Comment by nilkn
7 days ago
I don't know how I feel about this overall. But I do want to recount something from my childhood.
I'm American. I grew up in the rural Midwest. The truth is that much of this country is a depressing shell of its former self. The town I grew up in is all but dead -- about 12,000 people still live there, though. The nearest big city, previously a hub of manufacturing innovation, has been on a steady decline for decades. Since the 70s, more and more powerful drugs have been flooding into the broad geographic region, decimating entire communities and creating generational cycles of poverty and addiction. It's an absolutely brutal combination that has totally killed almost all innovation and output in huge swathes of this country. Candidly, even if you brought back manufacturing to the area, the local population is so dependent on drugs that you'd struggle to even find workers today.
Today's drugs are so powerful that addicts would rather live in total poverty with drugs daily than have a high-paying job without drugs. Every small business owner in these regions knows this, but the true scope and severity of the problem can otherwise be hard to fully notice and appreciate. It's not possible to operate a small business in these regions without encountering the drug problem on a regular basis.
Do I think tariffs are going to fix this? Honestly, probably not, for the simple reason that Trump is old and won't be here much longer even if he tries to install himself as a dictator. The winning strategy for much of the world is to likely wait this out to some degree -- best case scenario for others is that this will just get reversed or significantly mitigated in 3.5 years, which is the blink of an eye on global timescales.
Nonetheless, my heart goes out to the incredible loss this country has experienced over the last few decades. It's truly heartbreaking and devastating that we've sold out so much of the country for short-term profits to such a degree that we can probably never break out of the cycle without severe pain and sacrifice.
I see the drug problem in my midwest city too, it's literally on my doorstep on occasion.
The country is also not struggling with high unemployment or stagnant wage growth.
Multiple things can be true at once. Tariffs are a solution to an imagined problem.
And fwiw - reshoring has been happening already, through congressional action (CHIPS, IRA), rather than presidential decree, and was doning so without wrecking the economy.
The reshoring efforts you're talking about will not come remotely close to restoring what was lost and what could have been. We're so far behind outside of software and finance it's almost unfathomable. To grasp the full cost that has been paid, you need to imagine a scenario like all of NYC, Seattle, Austin, Denver, Silicon Valley, San Francisco, etc., just don't exist at all. That kind of scale is what we've lost out on -- not in software, of course, but in most other industries.
Fly-over country should have been the site of the greatest industrial and manufacturing innovation the world has ever seen. We threw away one of the greatest opportunities in history to juice stocks for a couple decades.
That sounds nice, but "bring manufacturing back" isn't a plan. Details matter.
I think that’s part of what I find so frustrating about this. There’s an alternate history where we’d have a national effort to invest in domestic industry, especially outside of a few areas which are doing well, but that just wouldn’t look anything like this.
A good example I saw was living in New Haven years back, where they were struggling to build businesses around the Yale community. There’s a ton of unused industrial area, especially as you go east, but they didn’t have the right combination of funding environment, local workforce, and infrastructure so in practice everyone went to NYC or Boston, or SF, and the state of Connecticut kept losing out.
Fixing that would be huge, but tariffs won’t do it unless you also invest in those other things and also something like antitrust protection so the key decisions aren’t made by a handful of gigantic companies.
The lack of longevity to these tariffs is part of the problem with them. Why would anyone invest in a factory when everyone knows these tariffs are likely going to be short lived, making any capex wasted. Capital is going to try to wait this out. It's short term pain and long term pain.
The problem isn't not enough money. It's not enough distribution of money. Income inequality in the US is at 1929 levels.
I understand the emotion, but emotion alone will not get us out of this. Here is a very similar post from someone much like you:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43565630
It makes a lot of good counterpoints.
This theme of "small town USA" is dying everywhere, even here in Upstate New York. Drugs and lack of opportunity has a chokehold on everywhere in America.