Originally Posted by Koyote

Absent from most of these discussions is the question of whether it is even desirable to move many of these manufacturing jobs back to the US. While there are market inefficiencies and distortions (including some tariffs) in the international trade system, manufacturing and trade largely follows comparative advantage -- a concept we've understood for over 200 years. To put it as simply as possible, the US is a rich country, in part, because we let other countries produce many of the goods (and increasingly services) that require less-skilled workers and less-sophisticated capital equipment, so that we can fully take advantage of our relatively highly-skilled workers and more sophisticated capital by producing more highly-valued items -- and hence to produce more income. In other words, our international trade system makes the US (and our trading partners) ALL better off, even if we do run trade deficits with some of our partners; the corollary is that bringing many of those manufacturing jobs to the US will make us all worse off. (Not that the current policies will bring those jobs back - they won't. But they will cause prices to rise and incomes to fall and thus make us all worse off.)

So, the bike content here is that moving bicycle production back to the US will make them more expensive, which means fewer of us will be able to buy new ones, which means we're worse off. Simple.

Another relevant factor, for anyone who's interested, is the Twin Deficits theory...It's a little more challenging on a technical level, but it suggests that we'll never be able to reduce our overall trade deficit as long as our federal government is running large deficits; and since our current administration is proposing tax policies that will definitively (and substantially) increase the federal deficit and debt, they are actually PROMOTING a larger trade deficits -- even while railing against it.