re: China: "If War is what the U.S. wants, be it a tariff/trade war, or any other type of War

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I bet all of that stuff can easily be made here.

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I'm not in manufacturing so i don't know how long it takes to build all the factories and install and calibrate all the machinery necessary to do that, but I feel safe with the answer, "Not in the short term it can't."

Not to mention, I don't know you saw it upthread, but it's not just medical supplies and equipment we get from China. We also get the factory machinery to do things like make medical equipment from China.

So the factories to make the actual medical equipment would literally have to wait on us to build and tool and die factories to make the factory equipment necessary to make the medical equipment.

Not only that, but we also import heavy construction equipment like excavators and wheel loaders from China.

So long term we'd have to start making those too if we wanted to all of a sudden build a bunch of factories to make all of this stuff that China currently makes.

So that's MORE factories we'd have to make before we could make the construction equipment so that we could build the factories to make the factory equipment so that we could build and equip the factories to make the medical equipment.

And FINALLY, even if we spent 10 years doing all of that, we'd never be able to do it for anywhere near the cost that they do.

The average Chinese factory worker makes around $6.75 an hour.

The average American factory worker makes around $17 an hour.

So even if we did all of that we'd be paying between 1 1/2 and 2 times what we pay for that stuff now.

Much better to just pay the tariffs Trump is imposing on the American people and keep importing Chinese stuff if those are the only choices.

Populists seemingly never stop to do the math.