Trump needs to restore
steel and aluminum production in the US to satisfy DOD requirements. Trump has
proposed tariffs on steel and aluminum, but this would discourage our favorite
foreign car manufacturers from putting more assembly plants in the US, because
the tariff would destroy their ability to buy cheap steel from low wage
countries and that would make them uncompetitive. The endgame for Trump is to
reduce tariff gouging by other countries and increase US manufacturing. But the
steel and aluminum requirements could be an opportunity.
The best way to reduce
the cost of producing steel and aluminum in the US is to automate the processes
and reduce labor costs to be able to compete with low wage countries who
produce steel and aluminum using labor intensive processes.
If automated processes
can be used to unload iron ore and transferred to blast furnaces and molten
steel can be automatically poured and moved on to cool and then be processed
and stacked automatically, this plant could be operated by very few
technicians. It would require capital to design and build the tools, but
production costs should be lower than more labor intensive methods.
Innovation requires
thinking out of the box and reinventing manufacturing processes requires an
inventor who is high energy and driven to complete the process reinvention.
This inventor needs to be a leader who works 24/7 and will need a team of work
animals to help. It never works in a
large bloated bureaucracy.
There are many examples
in history about inventers and innovators like Edison, Tesla, Rockefeller,
Morgan, Carnegie, Ford, Oppenheimer Einstein and others. They were “hands-on”,
high energy, driven and enjoying it.
Government has always
had the right to make what it needs. Trump needs to get the US made steel and
aluminum the DOD needs and should fund US manufacturers to reinvent the
processes to be able to reduce costs and become competitive with low wage
countries.
Steel production in
the US would be most efficient if the manufacturing plants were close to the
mining operations that extract iron and aluminum ore.
Iron mining in the United
States produced 42.5 million metric tons of iron ore in 2015, worth US$3.8 billion.Iron ore was the third-highest-value metal mined in the United States, after gold and
copper. Iron ore was
mined from nine active mines and
three reclamation operations in Michigan, Minnesota, and Utah.
Aluminum production
requires bauxite. The United States has small amounts of bauxite
ore located in Arkansas, Alabama and Georgia. However, very little mining
is done in the United States today. Australia, China, and Brazil are the
largest producers of bauxite.
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody
GA Tea Party Leader
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