Will American manufacturing ever "come back"?

Adjusting our tax structure for corporations for one.
Finding people who are willing to work for less than what most Americans are willing to work for.

I think so. Especially with 3D printing and automation. As labor becomes a smaller percent of the overall cost to produce something due to automation, then transportation costs will become a much bigger slice of the COGS (cost of good sold) pie. It’s much more affordable then to pay a small workforce that is highly productive due to automation than to ship stuff around the globe and back to save a few bucks per hour from a small labor pool also using automation.

Probably not…or at least it won’t have the impact it did in the mid 20th century. In those days, our technology had advanced in this country to a point where we were world leaders. Our entire economy was based on our manufacturing. However, fast forward to today and things are different. Automation has taken over most of the jobs and it was the manufacturing jobs that made it so important to our economy. We could get just as many factories as we did in those days, but it won’t provide the same number of jobs that existed at that time and they wouldn’t pay the wage value that was being given in those days. In the 50’s and 60’s, if you got a manufacturing job you could support a family on the one wage. That is a rarity in today’s world. And in a manufacturing world, we would have to compete with nations that pay pennies on the dollar for what we would have to pay for the workers.
So I think if you wanted it to come back in this country as it was in the mid 20th century, you would have to have some drastic world changing event that stopped trade around the world and killed automation so that we had manufacturing for our own country initially. Then we would have to look at making sure the quality was well over that of other nations before we started trading again.

I have no idea. But some if not most of it should be brought back. And make it work.

As to how, who really knows?

American political leadership lacks the right vision and worse, seems incapable of executing the right vision even if it appears from out of nowhere and landed on its lap.

We have to ask ourselves why it’s leaving in the first place….because it’s cheaper to manufacture stuff over seas.