Comment by fendy3002

12 days ago

Well, money talks and it's hard to choose the other option. On one hand bring manufacturing back to US and pay them higher, because otherwise the pay in McDonald's is better with a less demanding physical (cmiiw, don't live in US).

On the other hand, keep manufacturing outside of US for cheaper labor to keep price low and having bigger margin. It's an easy choice to make.

And again this is not a US specific problem, it's almost all of countries nowadays have a massive wealth gap that makes people racing to the bottom of living / working standard.

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fendy3002

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myrmidon  12 days ago

The thing is also that absolutely nothing about the overall situation changed meaningfully over the last 50 years or so.

People had the exact same concerns and fears when electronics manufacturing started shifting to Japan like 50 years ago-- they went in the same way up the value chain that China did, and they started losing a lot of the industry with rising wages, too, exactly like what we see with China => Vietnam/Indonesia/... nowadays.

I think 90% of the whole political debate about the economy is misplaced nostalgia combined with problematic local wealth inequality-- poor countries lifting themselves up by manufacturing stuff for low wages is how the whole system is actually supposed to work from my perspective; describing that as "ripping off the American people" is completely unhinged, misinformed self-delusion to me.

  • 9rx  11 days ago

    > I think 90% of the whole political debate about the economy is misplaced nostalgia combined with problematic local wealth inequality

    When Trump said that new manufacturing facilities would be fast-tracked to being able to build their own on-site power plants because the grid is "at risk of bombing", I've come to think that the whole political debate is really about: What the hell are we going to do if WWIII happens?

    Manufacturing capability and capacity is an incredibly precious resource if you find yourself in a large scale war, and there is growing concern (realistic or not) that America has given it away/lost it. It makes no difference in peaceful times, but there is growing belief that the era of peace is coming to an end.

    In fact, if you take a higher level view of what is going on, like the wanting to annex Canada and Greenland, it seems the entire motivation for it all is preparing for the possibility of war with Russia (and China).

    • myrmidon  11 days ago

      > When Trump said that new manufacturing facilities would be fast-tracked to being able to build their own on-site power plants because the grid is "at risk of bombing", I've come to think that the whole political debate is really about: What the hell are we going to do if WWIII happens?

      I'm not buying that whole argument. At all. Because this looks too much like a "lets find favorable talking points for the middling plans we already put in motion"-exercise.

      Can you honestly argue that current economic policy and decisionmaking was mainly driven by strategic military interests and planning, as opposed to Trump being a big fan of tariffs as a concept?

      Because I don't think you can. And I think we don't need more than a glance at the liberation day proposals to identify this; if the aim was to war-proof US supply chains, then you would expect a big focus on military relevance of tariffed goods, coupled with long term investments into defense-relevant local industry and a glut of defense-spending in general.

      Instead we got blanket tariffs that were so ill-conceived, they mostly had to be rolled back/suspended the next day, and generally pretty much no apparent guiding focus or much thought at all.

      Concerning possible war: Russia is not a credible military opponent to the US and is not gonna be one within decades, either. Their land army basically got stopped by a country a fifth of their size on mainly donated (and frequently old) western equipment, and the Russian Navy embarassed itself even worse.

      China is a somewhat credible opponent, but what would they even go to war over that would actually affect the US? Panama? They might be more serious about taking Taiwan back, but I honestly doubt that the US would involve itself in that business too much anyway; considering how the whole support for the Ukraine, whose territorial integrity it formally agreed on to protect, amounted to some military hand-me-downs and a bit of intel sharing (no longer even that from what I know?), I would NOT hold my breath waiting for US carriers in a Taiwan invasion...

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    • fendy3002  9 days ago

      well, if the first step to prepare for WWIII is threatening to annex nearest allies with their own sovereignty (Canada), I'd say it's a very very bad preparation. Secondly, imposing tariff for raw materials and tools while you don't have all the groundwork domestically to do the manufacturing, is also a very very bad preparation. If this is the best US can get, I'm disappointed.