I agree with you on many of the fundamentals, but still, for the sake of argument, let me play Devil's Advocate here.
1: Decentralize manufacturing out of the major city areas. Cities have been shown to be a disease magnet. We need to spread more of our industry out into the nation as a whole. Aka move more of it into rural areas.
Moving production further from where the largest portions of the population are isn't a smart move, because it increases fossil fuel consumption to transport those goods long distances to the cities.
2: We need to set up a National Emergency supply depot system. This is so that when future disaster happen we already have supplies in place.
We already have a very big strategic stockpile. It's for emergencies where everything else has been exhausted and is only dipped into as a last resort.
That said, I agree, we should have an even bigger stockpile.
3: More Small scale companies doing what most of the Big Corporations had been doing This is to broaden our supply chain.
Too late. All our largest corporations are trusts that would make Standard Oil and Bell Telephone blush.
Can you imagine any politician with the balls to break up Google, Walmart, Apple, Amazon, Autodesk, or Microsoft? All of these companies rely on providing contiguous cloud ecosystems for any of their shit to work.
If Google was five different companies, which one would get Google Drive and how well would it be able to talk with the rest of their network? If Apple was broken up into twelve companies, which one would get iCloud and how would it work with the Store?
Internet infrastructure
loves monopolies, and that's all because of the antiquated bullshit protocols that we use that take advantage of centralized hosting instead of peer-to-peer like IPFS.
4: Bring back all foreign manufacturing. Companies either relocate back to the US or lose any tax perks the currently get. With a Tariff added on all their goods if they don't.
Do you want $2000 smartphones? Because that's how you get $2000 smartphones. How can an American factory worker compete with a foreign one who does the same job for a fraction the wage?
Our system, for many many years, has been set up such that Americans go into debt to buy useless shit. The whole point of our system is to get Americans to rack up credit cards and pay interest on a brand new OLED 4K flatscreen TV. We need an actual wage to be able to afford all this stupid crap, so we specialized towards high-paying professional jobs and developed a massive service industry to shine the professionals' shoes, wash their dogs for them, babysit their children, and make them pizza.
If you bring back manufacturing to the US, everything will be incredibly expensive unless robots are doing it for free. See what happens whenever the minimum wage is raised? McDonald's starts contemplating touchscreen kiosks for ordering and burger machines to automatically assemble and dispense burgers. Raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour makes companies want to employ half as many people to compensate.
The cost of living is fucking ridiculous and rent and bills and groceries and everything are insane. If we deregulated and got rid of the minimum wage and let companies pay people $2 an hour to flip burgers, they wouldn't be able to make ends meet because everything is too goddamn expensive.
The real solution is worker's rights, more unionism, and avoiding letting corporations trample all over workers.
5: Set up a North and South America Economic sphere. The Americas need to have more trade between the two continents to lift up the standard of living in the whole hemisphere.
South and Central America is hell. Poverty, crime, violence, corruption, and narco-gangs from one end to the other. More trade with them would be nice, but we need to help them shore up their security first.
My own personal "Fuck China" plan would consist of the US Armed Forces joining hands with the Mexican government to wipe out the narcos and the coyotes and re-shoring much of our manufacturing to Mexico.
6: We need to have a National Journeyman program that trains ALL Students between the ages of 18 and 22 how to do a trade job. You can be a doctor or a lawyer. But for the first few years you will learn Plumbing or welding or Mechanic work etc. We need a multiskilled population.
To do that, you need a culture that doesn't make fun of blue-collar people or try to turn us into clowns to be pointed and laughed at. Everyone wants their kid to be the doctor or the lawyer or the manager or the bureaucrat simply to avoid the stigma of being anything else. We need more unionism and we need more of an appreciation for the Trades and for STEM, and it basically needs to be instilled with counter-propaganda that dignifies such work by presenting it as heroic rather than villainous.
If you think that sounds silly, I want you to do a quick little bit of mental arithmetic and figure out how many stories you've seen lately that feature hero scientists (you know, MacGyver or Doc Savage-type characters), and compare and contrast them to how many feature bureaucrats and lawyers and office workers as the heroes, with scientists as hunched Frankensteins with pipe-wrench-slinging thugs as their underlings.
We need a culture that encourages German-style apprenticeship and stops stigmatizing science and technology.
Don't forget to remove the H1B Visa program. Some Companies have replaced entire departments in America with cheaper H1B Visa workers.
Good luck with that. We won't have anyone to staff our labs.
I know! Let's take a bunch of San Francisco coders, waitresses, and janitors and stuff them in Los Alamos National Laboratory. We'll be able to get some real
sciencin' done that way.
It's going to take
decades to shift our education system around to the point where we have enough scientists to do that.
Tossing H1B overnight would improve our national security against certain people looking to steal our tech, sure, but it would also cripple the fuck out of us.
