Senator Ron Johnson tore a few pages out of the liberal playbook, claiming that re-shoring key industries like semiconductors and rare earth minerals is essential—but argues that bringing back labor-intensive manufacturing isn’t realistic, citing a so-called shortage of American workers.
On Wednesday, he appeared on Fox Business Network’s “The Bottom Line” and argued that re-shoring jobs critical to American national security and high value such as “high-end semiconductors, pharmaceutical precursors, the active pharmaceutical ingredients, rare earth minerals” isn’t critical to bring back “high labor content products, that’s gone. And, quite honestly, we don’t have the workers to produce high labor content products.”
Johnson declared that he wants “free and fair reciprocal trade” to be the ultimate outcome of the tariff war and noted that it’s important to have a strategy to re-shore jobs that are critical to our national security.
He said, “I don’t think it’s important to be bringing back high labor content products, that’s gone. And, quite honestly, we don’t have the workers to produce high labor content products. So, we should be producing high-value-added content. So, you want to have a smart strategy for re-shoring the critical products, things like high-end semiconductors, pharmaceutical precursors, the active pharmaceutical ingredients, rare earth minerals, there’s a list of things that we need to concentrate on that we have to re-shore.”