America Still Makes Stuff!

Free trade did not obliterate manufacturing.

Andrew Heaton | 4.3.2026 11:00 AM

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Why does everybody think America doesn't make stuff anymore? Where is this expressly disprovable idea dribbling in from?

Writer/Producer: Andrew Heaton
Producer: John Carter
Producer: Austin Bragg
Producer: Meredith Bragg

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Comedy Manufacturing Free Trade Protectionism Tariffs NAFTA Imports Labor Market Economy Jobs

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Sometimes a Great Notion 3 hours ago

But good paying Union jobs whose dues fund the Democrats' campaigns, we need those or something...

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Rick James 3 hours ago

Unfortunately, this is one of those topics where everything... and I mean everything requires a barrage of definitions. "Export" "manufacture" "goods" "factory" all can have cranky definitions that allow a statistician to play with the numbers until it begins to look however you want it.

For instance, the video mentions we export high-end goods like computers and semi-conductors.

Most of the U.S. companies making semi-conductors make them in Taiwan and South Korea.

The company I work for is a multi-billion dollar manufacturer. We make most everything in China and Mexico (with a few exceptions for Finland, Canada and the UK (still overseas) but we're considered an 'exporter' because the assembled product is shipped globally with the proceeds going into American stockholders' pockets. So when you see a U.S. Manufacturing Company Index, my company shows up in there, which would give someone the impression that everywhere my company is in the US, there's a row of smoke-stack buildings with thousands of workers employed, carrying their lunch boxes and punching a time card... not so. There's a bunch of suits (and some white collar IT people-- ME!) and a shrinking number of engineers (also being outsourced to India) designing the products, the factories and manufacturing is all done overseas, and then it's shipped back to North American Warehouses where we export it from here.

While the video is being funny, it suggests that no one misses these old factories where you died of black lung disease. Our factories overseas in China are high tech, clean affairs for manufacturing electronics and other various items.

I tried but couldn't find the old article where Nick Gillespie admits that the number of factory jobs in the US had fallen dramatically and then quipped that no one missed them because no one wants to work in a factory. Yeah, that got some pushback in the comments, and rightly so.

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1. Zeb 3 hours ago
  
  That's a fair point. The numbers are suspect, and people will game them.
  But it's also true that we do make lots of stuff in the US. Yeah, big complex stuff with electronics will have lots of imported components. But even here in dinky NH, I can show you 100 factories, foundries, machine shops and fabricators making parts for all kinds of things within a hour drive of where I'm sitting.
  
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2. mad.casual 1 hour ago
  
  Yeah, that got some pushback in the comments, and rightly so.
  
  There's also the underlying, insanely out-of-touch, post-modern, coastal progressivism of it all too.
  
  Sorry your dad and his dad died young working the coal mines for 3 generations so that your publicly-educated, blue-haired daughter (they/them) could girlboss her way to the top of the HR department by the time she's 50 and make it on her own without no man... but, your industry is "going away". If you really wanted to get ahead or are feeling left behind you should've learned to code, moved to the city, and maybe gotten public sector a job, or two, with public pension, or two. Also, you might owe reparations to Ibrahim X Kendi, Claudine Gay, and Ketanji Brown Jackson for the slaves your ancestors working the Pennsylvania coal mines 3-4 generations ago didn't own.
  
  Even with the AI data center boom: Foxconn gets a quid-pro-quo deal to bring jobs to Pleasant Prairie and Trump is just this side of Kruschev for not issuing an EO to stop the deal, but millions of acres of wind farms and data centers and those rubes from parts unknown need to just get over their petty, local municipal concerns about things like water and electricity.
  
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JFree 1 hour ago

We export very little value in goods where the value is derived from manufacturing and where that value benefits regular people. For manufacturing, exports are the measure of whether a good is produced competitively.

For the US, the major countries, by far - multiples more than China, that we export to are Mexico and Canada. Those two account for $780 billion in exports but very little of that is arm's length exports. Those are INTERNAL transfers of intermediate goods within a single manufacturing entity where pricing is arbitrary and based more on tax rates than anything real. The whole point of that trade is for the manufacturing value chain to occur in Canada and Mexico and for those final goods to be imported into the US with no tariffs/charges. IOW - these are merely ways of ensuring that multinationals can consider all three countries a single manufacturing entity - where the value in the US goes to shareholders/CEO's (and maybe design people). not blue collar workers.

Outside that - the manufactured goods exports are: aircraft/military, refined oil/gas, pharma, and semi/computers. Only aircraft/military is the standard old-fashioned manufactured exports model. The others are odd-ducks that do not benefit blue collar jobs in manufacturing.

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1. SCOTUS gave JeffSarc a big sad 16 minutes ago
  
  You should stick to raving about exterminating the Jews.
  
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