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Comment by bluedino | Hacker News Reader

You can tax whoever you want as much as you want but the problem is the industries from the past are no longer in this country.

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This was actually the real cause of the collapse of Zimbabwe. The tax base disappeared. People think it's just because they printed into oblivion but that's not the full picture.

in 1800, 95% of American were farmers in 1900, some 65% of Americans were farmers in 2020, it's down to like 5%.

My point is some industries just die. And its okay. The solution is not to go backwards, but tax the winners of the change to subsidize and retrain the people who lost.

But in America, the extreme winners have convinced the rest of us that we shouldn't tax them, and Trump is now asking us to instead tax everyone more

Caveat

> and Trump is now asking us to instead tax everyone more

Trump is now demanding to instead tax US residents more indirectly

> in 1800, 95% of American were farmers in 1900, some 65% of Americans were farmers in 2020, it's down to like 5%.

> My point is some industries just die. And its okay.

You've got your example dead wrong. American farming didn't "just die," it got insanely more productive.

And a lot of the industries people want back didn't "just die," they just got moved so the "extreme winners" could profit off them even more. And then those same winners and their defenders always go "herp derp, industries gone, nothing we can do! Don't fight it, just repeat: gone foreverrrr."

Sure, but the industries of the future arguably are. At least for now.

It's not like money isn't being made in the US today.

Regulations kill any and all profit on physical goods made in the US. It was more important to lift China out of poverty (Communism), kill a whole class worth of jobs and enact regulations to stifle any innovation because it’s okay if China pollutes, just not the US. It’s okay to buy goods from mega polluter China shipped on boats running on crude oil, instead of supporting Americans and American companies.

As you are about to find out with a president who is busy removing as many regulations as possible, consumer/worker/health/environment-protecting regulations are not the reason why physical goods are not made in the US anymore.

Manufacturing in the US had been shooting up

>Manufacturing output in the United States is at an all-time high as of 2023 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_in_the_United_St...

No, but we have new ones.

The vast majority of industries from the past are now highly automated and would be made even more so if the alternative were paying US-scale living wages to the employees.

So you bring the factories back to the US, but 95% of the created jobs are for robots.

Problem solved...?

100% this, in 2010 I briefly worked for a company that built assembly lines in the US and number one requirement for every client was reducing the number of workers needed. Almost every project going at the time reduced the number of workers by 80%+ and I imagine it's only become more automated since then.

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