> One of the goals of the Heritage Foundation is a weak dollar. They believe they can bring manufacturing back to the US this way.

Only cheap labor can bring manufacturing back to the US. Are Americans willing to work in factories for the same wages as the Chinese and Indians? I don't see it happening.

They are right on that. What they are wrong is when they decided that is a good thing.

Not every kind of "bringing manufacturing back" brings the same kind of wealth and quality of life.

> I don't think they're right.

it's worse then them not being right

the only way a weak dollar would majorly matter for bringing back production is iff production is cheap

so a 20% weaker dollar must not come with 20% higher "dollar" prices (living cost, salary). You need to decrees living cost and dollar value in lock step (i.e. weaker dollar without inflation!). But this seem impossible IMHO. And if we look at what happened, if anything, it went the other way.

And if you try to force it anyway you are basically saying "we effectively disown most money of most US citizens" and use that to try to attack manufacturing, while likely not relevantly affecting the wealthiest.

That is just plain evil.

And not very surprising if you consider that many "manufacturing countries" have pretty horrifying working conditions often not "that" far apart from slavery.

Worse this likely wouldn't work either, because iff your countries population doesn't have the money to buy stuff anymore, and investments are risky, why would you even bother to produce there? To then export to countries where investments into production lines are more reliable? Like how is that supposed to work?

Naturally things can be different if we only speak about high-tech / high-end manufacturing. But the current steps do not seem promising to archive that either:

1) this kind of manufacturing lines need even higher investments, i.e. act even more allergic wrt. trade instability and uncertainty

2) Trump has brought some high tech manufacturing into the US with a mixture of force and bribes/subsidization. But honestly it looks a lot of it is mostly hollow promises, not making a relevant difference long term.

3) More then one case where companies did agree had a lot of big problems. One of the biggest issue being, that missing in depth know-how requires temp. importing people which can make sure things work while teaching that know how (if you want things to get going fast. If you go slow you can send your people to other countries to learn.). But a destroyed visa system makes this a high risk for anyone coming to the US and did lead to more then one person like that being detained and deported by ICE. The other risk is if this people don't teach enough you become dependent on foreign workers in a strange way for a while.

Either way nothing in the current politics seems to be actually well thought through ways to archive (relevantly) more manufacturing in the US long term. But everything seems to be designed to destroy the wealth of the majority of US citizens.

The bigger question is, why is that even the primary goal?