> The US is the world's second biggest manufacturing country, almost on par with China. We have lots of manufacturing -- we just rely on automation instead of people.

On overall market cap, yes. What I'm not sure about are the numbers in key industries. For instance, we rely on China on key pharmaceutical ingredients. Heck, we were even in a crisis of shortage of salient solutions when there was a supply crunch from China. China manufactured more than 90% of the ships in the world. China manufactured many types of low-end chips we use in power supplies, in cars, and etc. The cost of our custom components on airplanes and battleships have been increasing through the roof because we simply can't rely on civil factories to make them cheaply. The list can go on.

It's fine if the US wanted to encourage onshoring of certain key industries for national security reasons.

You do that through strategic investment. Silicon Valley is where it is because of government investment here.

You don't do it through sudden high tariffs and angering our other allies. You don't need to be an economist to know it's a terrible idea.

You only need to know how tariffs work to understand it's an insanely stupid idea that'll crash our economy and put American businesses into bankruptcy.

It’s this simple: in the 1950s and 1960s you could graduate high school, get a job, and raise a family, often with home ownership as part of the equation. You also had more job security, at least for a while.

This past isn’t just glorified by MAGA. You also see it glorified by the Sanders/AOC wing of the Democrats at times.

Unfortunately neither side’s solutions will get us back there.

To get back there we’d have to attack the problem from two ends.

We would have to raise minimum wage, offer more assistance for health care or even full single payer, and to make the minimum wage increase work we probably would have to do a little of the tariffing and border enforcement MAGA likes… but not as much, and with better strategy.

But we would also have to implode the housing market. We’d have to MHCA (Make Housing Cheap Again). Real estate cost is one of the major reasons you can’t live like this anymore. Real estate cannot simultaneously be affordable and a good investment. We have opted in the past 50 years to protect the latter. We would have to switch and go for the former, which would destroy home equity.

It would cause problems. See, part of what we have done with housing is turn it into a stealth shadow second social security system for the middle class and the wealthy. Once you get on the housing treadmill your later life and retirement is subsidized by real estate appreciation. It’s a regressive tax, both economically and age wise as it’s essentially a tax on the young trying to get started.

But killing that system to make housing affordable would suddenly leave a ton of elderly people with no savings. The government would have to step in here too.

… which would mean both tax increases and spending cuts, and neither is popular.

Simply tariffing like mad and kicking out immigrant competition for labor won’t work because it won’t fix the cost disease.

Those easy times of the 50s were created from the pains of the 30s and 40s. 25% were unemployed in the early 30s.

If you wanted to go back you would have to kick women and minories out of the workforce so a man could earn double and have a percentage of young able bodied men killed or broken a generation before (through a war) before to get that demand where a highschool dropout who becomes a mailman can buy a house for a few thousand dollars.

Existing built home prices are going to go up in value if your society growing expanding. If you want declining home prices you need to reduce people/demand. The problem today is everyone wants to live in the biggest cities mostly because of jobs and everyone wants to setup a business because greater selection of employees. If the work from home movement succeeds this can break one of the pillars of why people need to be in big cities and cheaper houses can be built elsewhere.

> Those easy times of the 50s were created from the pains of the 30s and 40s.

Actually it was mostly created by the huge post-WW2 boom due to the fact that the US was quite literally the only country left standing, the only country not devastated by war, and the holder of much of the world's wealth in the form of gold reserves (collecting much of the gold that Europe had in store--you thought we did it for free?)

It's not clear how gold owned by the US's central bank (the Federal Reserve) translates into prosperity for the average US citizen.

Not these days, but back then it did because the US dollar was backed by gold, so more gold meant the Fed could increase the money supply without devaluing the currency (==inflation).

Existing built home prices will go up if construction doesn’t keep up with demand, which has been the case for some time. Why is housing exempt from normal supply and demand?

We do not have to ruin the world or kick women out of the work force. What we need is the same kind of price deflation that happened for appliances and manufactured goods to happen with housing. Of course the finite land supply probably makes price reductions that extreme unachievable but we could certainly make prices a lot more reasonable by density and taking the brakes off building.

It would also create a bunch of construction jobs.

> Why is housing exempt from normal supply and demand?

Most people feel the need to live in a house, so the demand is not going to diminish when the supply is low. Also, the land that housing requires is a fixed size resource, so is often seen as a good investment which means that over-supply of housing usually results in it being purchased by the wealthy and then used to generate rent income from the less wealthy.