Think hard. Where are you hearing all this?

Who uses the catch phrase "shipping our jobs overseas?" And why? What are their solutions?

Has anyone thought through the process of manufacturing cheap consumer items here? How it would be set up? How it would work? I have. Years ago. So have many others. Try it. Go through the concept and basic numbers of opening a factory in Nebraska that makes an electric fan you can buy for fifteen dollars.

America's Golden Age of Labor was back when the Third World was slogging behind cows for a living, and the rest of the First World had been blasted to shit by a world war. How long did we think we could pay a man huge wages and endless benefits for turning a bolt on an assembly line when there were billions of people out there who could do the same job for much less?

Think about your hypothetical fan factory. Try the tariff trick, and watch what happens to the trade balance when Europe decides to buy Chinese fans instead. Try all the tricks.

Businesses didn't "happily" ship jobs overseas. The ones that refused to do so simply folded up while other businesses did it and survived, or often, businesses that were actually founded overseas started building the products instead.

Go to the BLS site here. Click on the boxes about manufacturing employment (some go all the way back to 1939, others only back to 2006 for some reason.) What do you see? Check the graph option. How does the manufacturing graph compare to overall non-farm employment since 1940?

Here's a paper I found a while back on the subject which also has a lot of the employment graphs and numbers at the end.