A big part of what has changed is that much of the innovation in manufacturing has shifted from the ability to mass produce things at all in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (the US did very well at this) to cost optimization in the twenty-first century (China is doing very well at this).
I'd say that it's feasible to have mass manufacturing return to the US, but not a mass of manufacturing jobs in the short to medium term. Manufacturing with automation that is cheaper than the world's cheapest labor is feasible in the US. But, until the US standard of living converges with parts of the world that have large, organized sources of cheap labor (today that mostly means Asia), the cost of US labor will not allow competitive prices on manufactured goods.
There are partial exceptions to this. For example, it can make sense to do final assembly of cars in the US. This has many reasons... parts can be sourced from all over the world, there has long been investment in automation around auto assembly so the cost of labor is a smaller fraction of the consumer price, shipping cars across oceans is expensive, etc. Even in this example, far less US labor is used in the end to end production of a US assembled car than was the case decades ago.
I'm not an economist by any stretch of the imagination (I'd love to see a response from someone who is!). But I do work on math and software systems that manage a sizable marketplace with a goal of efficiently balancing competition between many businesses with competing interests. You can get a long way on this kind of thing by just thinking about the incentives that would be set up and how companies would rationally respond to those incentives.
If I understand your question... the tax would, for example, be paid by Apple on their products sold in the US if they continue to build their devices in China and it would be based on the difference in the cost of labor between the US and China. Let's assume the administrative details could be worked out, which does not seem trivial (e.g., If you want it proportional to the labor savings of manufacturing in China, how many hours of labor are spent on an iPhone and how is that audited? And how many hours would it take to make in the US with different worker protection laws / expectations?).
Apple would not just absorb such a tax. It would be reflected directly in the prices of their products. So prices go up for products sold in America, regardless of whether they are made in China (prices go up to cover the new tax) or they start being made in the US again (prices go up enough to cover more expensive labor).
Apple would now have the choice of continuing to manufacture in China or bringing manufacturing "home". They still want to sell to the rest of the world. To be competitive in the rest of the world, the non-US products still need to be made in China to keep prices down. So bringing US-bound production home means managing a more complex supply chain. I think I'd want to just pay the tax and keep logistics simpler by continuing to manufacture everything in China, even items bound for the US. One way around this would be for the government to charge US companies the tax for products sold outside the US as well. This would almost certainly be a disaster for the US because non-US companies now have a price advantage everywhere in the world except the US. Apple now has two choices... cede the global market to non-US competitors or move themselves outside the US.
So, if the result is that this doesn't help American labor much, then we're left with Americans paying higher prices for products with little offsetting increase in income. So Americans' purchasing power drops relative to the rest of the world. Revenue does increase for the US government and some of that will benefit the people who would have liked those manufacturing jobs, but certainly not all of it.
In the long term I can see the US getting more competitive in the global labor market because of such a tax, but not in a way that many would choose. It's not hard to see this dropping the standard of living in the US to some extent. If it drops enough that Americans are eager to work for the same compensation that Chinese workers get, manufacturing jobs could start coming back. Be careful what you wish for?
I wanted to follow up after giving sufficient time for other replies.
I sincerely hope you check your history and read this :-)
First off, thankyou for the in-depth response.
I, personally, think the race to the bottom style economics hurts everyone. It promotes a style of business that isn't healthy to employees, and allows companies to find loopholes to abuse Labor.
I completely agree about the downsides of the race to the bottom - I think it's inherently short sighted on a number of fronts (humane treatment of workers, wise use of natural resources, long term success, etc.). But I also see it as an almost inescapable consequence of US style capitalism. US capital markets reward companies who squeeze out every last penny and punish those who don't. Executives in public companies that are seen sacrificing short term revenue or short term profits for anything don't often keep their job for long. And those executives exploit this by making sure they have golden parachutes.
I think it goes way beyond race to the bottom. It's the effort to optimize the exploitation of everything for money. There is so much money to be made by exploiting every nuance of every law and regulation (or lack thereof), that I don't see companies pulling back willingly for any length of time. And the people who are already benefitting most from this have accumulated so much wealth and power that I don't think there's much hope of establishing laws or regulations that don't have exploitable loopholes designed in. I fear it will take something on the scale of the Great Depression to get meaningful change in this regard.
I'd say that it's feasible to have mass manufacturing return to the US, but not a mass of manufacturing jobs in the short to medium term. Manufacturing with automation that is cheaper than the world's cheapest labor is feasible in the US. But, until the US standard of living converges with parts of the world that have large, organized sources of cheap labor (today that mostly means Asia), the cost of US labor will not allow competitive prices on manufactured goods.
There are partial exceptions to this. For example, it can make sense to do final assembly of cars in the US. This has many reasons... parts can be sourced from all over the world, there has long been investment in automation around auto assembly so the cost of labor is a smaller fraction of the consumer price, shipping cars across oceans is expensive, etc. Even in this example, far less US labor is used in the end to end production of a US assembled car than was the case decades ago.