When I was young, I knew that The Nylon Curtain by Billy Joel was some great music. It would be many years later that I understood that the concept and lyrics were also brilliant. But why am I talking about 40 year old music?
Billy Joel sings in this song about how they’re shutting the factories down. That did happen. But it was over 40 years ago. The workers are gone: retired, deceased, moved on to other jobs. Their kids — and their grandkids — don’t have the same skillset even if they wanted to work in those factories. The equipment in those factories? Sold for scrap decades ago. The land? Redeveloped.
If you wanted to build factories to build things here in the United States and avoid tariffs as the President has suggested, you’d face some obstacles. Like the NIMBY crowd that doesn’t want a factory in their town. Like EPA regulations that still mean it’s more expensive to build a factory here — and that’s not actually a bad thing. Training new workers. And realistically most of the work that they would have done by hand in Billy Joel’s Allentown would now in a new modern factory be done by robots. At least there’s jobs for robot maintenance technicians!
It would take at least 5-10 years to get it running. That’s a minimum of one President from now, possibly two or even three. Will the same rules still apply? Your guess is as good as mine.
Tariffs aren’t bringing jobs to the United States. They’re only bringing economic…. Pressure.