Comment by simgt

> I'm only criticizing the race to the bottom that the platforms and kind of consumption mentioned are part of.

You're going to (collectively) need to increase the incomes at the low-end if you want people earning minimum-wage to still be clothed and able to furnish their homes. A significant portion of people who by from Shein have no other options within their budgets, and their existence tends to be ignored in conversations such as this one. The unspoken social contract has been "You get low wages, but get access to cheap consumer goods", but now the cheap consumer goods are being taken away.

There's a dissonance between wanting American-made/substantive/good quality/expensive consumer goods and maintaining the minimum wage at unlivable levels to avoid knock-on inflation. You can't have the economics of Switzerland coexisting with McJobs.

It's easy to look at the internet at large see people with these contradictory takes. But 1) these groups may consist of entirely different people who are vocal about different topics, or 2) the wide brush obscures critical context.

I support a $20 minimum wage AND

I think tariffs can be justified, especially when we use free trade to ignore the external costs to the environment and the arbitrage of exploitative labor AND

I have a problem with implementing tariffs in such a shotgun, ill-considered, shoddy way lacking clear strategy or intent

Most people bemoaning the tariffs are doing so because they understand that production will not actually come back to the US. It's not that these people hate Americans and don't want domestic manufacturing (or to pay for it), it's that they can see the reality that this isn't what's actually going to happen. Instead, the price of goods will just rise.

A lot of these people too have been saying "buy local!" or "support black businesses!" for a while now. They're not the same people bemoaning the lost of hyper consumerist plastic junk.

I'm pretty far to the left, and I'm actually fine with tariffs on China in principle for exactly the reason that you mention. Tangentially, I don't think that "free trade" can ever be meaningfully free when goods flow freely but workers can't move to where the high-paying jobs are - it's a recipe to create market inefficiencies that companies can profit from.

However, the fact of the matter is that our economy as it exists right now relies on cheap goods from China. This can and should be changed, but a meaningful plan to do so would last years of careful incremental changes if the goal is to benefit Americans as a whole. This is emphatically not what this admin is doing.

I'm a lefty lib and, like lots of us, I've wanted restricted trade with China since we granted them MFN status in the '90s. I think that was a bad idea in the first place.

Neoliberalism is not popular and never was. Donors like it. Workers don't. The only reason either party could stick to it and still win elections, is because both stuck to it. Neither "defected".

Tariffing Canada and Mexico? The EU? Yeah, not so much. And it makes working against Chinese trade far less effective and more-costly.

Claiming these aren't a tax on Americans? That's just a lie. Chaotically switching your message and actual policies day to day? That's not how you foster investment in factories that'll take years to be net-profitable. Working against the CHIPS act? What the literal fuck, that's exactly the kind of thing you [edit: the "you" here is the administration and their boosters, not necessarily "you", the poster] claim to want! That was a really good idea!

So, I agree with a tiny amount of the overall policy, while finding its implementation incompetent, and the other parts to work so strongly against the effects of the part-I-like that I find desirable, that I doubt my motivations for wanting to reduce trade with developing authoritarian states and the administration's are even the same.

That stuff is all over Silicon Valley. Santa Clara County actually has one of the most if not the most EPA superfund sites. It's the leftover legacy of chip manufacturing. When you rent in the Bay Area, the landlord does not have to disclose TCE contamination to you. TCE can cause birth defects and low birth weight in weeks if breathed in by pregnant women. If you're renting in the Bay Area, Google the address and make sure the property is not over a TCE contamination area.

"If we enrich the CCP we just end up with an adversary capable of taking us on. That's why tariffs."

This argument is absolutely accurate and somewhere between two and six decades late depending on who you feel like blaming for offshoring. Present day all we're doing is poking inflation with a stick, threatening the bond market (and eventually the dollar reserve), and encouraging economic partners to look elsewhere for stability. 3 guesses how all that ends.

Why tariffs on Madagascar?

>Unfortunately when doing business with communists, enriching them doesn't help the individuals move out of poverty because that would require wages to rise and that happens for political reasons not merit in a single party system

But poverty has dropped and income has risen under the CCP? You can argue that the CCP doesn't actually care about "individuals moving out of poverty", and all they care about is staying in power, but this is the sort of accusation that could be levied against governments in the west as well.

There are kids in Congo that are claiming to be older than they are so they can get work in mines to feed themselves and their families. If they don’t work they and their families starve, but if they do work they are encouraging immoral child labor. I don’t understand why many people think the answer is easy and straightforward in that case, this sounds like the trolley problem to me.

I don't use them, but I'd assume vape juice.