Technology

Like many industry observers accurately stated that the shortages will subside long before any of the CHIPS spending could even possibly make a difference.

If you consider advanced microprocessors a strategic asset, the immediate short-term pinch in supply isn't the problem. Its the long-term overseas outsourcing of production to regions we consider at high risk of foreign conflicts (Taiwan and South Korea). Simply moving finished chips across the Pacific Ocean is its own strategic problem.

One could easily argue that our steadily ratcheted hostilities toward China, Russia, and Iran is the actual root cause of our problems. And we'd do well to in-source production for supply flow reasons, but our real panacea might be to simply stop fucking around at the periphery of a rival imperial power.

But if you consider the Russian, Chinese, and Iranian peoples as inherently adversarial to the American way of life (on account of them hating us for our freedoms), then relying on Samsung and TMSC as your primary supply of chipsets seems imprudent.

Of course, if you wanted to give the economy any hope for viable electronics while also massively screwing over imports, this would have been your shot. So it seems strategically at odds with the whole “make domestic manufucating happen” rhetoric.

A big central problem of the US chips strategy is that we're not building capacity, we're building investment incentives. The goal is to make local manufacturing profitable rather than productive. But that's at the root of the ideological divide between American and the BRICS we're positioning ourselves in opposition to.

We wouldn't be threatening war with these countries if we had a strong global socio-economic consensus.