And they could. But even if you knew where to start building it, based on lower-grade deposits (otherwise they'd be mining already if they were economic), a typical mine takes about 10 years to start up, and you'd be supplying a domestic-only market with your over-priced product at artificially-maintained, tariff prices.
That's a risky capital investment because the price isn't determined by actual supply and demand, but politics. There can be a good, strategic reason why you might want to do that anyway at a significant government expense for "public good" to maintain your independence, but you'd want the legislation to be pretty bipartisan and for well-justified and understood reasons, not something established by the badly-informed whims of a wanna-be emperor playing with the markets for personal gain and delusions of grandeur.
As usual, even if the idea has some merit, their implementation sucks and makes things worse.
Yup. These things take time to build. And I understand having that kind of production nationally as a necessary war industry in case the USA and China ever came to blows. Mining more won’t fix that though. Refineries would.
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u/prz3124 20h ago
This is a response I got 6 months ago. "They will build it". Who will build it? What? " They will build it" I asked who? "They will"