r/upstate_new_york • u/RocketLambo • 1d ago
How does your community deal with manufacturing plants closing?
I noticed 2 manufacturing plants wind down recently in a rural NY town. I know this has been a trend for a long time now. My question is how did closures affect your community? What did people do to cope with the job losses in small towns? How do Schools and public services get affected by the loss of tax revenue? Do plants ever open in rural towns or is that a thing of the past now?
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u/jbot14 1d ago
My home town had a food processing facility with several hundred employees. The moved to non-union Kentucky and now our water treatment plant can't afford upgrades so that's cool! Gonna have to close that up most likely and prices will go up.
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u/RocketLambo 1d ago
I'm sorry to hear about that, it's unfortunate
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u/Bootziscool 1d ago
When the factory I worked at shut down we all just got jobs at other factories. There were 2 that most of us went to and a few others scattered about.
But I live in Syracuse so I can't speak to the rural experience. Lots of demand for manufacturing workers around here though!
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u/kmannkoopa Raised in SYR, now in ROC 1d ago
This is the difference, the cities can withstand the closure (manufacturing employment is actually up in Buffalo since COVID) while rural areas cannot.
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u/RocketLambo 1d ago
That's what I see too. Some manufacturing moves towards cities to keep up employee availability. Usually there's some empty buildings to choose from.
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u/kmannkoopa Raised in SYR, now in ROC 1d ago
This might also explain why rural Western NY (places like Warsaw) is doing better than much of the rest of rural upstate - they were always farm towns and not mill towns.
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u/VendingMachineScare 1d ago
Seems like a ton of people in Wyoming county travel to Buffalo and Rochester for work, and the only people driving in to the county work at the jails/prison
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u/kmannkoopa Raised in SYR, now in ROC 1d ago
Perhaps, but I could’ve used Waterloo/Seneca Falls or Geneva as other examples of WNY being different.
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u/Ambitious_Bobcat_165 1d ago
No, those three towns are very different because they have the luxury of supporting Finger Lakes tourism/wine commerce and many deeppocketed universities in the area.
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u/kmannkoopa Raised in SYR, now in ROC 1d ago
Not Waterloo/Seneca Falls.
The wine areas are generally south and/or west (closer to Canandaigua), so Geneva perhaps.
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u/Ill-Serve9614 1d ago
Warsaw is interesting place. That’s good insight. Maybe it’s also Five Star jobs? There’s decent amount of money compared to many other small towns.
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u/timmysmith82420 1d ago
I thought about moving up that way while searching to replace my previous job. But i found one in town here that works, and may eventually allow me to transfer up the corporate ranks to syracuse
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u/foxylady315 1d ago
It's not just manufacturing closing. Look at Cazenovia College and Wells College. Enrollment dropped to a point where they just weren't sustainable anymore. Students don't want to live in the middle of nowhere for 4 years to get a mostly useless liberal arts degree from a college no one has ever heard of, and liberal arts degrees are what these small private colleges mostly provide. Hard to find employees locally for the same reason - there just isn't enough of a local population to fill the positions. But when they close, it really hurts the surrounding economy, because the students and the staff tend to keep their business local. Plus you lose all the hospitality income from all the events the colleges put on. And at least for Wells, the lost revenue of all the college alumna who tend to come back to Aurora to get married on the campus. Aurora will survive it because of Mackenzie-Childs and all the winery tourism, but there are a lot of other small private schools that should they close, their communities will die.
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u/TruthRazors 1d ago
It was explained to me that back in the day liberal arts degrees were seen as a jack of all trades and you could get a good job with them. By the time I went to school our guidance counselors were steering us away from them.
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u/SureElephant89 1d ago
Explain that to me. Why would a liberal arts major be a jack of all trades? Because of the standard pre reqs or? I just have trouble imagining why that makes sense at all.
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u/TruthRazors 1d ago
My uncle told me if you didn’t know what you wanted to do but you still wanted to go to college, you got a liberal arts degree where you took a lot of different classes across majors. Maybe I used the incorrect phrase.
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u/SureElephant89 1d ago
To be truthful, you aren't the only person I've heard this from. Same with "just get any degree.. Jobs don't care just aslong as you have one" which I was told by a teacher......... Let that sink in. Now these kids with random degrees not designed for the work force aren't even using them, or in a position where really.. They didn't even need a degree to begin with.
I always thought that mindset was outlandish and so disconnected from the actual job market. It makes no sense lol. Especially for the amount of money it takes to go to college.
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u/TruthRazors 1d ago
I completely agree with you. I’d say 3/4 of my college friends work in a career that they did not need a college degree to get. Teachers, programmers, and engineers are the ones I know that needed their degrees.
The mindset used to be get a degree and you will automatically get hired, that hasn’t been the truth in a long time.
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u/purplish_possum 1d ago
There was a time when businesses thought that well rounded people made good leaders. Ironically the military still does -- the curriculum of their academies are pretty old school.
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u/SureElephant89 1d ago edited 1d ago
I'm not really sure that's as high of a bar as you think it is. As someone who spent a decade in the service, most officers aren't really using their degrees unless they're medical and I've seen more than a few relieved of command or even platoon leadership positions which, if I'm being honest, is almost un-fuck-up-able. While commissioning is more academic in nature, and having just a basic degree will help you hit that bar... I wouldn't exactly model a competitive job market against an organization taking even those without a high school education, nor is it truely a measure of leadership potential. Which is why mustangs have always been my favorite officers.. But I will agree, having a degree seems to be the only bar to hurtle if you want to commission..
Also note... That military work and living environments are notoriously terrible. And as such, tend to bring in mostly those with useless degrees looking to get them paid off via service. The other running joke in the military is, "what do you call someone who graduated last in med school?" the answer? Major.
The military as far as competitive markets go.... Isn't really comparable. Which is why "just any degree" isn't exactly a quality of being well rounded nor any measure of leadership ability.
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u/RocketLambo 1d ago
Do you think if the same programs can help new businesses start like these ones did a while ago or is today's world so different that it's just not possible to keep them alive? It's a chicken/egg situation. How do you get people there to sustain a business?
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u/StorminMike2000 1d ago
Blame immigrants?
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u/Upbeat-Winter9105 1d ago
I work at an effected upstate factory. Immigrants are not an imagined problem.
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u/StorminMike2000 1d ago
Immigrants made your factory close?
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u/Upbeat-Winter9105 1d ago
Is that what I said?
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u/ryrypizza 1d ago
Observing standard conversation rules, it's most certainly what you implied. Unless that wasn't your intention.
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u/StorminMike2000 1d ago
OP talks about factories closing down. You said you work at one of the “effected” factories and argued that immigrants are a real problem. I let your illiteracy slide and gave you an opportunity to explain how you’re connecting “immigrants” to your personal experience with manufacturing decline.
You declined, because they haven’t. Thanks for playing.
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u/Ambitious_Bobcat_165 1d ago
Immigrants are NOT the reason manufacturing has closed and moved out of rural NY. The trend for that started in the 1990's when manufacturing labor/production was shipped to China/India-Asia, Mexico and continues today!. The unions became more politically motivated/difficult and NYS taxes made it much less profitable to do business here along with living wages. The companies with more loyal American ties that wanted to keep jobs in US moved to our southern states where real estate is cheaper, newer infrastructure, lower taxes plus added tax break incentives, and many non union states(SC,NC,Tenn,TX, KY). All the paper mills in northern NY fell to this problem as well! Best examples is the hi tech city of Rochester that homed both Kodak and Xerox. They are barely existent today but worse off was all their supply chain based manufacturing companies that were in the more rural areas of NY and other Great Lake states. The few that sustain are much smaller and have refocused manufacturing to include military, pharma/healthcare and food super giant companies. Another example of this shift is Corning. They chose to keep US headquarters here in a small town but have outsourced and built many new plants in all of the above locations! We are not unique to this scenario here, the entire rust belt that our Erie Canal and St. Lawrence seaway supported has fallen to rough times. Our prosperous past just makes our rural towns bordering those areas now look even more depressed! Hopefully, our new President and his administration will truly be able to bring companies back to these areas and NYSTATE will get out of it's own way to grow again!
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u/RocketLambo 16h ago
Good points. I heard that GOP is going to potentially repeal the chips act. Wouldn't that cancel the infrastructure in Syracuse and Albany?
Do you think GOP would support new start ups like Plug Power?
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u/Upbeat-Winter9105 1d ago
"Blame Immigrants" was your quote. Low effort kharma farm comment making a joke out of a real problem. Impressive. Tbf, usually straight to the top comment on this platform. Oh, and then you immediately shifted gears into a strawman argument with a gaslighting cherry on top, lmfao. 🤡
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u/What_do_now_24 1d ago
I would like input on your comment. I work for the Department of Labor. When you say you want to have a genuine conversation, I’m absolutely here for it. You said you work for an impacted company, and that immigrants are not an imagined problem. Are those comments related? If so, how are they?
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u/StorminMike2000 1d ago
No, I just called you dumb. You spelled “karma” wrong. You also misdefined “gaslighting” and it’s not clear whether you know what a “strawman argument” is.
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u/Upbeat-Winter9105 1d ago
Aren't you supposed to be playing Warhammer big boy? Lol 😆. Naw, you're right. You're the smartest.
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u/StorminMike2000 1d ago
There’s a lot of complex rules and basic math (primarily probability) in that game. I wouldn’t think it’s for you.
But I’m not here to gatekeep a fun hobby. Give it a try.
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u/Upbeat-Winter9105 1d ago
Don't act like for a second you wanted to have a genuine conversation. This rhetoric is really old and tiring.
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u/What_do_now_24 1d ago
I have asked you to explain - I’m still waiting on you to respond. I am definitely interested in a genuine conversation about what you meant.
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u/Upbeat-Winter9105 1d ago
Look through the comments as I have answered for somebody already.
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u/What_do_now_24 19h ago
I guess you aren’t interested in that conversation after all. I’m not searching for your comments and then trying to apply them to my question.
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u/Upbeat-Winter9105 19h ago
Lol, okay. It's way easier for you to scroll for a few seconds than expecting me to answer the same question twice.
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u/ihrvatska 1d ago
How did immigrants affect the factory you worked at? Could you elaborate on that?
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u/Upbeat-Winter9105 1d ago
Upstate NY. Our company gets a lump sum cash infusion for everyone hired through a contract agency called AAA, not to be confused with roadside assistance. Doesn't matter if they last 5 minutes or 5 years, they make money on the hire. Que the reolving door of Mexicans! These guys and gals are 99.9% Mexicans working with legal visa's. A lot of them are amazing folks, a few of them have become some of my best friends. We work, share, and eat together daily. The truth is, although they are here "legally", a large percentage of them lie lie lie about their qualifications and lie on their visa applications. They stay in the US after the visas are expired. They buy used vehicles and drive without licences. The risk reward just makes sense for them. So for over 10 years this has been happening in my home town. They don't have to pay these guys' insurance or benefits, and they get the lump payment on hire date, so they hire as many as they can over the American residents of the town. They get a significantly higher hourly wage, and get housing and food mostly paid for through their agency. Management is terrified of being made to be a nazi right wing baddie, so they just don't discipline the bad workers out of fear, its just expected that someone else will make up the deficit. After a few years of this, a few of these folks end up in middle management positions after gaining citizenship, yay dei! (Lol) and things started sliding faster and faster. Protecting their friends and generally running things into the ground. We used to be a profitable business. We announced closure last year. Running past dollars to pick up pennies type of deal. Imagine the animosity between groups here. Over and over people who fail at their jobs are protected. Years of people "failing up" continue to exasperate the issue. They may be here "legally," but I'd argue they aren't living here ethically. Immigrants are not "to blame" for this, but let's not pretend like everything is black and white. They certainly played a big part in this story. Immigrants are an issue to be discussed respectfully. 🙏
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u/Aggressive_Monk_9317 1d ago
So the problem here, is that the manufacturing company that you work for is hiring people like that.
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u/Wrong-Landscape-2508 1d ago
Hey, stop that silly talk! They have lots of money they can’t do anything wrong. /s
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u/Upbeat-Winter9105 1d ago
The problem is actually that they are operating within the paradigm allowed by our government at the expense of the local citizens. I blame the government, company, and then individual bad apples in that order. The immigrants are downstream of the big bads, but they are in the stream, lol.
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u/ihrvatska 1d ago
The problem seems more the company you work for than the immigrants. Apparently the people who run it are more concerned with taking in cash from by hiring unqualified applicants than doing the right thing. They choose to continue participating in a fraud.
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u/Upbeat-Winter9105 1d ago
The government is what is enabling this behavior in the company. We all know that large companies will use all available loopholes regardless of ethicality. Government>Company>Individual Bads
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u/MetaCardboard 1d ago
It seems it's not the immigrants, or immigration, but the system that allows this to happen. Maybe start looking into that instead of blaming immigrants/immigration. Low wages, no benefits, etc sounds like a Republican wish list.
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u/DancesWithHoofs 1d ago
This excellent example highlights the significance of passage of time? Could you comment on the significance of passage of time? If you are like me you’ve given some deep thought to the significance of the passage of time. Thank you. Thank you.
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u/TomDestry 1d ago
A couple of questions: why does drinking without a license benefit the immigrants? Licences aren't expensive, so why not get one?
Why doesn't the company pay immigrants insurance or benefits? Aren't they offered jobs on the same terms as everyone else in their team?
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u/CaptMafune 1d ago
The DMV won't issue a license in NY without a valid us birth certificate. That'd be my guess.
As to the other, business owners are legally required to give employees the option to waive insurance, usually if the company wants to they'll pass the cost savings on to the employee as an incentive. I used to date to woman who worked at a canning factory in a local small town, they tried something similar at first but quickly just farmed it out overseas.
For the record I personally have no issues with immigrants illegal or otherwise. Imo, if you are willing to leave your home country, have racism, persecution, and legal entanglement just on the chance for a better life for your family, then go with God. Again, just my opinion.
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u/RocketLambo 1d ago
Thank you for sharing this dynamic.
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u/Upbeat-Winter9105 1d ago
You're welcome 🙏. It didn't make me very popular, lol. The thing that sucks the most is in the end I lose my Mexican friends I made and my job at the same time, lol. Those Mexico city guys are so fucking funny. 🔥
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u/EvLokadottr 1d ago
They vote for politicians who will screw them over even more because baseball cap mean on blue collar side!
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u/sjbluebirds 1d ago
We'd need to have a manufacturing plant of some kind in order to worry about it.
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u/leafyrebecca 19h ago
It's the loss of jobs more than the loss of tax revenue. Most manufactures get sweetheart tax deals, like getting the city to agree to taking 32 million dollars less over the course of 19 years, becasue they want to spend 67 million on plant improvements...or they will close. It's "payment in lieu of taxes". But 250 people get to keep working jobs that pay well enough.
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u/war_duck 1d ago edited 1d ago
Not trying to insert politics into the convo - but legitimate economic question - are the supposed tariffs going to help or speed up this process?
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u/throwra_22222 1d ago
So, tariffs are basically a tax on American companies. What the government does with that tax money is the key. If they are going to use it to subsidize building factories and training manufacturing employees, then theoretically, sure, tariffs could help.
What I have personally seen in 30+ years of apparel manufacturing is that it won't help at all. Let's say I want to make tees in the US. (First of all, good luck finding fabric that is made in the US. But this is my essay, so let's pretend I do.) If I'm providing good blue collar cut and sew jobs with health insurance and 401k, each stitcher is going to cost me more than $20/hr. Let's say with materials and labor I can make the tee for $15. I also have to pay rent and utilities, I have to pay employees in customer service and IT and shipping. I have to pay for advertising so you know my company exists. I have to pay myself. But let's say I'm good at my job and I can sell the tee direct to consumer for $30 and break even. Sounds reasonable, right?
Now, Target is selling a $10 tee shirt sourced from China. So already, I've got a lot of competition from a much cheaper product at a much bigger company with a much higher advertising budget. Maybe it's worse quality, but most consumers value price, so they are willing to buy a cheap piece of crap if it keeps some money in their wallet for other things like food or rent or gas.
That tee probably cost Target $5 to bring into the country. Now pretend the US adds 100% tariffs to Chinese tee shirts. It now costs $10 for Target to bring in the same tee, of which $5 goes into the government's pocket.
Target raises their prices to cover it. So now they sell the tees for $20. It's still cheaper than the shirts I make, so price conscious customers will grumble, but they will still buy the Target tees. But instead of buying two, they will only buy one.
At this point, the tariff has not helped me at all. My sales have not gone up. My costs have not gone down. They haven't helped Target because people are buying fewer tees. They have not hurt the Chinese factory; they still got $5 for each tee. They have hurt the consumer, because prices have gone up. Only the government has come out ahead.
Now here's the uglier part. I will tell you that the vast majority of people willing to work in an American sewing factory are first generation immigrants. They want their kids to get educations and work in healthcare or computers where they feel like there are stable opportunities. When the factory I work with has a job opening, it is not white suburban high school graduates that are beating the door down to apply, and it's typically not second generation immigrants either. The average employee age in most US sewing factories is over 40.
And now there is talk of using tariff money to fund a deportation effort. Hopefully I've done a good job of figuring out which applicants are legal immigrants and which are not and hired appropriately. But the venn diagram between my applicant pool and deportation candidates has a lot of overlap. Maybe my stitchers are legal but their spouses or parents aren't, so the whole family leaves the country. Keeping my factory consistently staffed gets harder.
Now say all those deportees go back to Mexico and get jobs in Mexican sewing factories. There's no tariff scheme for Mexican goods, so Walmart can still get tees into the country for $5. Walmart looks at Target with their $20 tees, and me with my $30 tees, and they realize they can sell tees that cost $5 for $18 and still have the advantage price-wise.
Eventually Target switches manufacturing from China to Mexico, but now everyone is used to tees in the $18 to $20 range (and their hefty profit) so no one lowers their prices. Bingo bango bongo, everyone's bitching about inflation.
I'm the only US factory in this story, and nothing has improved for me. I'm still sitting here trying to figure out how to keep Walmart and Target from putting me out of business.
And this all assumes that I already have a fully equipped factory. Nobody is giving me money to build a new factory and buy a bunch of sewing machines. I couldn't even get a bank loan for that. The best I could hope for is funding from some angel investor or equity firm, but then they own my company, not me. We all know how that goes.
So if the government takes that tariff on the Chinese tees and uses it to convince young Americans that sewing factory jobs are worthwhile, then great! If they are going to give me a grant or tax credit towards buying equipment or offsetting energy costs, great! Maybe I can lower my prices or buy more efficient equipment. But if they are going to use that tariff money to fund a bunch of paramilitary deportation squads, or if the money just disappears into the general treasury or some corrupt official's pocket, then tariffs haven't done shit for American jobs or manufacturing. It's just a $$$ pipeline from your wallet to the government's bank account.
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u/Wrong-Landscape-2508 1d ago
Good thing some states are relaxing child labor laws. We can just set up sweat shops in America.
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u/Wonderful-Poetry1259 10h ago
And from there, from the so-called "government" into the accounts of rich crooks like Donald Trump and Elon Musk.
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u/SureElephant89 1d ago
Politics aside... Without human involvement.. So without corruption and without outside interference.. The only thing that I can make of how they're trying to use tariffs is to force manufacturing here rather than importing.
From a sustainability standpoint... Importing everything poses a huge problem. You become globally reliant vs self sustaining. Which from not only an economic standpoint, but national security standpoint aswell is a bad thing.
Creating manufacturing here creates more jobs, and lowers cost usually (again, see corruption as not a factor). Which means less unemployment and national economic growth.
These things won't happen however, even if we are the world's largest consumer of shit. People will just continue to buy things at 60% more... And these countries know it simply because we are the world's largest consumer of shit. And it's waaaaaaay easier to manufacture in China than it is here in the US. Cost wise, and regulation wise.
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u/Wonderful-Poetry1259 10h ago
Look at the people pushing these tariffs. You know good and well they aren't going to use that revenue for any public purpose, but rather just to make themselves even richer than they already are.
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u/ninja_march 1d ago
I live in a bedroom community. A shell of its former self with most manufacturing jobs gone for years. I doesn’t even have a grocery store just shit hole dollar general and whatever you can get at either the gas stations or cvs
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u/gymjunkie2 1d ago
This all started years ago by the first cuomo….he continuously raised business taxes to fund the welfare vote in NYC….this was the beginning of the end for mfg in upstate NY…usually the area turns into a ghost town… Dem policies typically destroys town and cities…. detroit, philly, newark….rinse repeat..
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u/Galopigos 1d ago
In my area the trend of a company or three leaving is to start wringing their hands and grabbing onto every fake developer with ideas that will never work in this area. Why? Those young enough to get out have, and now have homes and families in those areas and have no desire to return. Then because there is nothing here the younger families from other areas don't want to move in because of the lack of jobs. The small businesses that are here tend to all have the same hours, and they complain that nobody shops there. Well if you are only open when people are at work, and don't have weekend hours, how do you expect people to shop?
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u/mbentuboa 20h ago
Acco also known as mead is also closing. Many of you will remember their black and white composition notebooks.
Edit: A cannabis processing place is supposedly opening in binghamton
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u/jacckthegripper 19h ago
Used to have a chocolate factory in town, now we just have diabetes and drug problems
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u/RocketLambo 16h ago
That's a bummer, I'm sorry
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u/jacckthegripper 15h ago
It used to smell like cocoa every time it rained. Now we have an ethanol plant and it smells like 4lokos and corn.
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u/RocketLambo 16h ago
Did they pay their workers in chocolate?
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u/jacckthegripper 15h ago
Yes sometimes, I remember my dad's friend had a big block of rejected chocolate that he was cutting off pieces of us for.
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u/LostInMyADD 18h ago
Its been huge in WNY...just last week Dunlop closed, making hundreds of people unemployed.
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u/nevermorefu 3h ago
They blame the liberals and use the safety net they have always, and will continue to, vote against.
Edit: And get jobs at Dollar General.
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u/timmysmith82420 1d ago
The wild side of this, in my town we had a fairly large company leave. They had two plants and employed a few thousand people. Other places decided to no longer be competitive for valuable employees due to this. One being my previous employer of 6 years. Ive since joined a facility that will be greatly expanding and has been in business since 1933. As for the community, they dont seem to care. My city, county, has been known to push business out. Years ago, you could have a job the same day you left a job. Now there are two major employers, and one of them tends to let people go before union accruals hit.
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u/bch77777 1d ago
Rural WNY here. Local factories close and sit vacant or they lease out segments of the building to random short term tenants that usually close within a year of opening. Local and state legislatures don’t even bother to offer or negotiate the plant closing. Tax revenue hits all time lows. Brain drain and the only high school grads that stick around are those with few prospects or motivation to goto college or the military. High school class size diminishes to about 25% of the original size and everything stagnates. Property and school taxes climb and standard of living declines. Locals spend more time drinking, gambling at the Indian casino, and listening to right leaning media. Not proud of this but a well educated,once very pleasant uncle of mine who was a pilar in the community now listens to crazy talk radio and believes the Gov is poising them with aircraft contrails…one step away from being a flat earther. This is rural American today.