“In a recent paper titled “Industrial Headwinds: Reducing the Burden of Regulations on U.S. Manufacturers,” published in the May 2024 Club for Growth Policy Handbook, economist Daniel Ikenson writes, “For manufacturing firms, the cost of federal regulations in 2022 was roughly $350 billion, or 13.5% of the sector’s GDP—a burden 26% greater than the inflation-adjusted cost of regulatory compliance in 2012.”
He adds that while the average U.S. company pays a regulatory compliance price of $13,000 per employee, large manufacturers shoulder a cost more than twice as much—$29,100. However, even some small-sized manufacturers face annual compliance costs of $50,100 per employee. This helps explain why manufacturing automation is so popular and why our fastest-growing companies are in service-sector tech, not manufacturing.”
“trade doesn’t need to balance. I have a trade deficit with my supermarket. They get more of my money every year. So, what? I don’t “lose.” I get food without having to grow it myself.
That’s a win for me and the food producer regardless of whether the food was grown locally or came from Mexico.
“Imports are great,” says Lincicome. “It means I can focus on what I want to do for a living and not go make my own food or make my own clothes. I can use those savings and buy other things that makes me better off.”
As long as trade is voluntary, trade is a win for both parties. It has to be; neither side would agree to it unless they think they get something out of the deal.”
…
“Manufacturing output in the U.S. is near its all-time high. We make more than Japan, Germany, India, and South Korea combined.”
“Even if these subsidies were to create a manufacturing boom, it probably wouldn’t lead to an employment boom because most manufacturing output today is produced by robots.”
“Washington is spending another $61 billion to help Ukraine. But most of the money will flow through the US economy first.
The new law will allow the Pentagon to send existing weapons — everything from bullets to missiles to tank parts — to Kyiv and then simultaneously backfill that inventory with new manufacturing efforts for US armories.
There are 117 production lines in about 71 US cities that are set to produce those weapons systems, according to research from the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).”
“Rubio doesn’t even get through the first paragraph of the piece before making a significant error. “Today,” he writes, Congress no longer views industrial policy with the same skepticism that it once did, but “what replaces unfettered free trade remains hotly debated.”
Unfettered free trade? That’s hardly an accurate description of the current status quo in the United States—a fact that Rubio surely knows, since Florida’s sugar and fruit industries are the beneficiaries of some of the most aggressive protectionist policies on the books. Even before former President Donald Trump ramped up the use of tariffs, America had more protectionist policies than other large, developed economies: A 2015 report from Credit Suisse called the United States the world’s most protectionist developed nation.
Rubio’s inability to describe the current status quo matters. It’s a failure of the ideological Turing Test, and it reveals that he misunderstands the economic policies he’s trying to shift—or that he is deliberately misinforming readers about them. Either way, this ought to call the rest of his claims into question.
Unfortunately, that’s far from the only mistake in the piece.”
“Russia appears on track to produce nearly three times more artillery munitions than the US and Europe, a key advantage ahead of what is expected to be another Russian offensive in Ukraine later this year.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/exclusive-russia-producing-three-times-040038274.html
“Experts say that the root of Boeing’s present troubles is a longstanding culture issue. Over the years, the company’s top decision-makers went from detail-oriented engineers to slick suits with MBAs.
“You’ve got a management team that doesn’t seem terribly concerned with their core business in building aircraft,” says Aboulafia.
There’s one name that keeps popping up when people talk about Boeing’s cultural downslide: Jack Welch, the legendary — and infamous — executive who helmed the conglomerate General Electric from 1981 to 2001. Welch was known for ushering in a sea change of “lean” management that ruthlessly made cuts in both manufacturing processes and the workforce, all in the service of pumping up stock prices. His leadership style included firing the worst-performing 10 percent of GE staff every year; he reportedly laid off over 250,000 people during his tenure. He inspired an entire generation of business leaders, and this Welchian GE philosophy was eventually brought over to Boeing.
Historically, Boeing was renowned for its boundary-pushing innovations in aviation, which helped put commercial air travel on the map. But in 1997, Boeing bought a rival plane maker called McDonnell Douglas; instead of Boeing culture influencing McDonnell, however, the opposite happened. The engineer-focused company got a heavy dose of the cutthroat GE ethos as McDonnell’s CEO — a Welch disciple — became the president and chief operating officer, and later CEO, of the merged company. Other Boeing leaders, including James McNerney and current CEO David Calhoun, have also had stints at GE.
In Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing, journalist Peter Robison describes an environment where safety concerns were concealed or downplayed, in part to be faster and cheaper than Airbus, the former underdog that overtook Boeing as the biggest commercial aircraft manufacturer in the world in 2019.
The company began relying more on subcontractors; It had its own fuselage plant until 2005, when it sold it to a private equity firm — that entity became Spirit AeroSystems. Today, Boeing only completes the final assembly of a plane after it sources parts from thousands of suppliers. Outsourcing is cheaper — but using so many suppliers reduces the fine-tune control and oversight a company has over the parts that make up their product, according to aviation experts.
While lean management was the name of the game for Boeing’s rank-and-file, in the past decade the company’s executives spent over $43 billion buying back their own stocks and paying out nearly $22 billion in profits to shareholders. By buying back shares and removing them from the public market, the individual value of a share automatically rises even though nothing about the company’s operations has changed.
Those billions represent cash that could have been reinvested in developing the next line of Boeing planes or hiring more quality inspectors. Former Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg, who led the company during the deadly Max crashes, reportedly received an exit package of $62 million.
After the merger, there was also “an open labor war between the unions and the management,” says Hamilton.
In 2000, feeling demoralized and disrespected by the leadership shift, over 22,000 Boeing engineers went on strike. One of the chants heard during the strike: “No nerds, no birds.” As in, if Boeing doesn’t let engineers do their jobs properly, with adequate pay, there would be no airplanes. The engineers got the extra money they asked for, but not the ideological win. Boeing bled about $750 million due to the strike, according to Robison, and kept on with its cost-cutting drive while Boeing’s workers have kept sounding the alarm with every mass layoff.
In 2019, the company said it could cut as many as 900 inspectors — the people who make sure the plane is ready to fly. In 2020, it laid off about 16,000 people. Some were offered buyouts, a move that the company might have regretted when it had to go on a hiring spree after the pandemic, and after the 737 Max was cleared to fly again. “So you have a lot of inexperienced workers who now have their hands on the airplane rather than the mature, highly experienced workers who were laid off or took early retirement,” says Hamilton.
Despite the regular rounds of mass layoffs, last summer, Boeing’s CEO Dave Calhoun said he would love to ramp up the production of 737 planes from 50 to 60 per month, which would further elevate the pace of work for Boeing workers who already felt pressured to meet unrealistic quotas. A 2019 New York Times report interviewed over a dozen people about their experience working at Boeing, who said they saw many safety hazards during assembly — like debris left on planes — and claimed that they were fired for raising potential problems.
Boeing’s treatment of its 10,000-plus subcontractors has come under scrutiny, too, as the company has demanded ever-lower prices. “They treated their suppliers the way they treated their workers — as a disposable commodity,” says Aboulafia.
Boeing’s strategy to continually shrink costs doesn’t appear to have paid off. The company hasn’t turned an annual profit in the past five years. Airbus is selling more planes, and recent headlines about Boeing are putting a halo over Airbus’s comparative reputation. In January alone, Boeing lost $35 billion in market value as its stock price fell.”