Comment by gigatexal
8 days ago
Americans have been hurt for 50 years … yes manufacturing going overseas was a huge change and many administrations didn’t do enough to help affected workers. Buuuuuut - placing tariffs on our allies that will likely lead to a recession makes no sense.
Devaluing the dollar and subsidizing production in the US makes far more sense.
But I’m not an economist or anything.
America got richer and outgrew the phase where tons of factory jobs made sense. It seems pretty clear to me that well-paying manufacturing job in developed countries were the product of a particular moment in time where poorer countries couldn't do it yet. Now they can. It was never going to last.
I live in NJ and people often make a lot of noise every time there's a report of people moving out of NJ because of high taxes and high housing costs (yet NJ's overall population has increased).
To me, it makes sense: NJ is a place where you live to make a high salary (proximity to NYC and Philadelphia) and raise a family (very good public school systems as a result of those high taxes). When you no longer have a need for those circumstances, you move.
Likewise, the US is not a great place for certain types of manufacturing because the labor and raw material supply chain simply isn't there. Why not focus on the things that we are good at instead?
It was never going to last if the US allowed for very low cost imports from those countries. This is literally one of the largest points of tariffs - protecting domestic manufacturing. We could have had high tariffs the whole time and offshoring would have been much less pronounced. I'm not saying that would have been a net positive, but to say it would never last is only true under certain circumstances.
You were still going to lose export markets as international competition grew, and you were still going to shift to higher value-added service jobs as the economy developed.
> Americans have been hurt for 50 years
Can you please explain a bit more about this 'hurt'?
My understanding is that a significant majority of sources of US 'hurt' are internal and there has been ample opportunity to vote at least some of it away, but the votes keep going in the direction of making it worse.
The worst thing about it is that the situation has essentially been perpetrated on the citizens of the US by those with power and influence for the simple human weakness of greed. Unfortunately they've got the power and resources to effectively do large scale "convincing".
> Americans have been hurt for 50 years
No they haven't. They've benefitted from it.
Because now most Americans don't slave away in unsafe factories 7 days/week for dollars an hour.
The error is assuming that Americans are homogenous. Wealthy ones benefited tremendously by reducing their production costs while the less fortunate were put into international labour productivity competition.
And yet, we have a system where the less fortunate could, simply by choosing to, make the government use some of the wealthy people’s money to make things better for themselves. This has been done in the past in the US, during the years that many consider America’s best. In other countries, the poor don’t have this option.
But, they choose not to. To some this choice is noble, to others it’s foolish. Either way, what can you do?
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Well, does the American public make it viable for a politician to push for expenditure of taxes on supporting the "less fortunate", say in terms of re-education or, you know, subsidizing social safety nets? If income inequality was such an issue, why did Americans put into power a billionaire to design the economy twice? Lol
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> They've benefitted from it.
They benefitted from it so hard they voted for the exact opposite with eyes wide open. Twice.
> Because now most Americans don't slave away in unsafe factories 7 days/week for dollars an hour.
Now they're collecting disability in their unsafe neighborhoods, getting morbidly obese while their substance abusing kids play vidya games in the basement into their 30s.
Yes, it's really like that. People want their factories and incomes back. I don't claim that anything happening here is going to deliver that, but that's the pitch they're voting for. To their credit, at least they're pursuing that in lieu of some UBI ideocracy made of fantasy money.
As for you: it's fine to point out all the ways they may be misguided and/or misled, but unless you have an alternative that doesn't amount to expecting everyone to somehow earn an advanced degree, and then discover it's next to worthless (even before "AI",) your really not contributing much. So what do you have?
Anything?
People who voted that wouldn't want to work at factories with working conditions and salaries Chinese factories make everything they consume. They also don't support the unions that would make working bearable in factories. Even if somehow factories would return and pay reasonable compensation, that would make the products so expensive most Americans couldn't afford them. People would have to consume a lot less. Which may be a good thing for the planet, but I doubt that's what the voters are prepared for.
Have you considered the platform that the Republicans have actually been running on? Was it one of economic policy? Did you consider why they attacked DEI and minority groups (including LGBTQ)? Because they would not have won on this roughshod economic policy.
> People want their factories and incomes back
But are they willing to work for below minimum wage for ridiculously long hours ?
Because otherwise that factory will be uncompetitive against China, Vietnam, India etc.
Unless of course you want to resort to tariffs which will instead transfer that cost onto everyone.
> They benefitted from it so hard they voted for the exact opposite with eyes wide open. Twice.
This conundrum, like so many others in public discourse, is downstream of the widespread but fundamentally incorrect belief in free will (which in turn is downstream of belief in supernatural powers, because free will sure as hell isn't explained by anything in nature).
Nothing is in anyone's control. There's no such thing as "eyes wide open". People's behaviors are 100% downstream of genetics and environment. Some people behave rationally some of the time, and to the extent they do so it is because the environment set them up to do that. There is absolutely no coherent reason to generalize that into the idea that most people vote (or do anything else) rationally.
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>>People want their factories back.
Did you ever work at a factory? I did. I would most certainly prefer to collect a pension and play video games (which I do now in retirement). Anyone would.
> They benefitted from it so hard they voted for the exact opposite with eyes wide open. Twice.
People vote against their own interests constantly. This is literally evidence of that.
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> Now they're collecting disability in their unsafe neighborhoods, getting morbidly obese while their substance abusing kids play vidya games in the basement into their 30s.
> People want their factories and incomes back
Sounds like what they really want is safety and hope for their futures. I'm not sure going back to the way things were - good or bad - is the way for society to move forward though.
Doomsaying prognostications, odd questions, free will talk for some reason, evidence free assertions about voters and their interests, doubts and fears...
And precisely 0.0 alternatives offered.
I can't imagine anyone being surprised that we've ended up with Trump et al. When all you offer is un-actionable thoughts and cowardly status quo, no one will listen to you. Meanwhile, the cohort of disenfranchised, disposable people grows around you until they fear the status quo more than they fear change.
Congratulations!
The richest country in the world cannot save their own citizens from poverty. Not to mention most number of millionaires and billionaires. Obviously the solution is to impose tariffs based on some made up numbers. Wonderful idea!
I've met a lot of people in St. Louis working various factory jobs. Making different kinds of specialized equipment, food products. I think they get paid $25+ an hour starting out. A fair amount seem like tedious jobs.
There's around 12.8 million people in the US working in manufacturing.
> No they haven't. They've benefitted from it.
some benefit. many have been in a state of perpetual poverty/welfare, but we don't see those in the official stats because the rich are so rich here it skews numbers
Yeah … talk to someone who worked in the 50s and 60s in Detroit.
Or anyone who worked as a switchboard operator. Nobody did anything to protect their jobs!
How about steel mill jobs paying $35/hr?
Saying Americans haven’t been hurt they’ve benefited applies to white collar workers only - no change to jobs and cheaper goods.
Plenty of white collar jobs have moved overseas e.g. IT, marketing, call centres. Especially with remote work.
The point is that as a country it has adapted by people moving into industries that aren't able to be easily outsourced.
The US today produces more steel than it ever has in its history, with ~1/10th of its peak workforce.
Those jobs aren't coming back.
>>> Americans have been hurt for 50 years
>> No they haven't. They've benefitted from it.
> Saying Americans haven’t been hurt they’ve benefited applies to white collar workers only - no change to jobs and cheaper goods.
And that's a big reason why Trump won: white collar workers, like the GP, lecturing blue collar workers, while being ignorant of their actual situation.
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Now they're safely home, unemployed.
> Americans have been hurt for 50 years … yes manufacturing going overseas was a huge change and many administrations didn’t do enough to help affected workers. Buuuuuut - placing tariffs on our allies that will likely lead to a recession makes no sense.
Yeah, some tariffs aren't a bad idea. But this plan? Just stupid, without any thought or strategy behind it.
The tariffs should be used more strategically to reorganize supply chains, not these blanket tariffs of low cost and high cost places. And probably ratchet them up slowly, to give time for production to move, instead of a big bang of putting them up everywhere.
So tariff China and Mexico, not Canada and Germany.
> yes manufacturing going overseas was a huge change and many administrations didn’t do enough to help affected workers
Manufacturing didn’t go overseas - it got automated. The US is still the world’s 2nd largest manufacturer, the share of GDP going to manufacturing has been flat since 1950, and so on.
What happened is automation made manufacturing need vastly fewer workers. Nothing is “being jobs back” from a fairy tale reason.
Devaluing the dollar makes paying national debt more expensive
No it makes it cheaper because the US is in a unique position of issuing debt in its own currency.
You can both be right. Old debt is cheaper to pay but new debt more expensive. And the government runs a deficit so new debt is always accruing.
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