"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.
