Thanks, Joe Biden! The Wall Street Journal is reporting that U.S. companies are moving nearly 350,000 overseas jobs back to the United States this year—a new record—as companies become a wee bit more wary about chasing cheap labor overseas and look to move infrastructure a bit closer to home. Again: Thanks, Joe Biden!

I'm kidding, mostly. The ability of presidents to shift global economic patterns is marginal at best, and business trends 18 months into a presidency may still likely be the result of corporate decisions made even earlier. There's really only one way for a U.S. president to dramatically reconfigure worldwide capitalism in a short period of time, and that's to screw something up to near-apocalyptic levels. To so botch world markets that they're on the brink of collapse. So what we really should be saying here is: Thanks, Donald Trump!

There's nothing like new trade wars followed by a raging economy-crashing pandemic to restructure world supply chains. Nothing like not knowing whether your major product lines are going to become ground zero for a new tit-for-tat battle dreamed up between tee and hole. And while we can't blame Donald Trump for most of the world's response to COVID-19, we can blame him for turning the disease from short-term crisis to million-death long-term crisis through the mighty power of just not giving a damn. We also can't entirely blame him for Texas Gov. Greg Abbott's recent demonstrations showing that even if your factories in Mexico are humming along without issue, it still doesn't help you if a racist twit looking to boost xenophobic panics for political purposes shuts down the border crossings, leaving your parts stranded on the wrong side.

As Rupert Murdoch's business rag points out, considerably less churlishly than I just did, there are several factors at work here in the mass "reshoring" of offshored jobs. The biggest is likely the chaos of pandemic supply lines, a problem that has become existential for U.S. companies relying on computer chips and other parts essential for their products. Automobile manufacturers, appliance manufacturers, and others have been constrained in their ability to actually assemble finished products as pandemic shutdowns in Asia's major technology hubs have caused just-in-time part deliveries to dry up for weeks or months at a time. The resulting shipping chaos has put major U.S. ports in gridlock, fouling even deliveries of stuff that isn't in short supply.

All of a sudden, just-in-time delivery schemes and globe-spanning supply lines that outsource every individual component part to the lowest bidder are coming back to bite the corporate masters that championed them as the Wave Of Every Possible Future. Companies that can, then, are taking a serious look at shrinking the supply lines for vital parts. That's a trend that's likely going to escalate after the Russian invasion of Ukraine demonstrated that Europe, too, is not as stable a manufacturing environment as it was even two years ago. Shipping costs are going up, energy costs are going up, and political instability is going up.

All of that is bad news for any supply chain with more than two links. And the fragility of such supply lines has been known for a Very Long Damn Time, but corporate titans (see: Boeing) have previously been indifferent to the risks because accounting for theoretical risks doesn't net you an executive bonus. Cutting manufacturing costs by 2%, however, very much does.

Other factors at play also suggest "onshoring" is going to strengthen in the next few years. The Biden-signed CHIPS Act gives big tax breaks to companies building high-tech manufacturing plants in the United States, and the Inflation Reduction Act—still a terrible name, by the way—greatly prioritizes the manufacturing of next-generation energy solutions.

Companies also are having to respond to consumer frustration over their carbon footprints, prodding them into reducing the distances parts need to be shipped. It's not just that shipping has become more unreliable and expensive, with new pandemic externalities attached. Those shipping networks are clearly going to be changing in a climate-emergency world, and nobody's quite sure how that's going to fall out.

The Journal also notes that just because companies are bringing those jobs back, that doesn't mean they want to, ahem, give them to American workers without a fight. Firms are also spending big to automate production lines and reduce jobs. Let's wait on being too churlish about that one; automation has been forever blamed for ending well-paying but monotonous jobs, but past futures have always produced new workforces alongside the losses.

In the end, of course, all jobs will be automated except for service jobs. All deliveries, all manufacturing, everything except sales jobs and cafe workers. That'll be the short-term future: An economic transition that results in all Americans owning and operating their own cafes, hosting all the people who own and operate different cafes.

Longer-term than that isn't really known yet. Let's work out how to keep the atmosphere from cooking us all alive and then come back to that one. The short-term takeaway: Jobs are coming back, and they're better jobs than what left. Finally, a shred of good news.

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