You can experience that emotion and then logic your way to "it probably doesn't make sense then to vote for massive tariffs." If you don't logic your way to that next point, then yeah, you're making a bit of an emotionally-tainted decision.
Manufacturing jobs in the past paid much better than the sort of jobs that people in the rust belt are doing more often today.
If we assume that the manufacturing increase we would inevitably see in the presence of protectionist tariffs end up in those same places, then that would help make food and other things more affordable for those people.
Whether manufacturing ends up there or elsewhere is of course not actually guaranteed, the shipping technology and environmental laws were very different when the old manufacturing centers were established.
I don’t understand why people are so quick to conclude that others are very, very stupid in this case, as opposed to having interests that don’t align with one’s own and which are difficult to relate to absent the sorts of multi generational experiences these people have had.
Not saying they're stupid but that they're easily misled.
Manufacturing jobs are not coming back to the US in large quantities. Period.
Even if you apply tariffs to force large companies to leave China, they'll go to other countries -- India, Vietnam, etc.
The one thing that might work is to provide huge tax incentives to entice foreign companies to build factories in the US -- but that has proven to have limited effect -- remember Foxconn supposed huge investment in a factory in the US?
The only place this _might_ work is in high-end chips, such as TSMC -- but those are not the "manufacturing jobs" in Ohio and PA that disappeared.
But mostly, the manufacturing jobs won't come back because companies are rushing to replace them with machines as quickly as possible. So sure, a factory might open in the US, but it won't employ many people.
Hypothetically though, might it be good to have more industry domestically? As it stands today, we are so dependent on China specifically that we can't for instance, sanction them (one reasonable reaction to them messing with Taiwan, for instance, since nuking them wouldn't end well) without doing massive damage to our economy. I'm sure Trump won't have a nuanced and good plan for getting there, but I would like to start doing the work to promote having more industry here, even if it doesn't solve the problem of what to do with the masses who used to work in factories and coal mines. Honestly with our birth rates in the toilet, it's not a permanent problem. If we kept more wealth here maybe we could deploy some of this excess labor (while we even still have it, cuz again, population collapse is in progress) to build useful infrastructure.
The population is aging, but it's gone from an average age of ~38 in 2010 to ~40 now, while increasing. This is not a collapse, and the US is actually uniquely good at immigration, so there is a reasonable path forward.
I’m absolutely in favor of having a strong domestic industry. But to accomplish that you have to have more controls over industry which is anathema to capitalists and “un American”.
It’s just really really hard to put the horse back in the barn once it’s bolted. Shareholders will fight it tooth and nail.
There is a possibility in new energy industries because those haven’t taken root abroad yet and so Biden efforts to fund that are good. Unfortunately Trump wants to gut all that.
You’re the only one making assumptions here. You have no clue what my interests are or my background is.
Assumption 1: That Americans want those manufacturing jobs
2: Those manufacturing jobs still exist and are not simply automated away
3: People will still want to buy those goods at 30-1000% higher price points
4: That the onshoring of the lowest-quality jobs on the planet will pay enough to overcome the new inflated prices of everyday goods
I assume that people don't know what they're talking about on this subject because 100% of people I’ve seen defending the policy make dumb arguments, while approximately every single economist on the planet argues the opposite.
Except voting for massive tariffs make sense from an environmental and workers point of view. Logic instead of emotions was lacking in the democrats camp too.
I'm ok with this because it's going to keep American money in America. The cheep prices we are used to are fueled by slave labor. That Chinese hammer that is $5 less at wal-mart was produced in a sweat shop by underpaid and overworked workers.
The tariffs level the playing field and allow us to afford to produce goods at home by effectively banning slave goods. Besides, when you produce local its better for the environment because you're not sending everything on massive cargo ships.
But driving up the costs is a good thing in the big picture because negative externalities are artificially suppressed, the environmental, social and geopolitical cost of having cheap electronics and crap from China is way more high than anticipated. 1929 was another world, and economists have yet to update their view to the 21st century, GDP only is not the end goal.
I didn't realize a vote for Trump was a vote for selfless austerity. Macro-economics is hard, but seizing up world trade is one well known easy way to ignite an actual depression, not just the kind-of-but-not-really recession we had under Biden.
> make sense from an environmental and workers point of view
from an environmental point of view, yes, by reducing consumption; but that's not why people voted for Trump -- they did because they thought it would lower their prices at the supermarket. it won't do that.
Except that at the the lower income bracket, there are many more Democrats than Republicans (58% to 36% according to Pew[0]). So I don't think the election turned on poor people not being able to even afford food.
Fair point. It is more nuanced this time. For income < $30K, more people voted D than R, though for $30K-50K more voted R. And $30-$50K could be "poor" depending on where you live and whether you have kids, so a little hard to tell.
These particular nominal distinctions are losing meaning as everything but technology continues to inflate. An income of $30k is not survivable where I live (it's less than rent + transportation to work) without subsidy from family who joined the property owning class in the 1970's - essentially homeless but for charity.
It's not that you're "poor" if you make less than $30k, it doesn't depend on whether you're supporting family, it's that it's not possible to legally exist as a single person household working full-time at $15/hr; You are either receiving charity or you're securing your person through some sort of criminal act (squatting, living in your car, living in a park, sleeping in the breakroom at work, living in an illegal basement apartment or having five roommates in an illegal sublet), or you're delving into the 60-80 hour workweek.
Provisions which trigger at the federal poverty line for a single person not receiving private charity, require that you have been involved in criminalized living arrangements for a long time, and also that you have some sort of fixed address by which to reach you.
$32,000 in 1994 is worth $68,000 in 2024 according to official CPI figures. You did alright - this is basically median HOUSEHOLD income at the time, far higher than median "Young single male" income.
But CPI figures aren't what we have to deal with.
Average rent in 1994 was roughly $500 ($6000/year). Today it's $1400 ($16800/year).
You were paying (if a median unit) 15-20% of your income in rent and felt that this was too much and you needed a roommate.
Today there are lots of people making $32000 a year at full-time jobs (that's $16/hr, pretax), or LESS than that, and being told that they need to pay more than 50%. Or that because they make so little (we credit check tenants now!), they simply are not allowed to rent legally.
I think we're somewhere in the middle between the way you had it in the 90s, and absolute disaster. (Also, if you were making low 30s in 90s dollars that's a lot better than like 40k in 2024 dollars.)
Several issues that real people today are suffering with is that it's hard to remain a 2-income family and have young kids. Someone's got to take care of them, and daycare costs more than the median worker is likely to make in the limited time your kids can realistically be in daycare. So now you're down to 1 income, expensive rent, or 2 incomes, expensive rent and expensive childcare. Or 2 incomes and live with someone's parents who may also watch the kids, which while some cultures are fine with that, others resent that being their only option (especially if you can't stand those parents!) -- and for elder millennials and older, we generally were able to have better options if we planned our careers wisely. I cannot imagine any advice I would have given to two 18-year-olds from poor families in 2020 that would have set them up to be on track to have kids and live independently anytime. Especially if they were determined to go to college, which everyone is told they must do.
Thing is, people will say stuff like this and them foam at the mouth at the mere mention of the phrase "food stamps". Methinks this sudden empathy is a load of crocodile tears.
"Analysis conducted by Vanderbilt University political science professor Larry Bartels in 2004 and 2015 found income growth is faster and more equal under Democratic presidents. From 1982 through 2013, he found real incomes increased in the 20th and 40th percentiles of incomes under Democrats, while they fell under Republicans"
Good paying jobs went away with Reagonmics and offshore manufacturing. Trump isn’t bringing them back (neither is Harris). It’s a feature, not a bug, of capitalism.
Also Elon “Efficiency Czar” is all about cutting jobs not creating them.
I'm okay with eliminating some government jobs though. With how much we pay, and the way plenty of government workers I know literally just screw around all day, I am certain that there is plenty of waste. And we have whole agencies that do not make progress towards their supposed goals despite bountiful public funding. Worst case scenario they cut too far and we finally notice something is missing, and they hire some back.
It's not a feature of capitalism - we've had capitalism without sending manufacturing overseas for decades. Rather, it's a feature of globalization, which is a tactic that isn't specific to capitalism.
Globalism is the logical conclusion of capitalism. You can argue the two have distinction and you'll be right, but trade loves free borders and price inequalities don't go away when you levy proportional taxes on imports. The more insular your nation becomes, the more detached they are from the actual value of things. A capitalist rejecting globalism is like the clergyman refusing gospel.
It's ultimately the businesses that decide how to conduct their business. If moving your jobs overseas is a cheaper strategy than producing something domestically, you will have a hard time getting anyone to stick around. Our problem today is that America raised it's standard of living without reciprocally raising the median value of the American worker.
No, it may be the logical conclusion of Free Market Capitalism or laissez-faire capitalism. Which is the direction that the US was going down but that does not mean that we have to go that route.
>If moving your jobs overseas is a cheaper strategy than producing something domestically, you will have a hard time getting anyone to stick around.
Hence tariffs....
You can't have a consumer class if they cant afford to consume. You can't demand environmental protections and then turn around and claim it cost too much so we build it in a country that we can pollute in. TANSTAAFL
We want environmental protections, we pay for them. Business owners want customers, they pay for them by paying fair wages.
Peak free-market unregulated capitalism failed when GFC happened. We have been bailing it out ever since. US has not had a surplus since 2001. I don't know what this 'socialize losses, private profits' is but it does not look like capitalism. GFC showed that capitalism has to be regulated IMO. And tariffs could be part of this regulation.
there is no non-free market capitalism; capitalism that is laissez-faire is not true capitalism, it's a mixture of capitalism and socialism (which is what we actually have in the US, mostly starting with FDR, but which can't bring ourselves to actually admit because "socialism is bad".
> Business owners want customers, they pay for them by paying fair wages.
Huh? WalMart has plenty of customers and they don't pay fair wages. They don't have to because they use economy of scale to put all the smaller businesses, who might have paid fair wages, out of business.
Paying fair wages is not a feature of capitalism -- only if you are in a market sector that demands it. Corporations hate it, thus offshore production, but they survive by convincing enough people that having lots of cheap shit is better than paying fair wages (even if it destroys a significant portion of the American workforce).
This has a first mover advantage and bound to eventually fail. They're taking advantage of the fact other companies still pay...better, and siphoning off the money.
When every company is put out by an 'economy of scale' type company with the same tactics, you end up with a lot of sellers and no more buyers.
Globalism is the counter model to localized Globalism ,aka empires, starving the little map filler countries without power and who than band together to build catch-up-empires of their own warring on the predecessor empires aka worldwars.
Wrong. The only reason capitalism didn’t do it earlier was because it wasn’t profitable to do so. It is absolutely specific to and a feature of capitalism, because socialism by definition concerned with the welfare of workers, whereas capitalism is by definition concerned with the welfare of shareholders.
Majority of people are too shortsighted to know what this means. If you rephrase "unprofitable" as "your prices will go up and you will be further pushed into poverty" they won't want this. So you just don't phrase it like that.
Routinely, conservative proposals, no matter how stupid, are displayed in the most generous light possible. Meanwhile on the left, the opposite is done.
High tariffs? Well, that could maybe bring manufacturing back! Gender affirming care? Every woman in this country will be raped in bathrooms and beaten to a pulp!
I didn't hear that it would lower prices and don't expect it to. I expect to pay a lot more for everything as we re-build our supply chains not to include countries that throw all their Muslims in concentration camps and steal IP. I expect business that aren't viable without slave labor to cease to exist for the benefit of humanity and that the cost will be very high.
People want cheap shit, they don't care about how competitive the market is. It's just an unfortunate fact that has been reflected by dozens of American monopolies and decades of fervent offshoring. Tariffs just raise the price of said cheap shit until it costs as much as luxury alternatives, and "fixes" the problem by neglecting any market too poor to cope with more expensive goods.
It's a great trick if your goal is to artificially and temporarily encourage competition between two heavily unequal trade partners. It's a suicide rap for low-class Americans that now have to foot the bill for the rest of the economy by paying more for less food. It will put millions of American citizens on welfare, just to make unprofitable businesses seem competent. The people that want this are business owners and voters that do not understand the futility of a trade war with China.
If you watch the "undecided voter" focus groups being interviewed after the debate, most of the comments were very abstract -- about how the candidate made them feel. Nobody mentioned policy specifics.
Emotions are much stronger.