Use the Total Cost of Ownership Estimator (TCO) to make a strong case when selling against offshore competitors! Sixty percent of companies make sourcing decisions based on rudimentary metrics, such as wage rate, ex-works price or landed cost, often resulting in a 15 to 30 percent understatement of actual offshoring costs.

In my December column, I discussed how total cost of ownership (TCO) can reveal the hidden costs of offshoring and determine the real profit and loss impact of reshoring and offshoring.

On the campaign trail, President Donald Trump promised to bolster U.S. manufacturing; slash the corporate tax rate; build a wall on our southern border to keep out illegal immigrants; and invest more than $1 trillion to upgrade the nation’s aging infrastructure.

In our last column, we discussed how “total cost of ownership” (TCO) could reveal the hidden costs of offshoring and quantify the real profit and loss impact of reshoring or offshoring.

Lumps of coal go to Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton for giving us a choice between Scylla and Charybdis. An extra lump goes to The Donald for running a campaign that set new lows in civil political discourse.

In our last column, we identified national policies that will help bring manufacturing back from offshore, thereby improving the country’s economy, employment and budget deficit.

DEARBORN, MI—Ford plans to eventually shift all North American small-car production from the U.S. to Mexico, CEO Mark Fields told investors last week, even though the company’s production investments in Mexico have become a lightning rod for controversy in the presidential election.

KILDEER, IL—From January 2010 until July 2016, approximately 265,000 jobs have come back to the United States from abroad, according to the latest estimates from the Reshoring Initiative.

It is too little and too late to keep writing “manufacturing matters.” Everything else in the economy is secondary to manufacturing, mining and farming. Only these activities build wealth.

Manufacturing has again become part of the conversation on the presidential campaign trail, though not for the best of reasons.