zlacker

> people like that would have to be convinced that mass-producing electric cars was more important than preserving local forests

As though there isn’t a glut of underutilized parking lots littering literally every American metro where the local forests were bulldozed decades ago

> paying workers prevailing wage

Subsidies are there to pay for wages and for automation to be less reliant on labor costs, of which China automates waaaay more than the USA does

> running a low government deficit

Industrial subsidies have the potential to pay back far more than the government puts in, and would be much smaller in size than other boondoggles the US government pays for

Honestly I think this is all just excuses and China just took advantage of the incompetence of our leadership to leapfrog us. Since when did Americans not want to be #1?

>>presen+(OP)
The average American voter likes parking lot and starts foaming at the mouth when talking about reducing minimums.

The other dirty secret is that government debt is actually very high in China and it’s a bit of a problem. Local and provincial governments in China have very little taxing power and so have been financing via opaque off-balance-sheet shell companies, and the exact number is not known but estimated at $8T. And now local government services are cutting back or even collapsing since the Chinese property market that was the collateral for a lot of this debt is in dire straits. https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Markets/China-debt-crunch/C...

>>bobthe+081
Yeah, therein lies the real problem, America doesn’t do it mostly because those with political influence don’t want to; everything else is face-saving excuses/Americans thinking they’re morally and culturally superior to everyone else despite getting our asses handed to us.

But I’m optimistic that if the federal government could wrest control away from (selfish) local governments and set a national agenda people can get behind, progress will happen. The CHIPS act demonstrated some amount of this, but it can go much farther, both into other industrial verticals but also in reversing dumb local NIMBY policies.

The USA can do this in a more fiscally responsible way than China did if they can get corruption under control. Anyway if there’s anything the USA has a lot of, it’s money.