should ideally be in democratic countries who are strong U.S. allies.
To say "Made in the USA" does not mean everything in your cellphone or laptop is actually American made. This is true whether the manufacturing company is Boeing, Ford, Intel or any U.S. company.
For example, the entire chip industry relies on a company in the Netherlands called ASML. ASML builds equipment that are around as big as a bus, containing advanced robotics and something called Extended UltraViolet Lithography machines that cost a few hundred million dollars per machine. The way these huge machines blast droplets of tin with a pulsed CO2 laser, then direct the EUV laser towards the silicon wafer, is something out of a sci-fi film. These ASML EUVL machines are used by Intel, Samsung, TSMC and others to lay chip patterns of atomic level size. You cannot just copy these EUVL machines, as the technology is extremely complex, and these are restricted for export to certain countries like China.