>manufacturing is dying across the West.

Died a long time ago and went to hell in handbasket :(

>If your inputs (labor) are more expensive you can't compete

Houston had always been less expensive than Detroit, LA, Chicago, New England and just about anywhere else in the US for this kind of thing, but it was really the cheapness of the foreign labor that made it irresistible to Wall Street. It had always been that way but didn't really matter until after the value of the dollar had been dropped so low that they had to pay workers what amounted to exorbitant sums while the labor still ended up with less discretionary cash, and that was at the lower-value dollar.

You should have seen Houston in 1979 when the Nixon Recession was raging worse than ever, long after he had sailed into the sunset. It was no Pittsburgh[0] but there were still two steel mills and of course one of them was US Steel where they had expanded to the industrial suburb of Baytown Texas specifically because the labor was cheaper than up north.

Wall Street took that differential to the bank and lit their cigars with $100 bills :\

Eventually led to champagne and caviar with each round of layoffs.

Nixon "opened up" China, but Reagan was not yet here to put the nail in the coffin.

I agree it would take a whole lot more unfair advantages just to get closer to a level playing field.

The way to real manufacturing growth is to build much higher-value-added products per worker.

The difficult problem to overcome is that most of the low-cost raw materials have been coming from China for so long, and the ideal thing would have been coming from more than one place the whole time.

But no, the absolute cheapest must be sought.

Mexico could have been ready by now but they would have had to do it on their own in an organized way like China and India so it pales by comparison, especially high tech in spite of all the brilliant Mexican engineers and innovators.

Lower-cost labor in India might be abundant enough but it'll take a while before the supply chain can compare to what China has built with all the dollars they have had in their hands for so long.

[0] Made up for it with oil, as heavy industry goes.