Where do you buy your stuff - China or the Americas?

[J N Winkler]

Since the average person is going to vote with their wallet and not by the production process, it would be really hard to bring mass-scale manufacturing back to the states.

Some of this has to do with the market for lemons.  Consumers will shop by price if there is no reliable signal of quality.  If there is, however, the rational consumer will choose the option that maximizes his or her utility, even if this means paying more initially.  This is how Saturn was able to use the S-Series cars (entirely US-built out of US-sourced parts) to build market share in the 1990's (unfortunately, largely at the expense of other US automakers):  the cars early on acquired such a solid reputation for reliability that dealer inventories were typically quite low in spite of the rather high prices and no-haggling policy.

Right now it is really comfortable to buy American without worrying about quality, with even Consumer Reports describing the current-generation Chevy Malibu as a worthy competitor to the Toyota Camry.  It will get more difficult to stick to a buy-American policy if the quality gap ever re-opens in the US manufacturers' disfavor.  As a person who has owned both American and Japanese cars, I think the folks on here who wax nostalgic about Detroit iron are entirely too ready to forget that US cars came out of the factory with dirt in the paint until quite recently, and had other quality problems that were so numerous and so serious that consumers were willing to put up with the real disadvantages of buying Japanese, such as committing to an expensive timing belt replacement every 60,000 miles.

[vdeane]

This is why most countries tax based on money earned in the country instead of by citizenship.  As far as I know, the US is the only country to tax by citizenship.

Country of citizenship matters for personal income tax--i.e., tax on income earned by a physical person, rather than a juridical person such as a corporation.  Since the US requires its citizens to pay taxes on all income regardless of where it is earned, US citizens by default have double tax liability on income earned overseas.  Eliminating this double-charging is one reason the US has bilateral tax treaties with a number of countries.

I'm pretty sure most countries don't do that.  If someone is living out of the country, they pay no income tax to their home country - unless their home country is the US (it's also worth nothing that we're the only country that allows expats to vote).