There are so many reasons manufacturing in US is declining.
It used to be the US was one of the few places you could set up a factory without it getting bombed or confiscated. It then had a monopoly on manufacturing and the rest of the world competed to produce commodities to trade for the finished products. With protracted peacetime came establishment of factories elsewhere and competition for manufacturing without a corresponding increase in commodity production. So now an American worker has to compete with a Chinese or Hindu worker, and if he's more expensive, he'll lose and the Asian will win.
An American worker is more expensive than his Chinese counterpart at any exchange rate because of the prices of commodities they consume. A worker can't work without a car in most US cities, but in China he sure can. Beside commutes, housing is expensive (for whatever reasons). Then you have healthcare costs that are globally superlative and that the employer has to pay for, and taxes that are by no means small.
Then you have the legal system, which themselves are a huge burden. Court awards and consequently settlements are very large by global standards. This also costs a business more than money; it costs it time and requires the bureaucratic complexity to deal effectively with liability. Then there's Sarbanes-Oxley and lobbying. On top of that there's IP law: if part of a product is patented in the US, that product can't be imported by foreign companies, but it can be sold outside the country. But an American company can't sell it in US or export it. And on and on.
Under such conditions, who would want to build a factory here?
It used to be the US was one of the few places you could set up a factory without it getting bombed or confiscated. It then had a monopoly on manufacturing and the rest of the world competed to produce commodities to trade for the finished products. With protracted peacetime came establishment of factories elsewhere and competition for manufacturing without a corresponding increase in commodity production. So now an American worker has to compete with a Chinese or Hindu worker, and if he's more expensive, he'll lose and the Asian will win.
An American worker is more expensive than his Chinese counterpart at any exchange rate because of the prices of commodities they consume. A worker can't work without a car in most US cities, but in China he sure can. Beside commutes, housing is expensive (for whatever reasons). Then you have healthcare costs that are globally superlative and that the employer has to pay for, and taxes that are by no means small.
Then you have the legal system, which themselves are a huge burden. Court awards and consequently settlements are very large by global standards. This also costs a business more than money; it costs it time and requires the bureaucratic complexity to deal effectively with liability. Then there's Sarbanes-Oxley and lobbying. On top of that there's IP law: if part of a product is patented in the US, that product can't be imported by foreign companies, but it can be sold outside the country. But an American company can't sell it in US or export it. And on and on.
Under such conditions, who would want to build a factory here?