Some analysts, notably Andre Martyanov, describe how the US has lost strategic thinking and long-range planning in the military domain. The loss of the US ability to mine and refine rare earths is a good example of absence of strategic thinking in the supply chain.

U.S. manufacturing output is almost at an all time high. At its peak in 2007, it was only 5% higher than today and the current trend is upward.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OUTMS

We did lose manufacturing jobs, but not because we "sold" them, it's because productivity has increased so much. This happens to all mature economies, where services and knowledge work become a larger percent of GDP as productivity, education, and living standards increase.

The combination of tax policy disincentivizing capital investment, and regulatory policy making physical things hard to do has shifting increasing amounts of investment into finance, software, and services (and away from resource extraction, processing, and manufacturing).

Software dev/design/architecture/... has been going the same way for 20 years.

We lost our industrial commons.

Manufacturing output in US is way higher than 40 years ago.

Manufacturing jobs are killed by automation. Robots replaced people in plants.

This is happening in Europe and Asia too.

People "dreaming" or cushy well paid union jobs assembling stuff are talking nonsense nostalgia.

>The whole economy for 40-ish years now been built on finance engineering away labors grip on anything in the US

Because when these plants and facilities come up for reinvestment the rules and laws have inevitably made a piecemeal sell out the only financially viable move.

The environmentalists point at the financiers. The financiers point at the environmentalists. It's like the two party system.

Worse, there was always some degree of unwritten understanding between government and big business. Like if big business built out a factory they would expect to use it for 50-100yr with refreshes every 30 or so. When the government started crapping on that sort of thing to the degree that various investments became wholly non-viable it became risky to make those investments, less of them, less to spread any risk over, more expensive, it's a spiral. And so if you can't be sure your facility will be allowed to be viable in the long term you've gotta milk what you can each quarter.

Once you make it hard to build something, the incentives to build the thing goes away. Can you imaging trying to build a factory in California in 2026? Or 2006? The NIMBYs can barely stand building an ice cream store.