As an American, I despise the man, but fully support his efforts at tempering globalism and clamping down on H1Bs. I don't have to like him to judge his policies on a case by case basis.
You talk about death rates. The suicide rate of working class white Americans has been sky rocketing [1]
You can ignore these and many many other data points to assume a narrative of unceasing improvement, but millions of people would rightly see that as nonsense. [2]
[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/opioids-drug-overdose-killed-mo...
[1] https://twitter.com/RonStoeferle/status/877778443210903553
[2] https://twitter.com/LukeGromen/status/969646830744227840
The towns who are relying on cheaper steel and aluminum imports to build air conditioning units for the rest of America?
Or the ones relying upon cheaper steel and aluminum to build cars? Or Airplanes?
Sure, it sucks to be Pittsburgh when steel imports compete against the steel industry. But its great for literally every other industrial town in the USA. There are far more USERS of steel than there are makers of steel.
Tell me: do you think the 25% price increase on imported steel (helping Pittsburgh, and almost no one else) is worth the Chinese tariff on Pork, Nuts, Wine, and other agricultural products (aka: the majority of rural American's exports)?
Pittsburgh is a blueprint for the rest of the country in this regard. It sucked to be Pittsburgh in 1970-1990. Today, Pittsburgh is almost unrecognizable from the Steel City, at least in economic terms, and the county's unemployment rate is right around the national average.
> helping Pittsburgh, and almost no one else
The help to Pittsburgh would be pretty marginal; US Steel isn't even a top 5 employer in the region, and a lot of those jobs are suits that scale logarithmically with output. US Steel employs about the same number of people as Carnegie Mellon, which isn't even a particularly large university among R1 institutions.
Pittsburgh is a medicine, education, and robotics powerhouse. It's doing fine whether steel goes up or down.
Higher oil prices in 2008 did what? Increased domestic oil production, massively. We'll see this in steel, and we should take measures to do the same for other industries by equalizing tariffs vs China.
But back to my point about globalization leading to massive outsourcing of jobs to China, then leading to massive economic dissolution to large swaths of the country. We can't all be "coders".. So what's the solution?
We "buy local" by spending a little bit higher prices on food and hipster coffee & craft beer and restaurants etc. Why can't we do the same, at the margins for all sorts of industries. Is that "more expensive" than dealing with epidemic levels of Opioid addictions and corresponding healthcare and other costs? The current situation is not working.. or more specifically, it is not working for a particular group of people in any way whatsoever.
Wrong on this count.
http://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/20...
As you can see, the US is increasing manufacturing steadily (with exception of the 2008 recession).
The problem is that we've got fewer jobs that produce MORE than we did before. The issue is that the USA is getting incredibly more efficient at manufacturing.
Consider the relatively labor-intensive job of farming. With innovations like "Plant Tape", what used to be a 10-person job is now the job of ~3 people and one tractor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzHo80bO-sU
And said ~3 people+tractor will work more efficiently and get more work done than 10-people in the "old way". Fewer and fewer people are needed to work anymore. That's the problem.
> We can't all be "coders".. So what's the solution?
Blame someone else for our problems. Apparently: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DZnj-jyXkAAP4Od.jpg:large
None of your sources link those two, and U.S. unemployment is at a record low so I'm not sure what the point is you're trying to make here is. Yes, the opioid epidemic exists, but nobody was saying here that it doesn't, so why are you introducing it?
The opioid crisis is just a symptom.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/04/joblessne...
It also doesn't explain why GP is introducing the opioid epidemic as a consequence of globalism.
You ignore the very real feeling they must be having when they can't afford a home. You ignore how they must feel when they put off marriage, and having children, because they're living paycheck to paycheck. You ignore how it must feel to wonder if you'll ever retire, feeling like you just barely missed the "good times". Its happening in our country, in our neighborhoods, to good people. It's no wonder Trump's slogan was "Make America Great Again". People eat that shit up right now. The standard of living is dropping and the middle and lower classes are feeling it the worst.
But hurray, global poverty is down.
There's a real dilution to the western experience happening right now and it's naïve to brush off the woes of your countryman with the idealistic perspective of a global poverty lift.
When they finally woke up to what’s happening, the blame goes on Chinese and Africans — because anything else would be suspiciously close to an argument for socialism.
That would be a fair criticism, but I don't see any major party candidates advocating for wealth redistribution. Maybe if someone was allowed to offer an argument for limited socialism then we could actually vote on it and try it out.
The only semi-socialist candidate in recent memory who came close to winning the primary was railroaded through a combination of systems that favor the status quo (superdelegates), a media that alternately ignored and attacked his candidacy, and a party that actively schemed against him while nominally allowing him to run.
All this after we elected a president who ran as the "change" candidate and promised to hold big banks accountable, only to stick the taxpayers with the bailout bill, increase the scope of domestic spying programs, and implement a flawed health care scheme dreamed up by the Republicans.
I can understand why people are pissed. I can also understand why some might choose to vote for their narrow self-interest, given the state of our democracy.
Forget regulatory recapture, we're at the stage of government recapture.
I can't say that I didn't feel bad for them but this has been long time coming. How come countries like Germany are at the same time booming, is it because there is something intrinsically different about the two populations? We are not just leaves in a stream floating around aimlessly, the people themselves have to try and change the current status quo. If the system in place does not provide a way to do it or does it inefficiently (how I view Trump election win) it does a disservice to its people.
Yes, it has been. Yet it's boons have not been spread equally. Most of the inequality in the US is directly tied to globalism.
> Nationalism and xenophobia, while definitely common in the 1950's, aren't the tools to bring back the middle class of that era.
There are 3 major levers that are causing inequality in the US - globalism, immigration, and technology.
The US can do a lot to mitigate this inequality through the first two levers.
Edit: Taxes are another major lever - but corporate taxes can't make a major dent so we would need much higher individual income taxes.
Who will be the first to jump for the report button boys?
If I am wrong then tell me where I am wrong - but don't downvote comments just because they make you feel uncomfortable.
https://reason.com/archives/2017/10/26/the-fragile-generatio...
Global trade is neither going away nor will there be billions more starving babies if we change our trade policies to protect ourselves against totalitarian regimes who have considerably more selfish interests than us.
And it is most certainly this group that explains why he won. He won Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. You realize that hasn't happened in quite a while for a Republican right?
There is a huge amount of semi-skilled IT work that has been shifted to India. Enough to employ millions in the US.
And this kind of work is a good stepping stone to higher skilled IT work.
A large proportion of this work would never have shifted without H1B/L1. If you work at one of the big body shops you will see how they constantly rotate Indian developers between India and the US.
The outsourcing of the late 90s and early 00s never would have happened without this.
don’t live there so don’t know; could be wrong
Yes, and the professional services companies (the body shops I was referring to above) need people on-site in the US. They act as the bridge between the client and offshore workers.
During the outsourcing craze it was incredibly common to bring over a team from India, spend 6-12 months training them up, and then lay off the American workers.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/disney-ex-employees...
Further, claiming down on Indian outsourcing companies will not increase American jobs, but will lead to lower blended ratio and more offshoring. No one is ready to pay huge wages to maintain an aging ERP implementations
Of course it will - Indian outsourcing companies only have onshore staff because they have to.
> No one is ready to pay huge wages to maintain an aging ERP implementations
Costs were only 10-15% higher when the work was done locally. Companies will pay what they have to - I have no doubt American devs can be competitive in this space.
In the long term it will hasten the shift to cloud erp solutions and towards providers with a lower maintenance burden - IMO not a bad thing.
But you can definitely find a contingent of Trump voters who are voting out of ignorance. It’s a whole theme of people saying they support the man for X while you can prove he’s anti-x.
That bothers me a lot less than his voting bloc that votes for him because he emboldens racist actions.
That said, I agree this is off topic & on the point of tariffs Trump has been quite transparent & consistent.
Ignorant is why you'll choose an option with a worse chance of a better result on the axis of concern.
I think in many cases people ignored the things they couldn't deny that they didn't like about Trump out of desperation, but I think that in many cases they also voted for him out of ignorant belief that he offered a better chance for change they wanted in other dimensions (either ignorance of his likely policies or ignorance of the likely impacts of those policies on things they really wanted out of them.)
it’s possible that people just wanted ANYTHING other than the political crap fest that was the whole cycle that world politics is stuck in, and trump was a way to shake things up and help change things in ~10years
that i can empathise with
For at LEAST the last 20 years, I've heard of people complain about "Trade Deficits" and the perils of "Globalization". Sure, Trump is an anti-globalist. But so are a TON of other people. My statements are aimed at anti-globalists in general.
> And if you don't believe that's the case, I'll go spend a day in rural West Virginia with you and show you first hand.
Indeed. And I've spent a week in rural Washington (Spokane). The town was decimated after a lumber mill closing, and tons of people were on welfare. Trust me dude, I've seen it myself. HUGE stretches of areas where the ONLY revenue source are Native American casinos and/or military bases, with closed down factories overlooking hills. There were some successful farmland, but that's not enough to sustain the economy of the population.
Now explain to me how raising Aluminum / Steel prices is going to improve the position of towns like this? Explain to me why a trade war with China / Europe / Other countries helps at all?
China just increased tariffs on Pork, Wine, dried fruits and nuts: https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/04/02/598870076/wh...
Good luck rust-belt / heartland. The trade war is coming. A good chunk of the rural folks have been wanting this for years. If Trump wasn't going to be elected last year, it'd only be a matter of time before some other "anti-globalist" came into power.
Unfortunately for the rural folks: they're the ones who depend most heavily on exports AND imports. Increase costs of steel and aluminum makes manufacturing more difficult. Sure, it helps the US Steel industry, but there are FAR more rural towns out there who rely upon cheap steel prices for the meager manufacturing that they already have. And obviously, if China stops buying Pork / Fruits / Wine / etc. etc. from American farmers, then those farmers are going to get hurt.
Its obviously lose/lose if you give it some thought. Alas, too many people are focused on the "Trade Deficit" to even care.
It's crystal clear what the problem is. It's not the trade deficit, which is simply a result of the market's way of allocating where capital and labor should be. The market is giving US laborers an extraordinary break -- let others be slaves, you take the capital. The problem is what the US has been doing with this capital.
I can certainly agree with that. In these sorts of discussions I work hard to ignore the 'people are complaining about ...' sorts of inputs because people complain about everything, it is hard to develop understanding from that.
However it is useful to understand economic value is changing. For example, gasoline was a 'waste product' of refining oil for kerosene[1]. When the economic value of gasoline changed, it changed how the companies were viewed. Nuclear power was once the power of the future with high economic value, until it was perceived (or maligned depending on your point of view) into being a threat to civilization.
So where does economic value arise? It is the ratio of the cost of production over the price of a good. So raising tariffs allows the cost of production of a foreign good to rise, and assuming the buyers are all trying to get the same price, the economic value of aluminum production goes up in the local (tariff free) economy.
So the price of aluminum goes up, and now it can be made profitably in Spokane, so an aluminum plant (mill?) opens up and jobs are created and the town becomes more prosperous.
With tariffs it is possible to raise the effective cost of any good to the point where it can be made profitably locally. However it requires that the local economy be able to pick up production. That is generally not a problem for the US economy, not as easily done on places like Brazil for example which can have high tariffs and still not have a local iPhone factory.
The rust belt folks believe that the country will switch to manufacturing things locally and consumers will eat the cost increase (or not eat, pun intended). They may be correct, they may not. Seems like we get the experiment regardless of our point of view.
[1] http://knowledgenuts.com/2014/02/24/gasoline-used-to-be-cons...
They are simply not correct, unfortunately. There's no need to experiment.
The issue is not with manufacturing per se. Its with manufacturing JOBS. The USA is far more efficient today with computers / automation managing huge swaths of our manufacturing process. Even if we increase output dramatically, we won't make many jobs.
The sad fact is that automation is destroying that way of life. US Manufacturing is severely up over the past few decades. Aside from recessionary periods (2008, 2001, etc. etc.), the US has constantly manufactured more and more things.
We've just managed to do it with fewer and fewer people.
Your thesis seems to based on the assertion that 'jobs' are the desired outcome and you will get 'automation' instead.
I don't disagree, that is certainly a possible outcome but having recently read an interesting position paper on Tesla where much of their model 3 woes were being pinned on being too automated it suggests that it isn't as simple as ordering up a few robots and you're done.
Further many of the steel and aluminum plants in the US have been automated as a means of cutting cost, and yet are still made idle by lower cost foreign steel and aluminum. So perhaps it may be a small number of positions that are brought back just by turning the factory back on. Not to mention material transport, etc.
All I'm trying to say is that these things are often more nuanced than they appear on the surface.
Sure. And its important to me that the USA remains strong and the best in the world. Unfortunately, their perspectives are weakening the USA and therefore, I'll work against them politically.
Various US citizens are entitled to their opinion. And I'm entitled to my opinion of those people.
The most important of which is that specialization is the key to efficiency.
The USA plants manufacture Ford F-150. But the Ford Fusion is manufactured in Mexico.
Having all of your plants in one city making the F150 and ONLY the F150 means parts for that vehicle are more readily available, more specialists who understand the process are grouped together, and the community grows as a whole.
Cars definitely need to be made per-country basis in general. The USA has slightly different regulations than UK (Driver seat for instance).
Often times: when a plant moves to Mexico, its more so that Ford can increase production of a particular model in a particular area. Scaling up the F150 to even greater production numbers? Well, its cheaper to move the assembly lines to another country, and then grow the F150 plant.
Looking back at the map, I landed in Spokane airport and then traveled westward for 2 hours. We passed the Grand Coulee Dam and I stayed in and around that area for roughly a week and got to interact with the locals.
Omak was the actual town I stayed in. Apologies for getting the geography wrong. I had to look up the map and actually remember the names to get this stuff right... I'll check a map next time I start listing off Geography I'm not familiar with...
Specifically for the area I was in: the locals were mostly concerned with a Lumber Mill that shut down relatively recently. Certainly not a town that is affected by the Aluminum or Steel tariffs, and certainly one that will be affected by China's counter-tariffs in Nuts and Dried Fruit. Lots of farms in that area.
You're right though: they have lots of cheap power due to the huge Grand Coulee Dam, so the area should be theoretically a good area for manufacturing.
Washington has been in the metal refining business because of cheap hydro since WW2, Boeing's primary operations are in Washington (Seattle, some in Spokane) because of it.
You can't scare people with nothing left to lose.
The US Heartland relies upon beef, cotton, nut, pork, etc. etc. exports. The US's primary "manufactured" export is food from the heartland.
Larger corporations can more reliably offer wages, better plan for trends, better analyze market conditions, afford the latest technologies, etc. etc.
Traditionally, when companies got too big in the USA, the regulators would split them up to allow competitors to flourish. This sort of splitting doesn't happen these days however.
They sure haven't. Last real breakup was AT&T in the early 1980s? I think that's my biggest gripe with politics today. Neither party is willing to break up these big companies and often gives the green-light for mega mergers without much fuss.