There are an enormous number of people who would love to make $50k working a lathe in the US. Enormous amounts of them. But they can't. They're working at Walmart making minimum wage.
If you try to raise the number of Americans that make $50k by shrinking the total domestic output, it's going to be laid-off mechanical engineers in those new jobs, not former sales associates, themselves now unemployed due to reduced retail traffic.
No one will take the risk of educating them to work the lathe.
Working the lathe is probably not any easier to learn than "vibe coding" or generic office work like customer support or data entry.
The unspoken problem is that it's enormously expensive to re-educate adults to do something different. Adults just have worse brain plasticity and don't pick things up as quickly as younger workers. Some just refuse to learn thanks to the pervasive culture of ignorance that permeates USA.
And adults cost more as well (even just the basics such as food, which children eat less of) and if they have aging parents or kids, have additional responsibilities that distract them from learning.
No one is taking this risk on and why should they? If I was starting a company, and you suggested to me that I should indiscriminately hire minimum wage workers to work in a machining workshop, but first I have to educate them about machining from scratch, you'd be (rightfully) laughed out of the room, because you're dooming this business to failure.
Once you break that link (e.g. skip a generation of a profession), it's incredibly hard to bring that back. It's like losing institutional knowledge, because your genius employee was hit by a bus, or moved countries.
The modern equivalent of working a lathe is running a CNC machine tool, and I would bet that if we suddenly killed off the tech industry and ramped up CNC machining in the US, the CNC machine industry would have far more former SWEs than former "lathe workers".
learning to operate a lathe for alot of the low-precision work that goes on for mass market production is really pretty easy. but those job are _never_ coming back, anywhere except places that lack sufficient capital or prototyping/research environments. you can program a swiss machine to take in stock from behind the head and dump completely finished parts in a tray at the bottom. depending on parts complexity you can easily vomit out 1000s of parts per hour with a single unskilled operator dumping out trays and loading new stock across several machines.
Yup, people have this romanticized 1950s view of a "factory" full of tools that they last saw in high school metal shop, employing middle-to-working-class people to run those tools making widgets by hand, and that simply isn't what a factory is in 2025. It's more often than not one poorly paid dude emptying out trays from a fully-robotic line.
