Comment by wat10000
7 days ago
Globalization is fine. Wages in this country are quite high overall. Inequality isn't caused by trade, it's caused by low taxes on rich people, weak unions, and weak labor regulation.
The terrible state of US production is a myth. The US is the second largest manufacturer in the world. The #1 spot is occupied by a country with over 4x our population. Manufacturing employment is down because our manufacturing productivity is really high. Yeah, we don't assemble smartphones or make plastic trinkets. We make cars and jetliners and computer chips.
If you want to address the national debt and inequality, the solution is to correct the power imbalance between employers and employees by strengthening labor regulations and unions, and to raise taxes, especially on high incomes, and especially on the super wealthy. Taxing people like Elon Musk down to a more manageable 10 or 11 figures of net worth won't do a lot for the nation's finances directly, but it will do a lot to curb their power and get the government to be more responsive to our interests instead of theirs.
(And no, tariffs are not a good way to do this, since they're regressive.)
Aren't "weak unions" caused by globalization? Unless the union is global, employers can always respond to stronger unions by pulling the off-shoring lever even more vigorously than they already do.
Globalization adds competition for both labor and business, which will drive prices down. That will limit what unions are able to bargain for, but it also limits what non-union workers are able to bargain for, so it's somewhat orthogonal. A smart union won't bargain so hard that their employer decides to move the facility instead.