Comment by vFunct
8 days ago
Trump really thinks America is in the 1950's. He thinks people want to work at factories doing manual labor. He doesn't understand that we DON'T want to work at factories. Americans like our plush corporate office jobs building intellectual property. We aren't oxen doing physical labor.
And we designed it that way. We pay thousands of dollars to each citizen in our public schools to teach them calculus, literature, world history, and science, so that they DON'T work at factories doing manual labor like we were oxen. We're supposed to be doing more valuable jobs in intellectual property and services.
It's going to be hard lesson to be learned by Trump and his working class supporters when the inflation hits them because our economy doesn't have any workers that want to work at factories, but it'll have to be a lesson they learn the hard way.
The correct economy is to let people do labor they're best at. If a foreigner can make a shirt cheaper than an American can, LET THEM. Our economy is already taken by the people that design the shirts.
We have plenty of workers that want that kind of work, we're just deporting a good chunk of them.
We have less than zero workers who want to do the physical labor of factory jobs for prices paid to workers in places like China and Vietnam.
Especially given the luxury lifestyle that even the poorest suburban 20-something American male lives in today. They get to play video games all day and watch any movie at home with any food from around the world that can show up at their doorstep of their parents home at a moments notice. The aristocrats of 150 years ago could NEVER imagine such luxuries.
And Trump expects our population of suburban aristocrats to work hard at factories...
Yes. Outsource the manufacturing. We have important intellectual work to do like optimizing ad sales.
Hey now, we're also using AI to automate debt collection phone calls.
> It's going to be hard lesson to be learned by Trump and his working class supporters
They won’t learn any lessons.
The impacts will be felt years from now, when the Democrat are in power, and… you know the rest.
Well, the unfortunate beauty of touching the incredibly hot stove of Tariffs is that the pain is immediate and obvious. So assuming that these tariffs go through as is, we'll immediately launch into one of the worst recessions we've seen with price increases unlike anything Americans are used to.
A tariff of some +x% doesn’t cause a +x% increase in retail prices. The ratio is somewhere between 2:1 and 10:1 for most products, depending on the markup, local value add, taxes, etc…
The real damage is business uncertainty, inefficient capital allocation, etc… all of which takes years to fully impact the economy.
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He has repeatedly invoked the 1890s actually. Big fan of McKinley.
Pretty sure the broadcast plan as been to make more Americans oxen for the cart…
These tariffs are a disaster, but this is is quite a neoliberal take. So if we aren't the oxen, who is? Vietnam? And that's morally acceptable?
Yes. They - or other poor countries - are. And it's their responsibility to grow their citizenry in a neoliberal world. Economics doesn't care about liberal concern tools.
China eliminated poverty through neoliberalism. The rest of the world can, too. This is the benefit of neoliberalism: it lifts the world out of poverty through free trade and self-selected efficiency.
China didnt eliminate poverty, it merely shifted dirty work to other poor countries (other SE asian countries). Just like the US did. Just like all countries will do until they run out of poor countries and the pyramid scheme of globalization collapses.
Not everyone gets to have a cushy intellectual office job. Somebody has to do the coal mining.
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I did not know that having most of your industries run in part by government under five years planning was a neoliberal method.
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Capitalism needs justification. Neoliberalism is an awful policy. Do I need to school you on the history of US foreign intervention?
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Because we all know there is no amount of factory manual labour going on in China.
Did you even think for a second before writting this?
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I agree with this. People seem to forget that factories and other manual labor positions were hard to fill. No one wanted to do them anymore in America. I don’t remember the timing, but there were articles about the whole situation. Well, those jobs went to other countries.
Bush Jr. was all about outsourcing to India and other countries. The India population were thrilled to take office gigs for Microsoft and Google and any other tech company.
The whole “put me to work” in middle-America doesn’t exist anymore. They don’t want to do that type of work.
I do think a missed opportunity is not increasing defense manufacturing in the US. That could mean a lot of jobs and skill-based jobs. NASA is another failed opportunity where it could be a huge skill and labor opportunity for America. I remember the thousands of workers on the shuttle program being devastated. I’m not saying we need another shuttle program, but the next evolution of NASA, aerospace, and defense would be great for jobs and America.
We have no one left thinking about the long-term big picture for America - and we now have a president trying to destroy America. Any current politicians are focused on just staying in power, more so than they ever have.
I think Bill Clinton was the last president to focus on America.
Even Obama failed to deliver to the American people. He was too focused on drone strikes.
> I do think a missed opportunity is not increasing defense manufacturing in the US.
They are trying to. But zero chance EU capitulates on this:
https://www.reuters.com/world/us-officials-object-european-p...
Obama was completely blocked by Republicans. That is when they started to oppose anything accross the aisle on principle.
> Even Obama failed to deliver to the American people. He was too focused on drone strikes.
I agree how Obama continued Bush's "war on terror" was a disappointment, but to state that as the reason for his relatively limited accomplishments is profoundly unserious. The Mitch McConnell's strategy was to do anything Obama did for no other reason than to make him look bad, because McConnell realised that Obama had the potential to be the most consequential president since FDR, with broad public support.
They used every trick in the book to hold up votes, to not schedule votes, voting against popular policy they themselves supported just a few years ago out of principle, etc.
I don't know how anyone could have forgotten this; the Republican party was not serious good faith participant in the democratic process long before Trump came along.