Comment by Qworg
15 days ago
It isn't just "reopen the plant" - it is "reopen the plant and match economic conditions in the time period from the 1950s-1990s".
Just reopening won't bring back the comparably high wages from that time period.
15 days ago
It isn't just "reopen the plant" - it is "reopen the plant and match economic conditions in the time period from the 1950s-1990s".
Just reopening won't bring back the comparably high wages from that time period.
> Just reopening won't bring back the comparably high wages from that time period.
It's a start though. If the plant stays closed, those "comparably high wages" certainly aren't coming back. If the plant opens, there's a chance.
There's a lot of "letting the perfect be the enemy of the good" protecting a shitty status quo: "don't do that because it doesn't fix X," implicitly requires that one solution fix everything perfectly all at once.
I'm not saying it has to be perfect.
I'm saying that this outcome will never exist because more has changed than just the plant closing. If we coupled "reopen the plant" with "the plant makes entirely new things" and "the plant trains local workers to take these jobs" and "the plant pays above local service/construction wages" and "the plant will be successful in geopolitical competition" and "the plant can do 10x the amount of business due to advances in automation to get to the same level of employment" and on and on.
We could solve _each_ of these problems, absolutely - but they are all interlocking parts of a wicked problem. Blowing up the economy and threatening a global recession won't actually solve any of these.
> Blowing up the economy and threatening a global recession won't actually solve any of these.
But neither will the status quo.
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That's a helluva defense of nuking our trade relationships and sparking a trade war.
Like it wasn't perfect but it sure was preferable to what's about to come.
We could have kept that and implemented policies that were far less painful and far more likely to increase wages.
> We could have kept that and implemented policies that were far less painful and far more likely to increase wages.
Yeah, but we didn't, so this is what we get.
That's why, ultimately, I blame Democrats for Trump. They had many opportunities to improve things, but they chose to ignore the trouble and prioritize other stuff more amiable to their increasingly upper-class base. The root cause was their neglect of the building pressure, Trump is just the explosion. They keep claiming they're the competent and responsible ones, but they are just irresponsible in a different, more subtle way.
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Yes, the hard part is convincing owners to part with their wealth in order to fund better pay. This is partly because they themselves are wrapped up in a massive obligatory apparatus; call it "the financialization of the economy." I'm by no measure a Trump supporter, but I do hope that what we're seeing is a proper crash that wipes out some of these folks. Once defaults are rampant, you'll have destroyed a lot of wealth, but also a lot of the obligations that necessitated all of this shifting of wealth upward in the first place. You'd also have a lot of very sophisticated people in the clock-in line, suddenly very interested in pay equity. That's one of the happier scenarios, at least.