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Comment by recursivedoubts | Hacker News Reader

man, maybe the US shouldn't have let the supply chain move to asia so our upper 10% could get rich and especially our upper 1% could get really rich and especially especially our upper .1% could get super-duper rich, oh well, too bad nobody said that back then and were laughed off the national stage

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The US could just tax the rich more and spread the extra wealth gained through offshoring. But no.

That is basically what tariffs are, it taxes the wealth gained by offshoring. When you do that offshoring no longer provides you with cheaper goods and you get the current imminent downturn.

Other than that it is very hard to tax profits generated in another country.

> Other than that it is very hard to tax profits generated in another country.

But it's easy to tax personal wealth. It's new and different to tax wealth instead of income but it's not totally unreasonable IMO.

EDIT: also, the highest income tax rate in the US has dropped significantly since the 1950s. Maybe that was what made America great then?

> But it's easy to tax personal wealth.

No, it just means personal wealth moves abroad.

Is it? What if you hold shares in US traded equities? Can you still be a major shareholder if you somehow transfer that to an entity in another country?

And maybe a mutual taxation reciprocity agreement with other like minded countries could defeat those games?

> too bad nobody said that back then and were laughed off the national stage

It was a loud and varied contingent around 2000.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Seattle_WTO_protests#Or...

Ross Perot said it, but he was considered crazy.

i member

I'm not convinced the supply chain moving isn't just ... how it was going to play out. I don't think you need a conspiracy to discover cheap labor is a place to do manufacturing.

specific people with specific names pushed offshoring it isn’t secret

Does “pushing” matter if it actually works regardless?

Does pushing for slavery matter if it works regardless?

I think that's a different situation.

check out the conditions in third world factorys

Maybe they shouldn't have, but the reasons were:

It'll make America richer. It'll encourage world peace. (It's hard to go to war with a country you trade with a lot)

The disadvantages of this were that high labour manufacturing left America and the poor had less jobs, and most of the wealth went to the elites and blue states. Funnily enough the politics of the red states was what prevented the (from free trade, in total greater) wealth from being spread around because it's apparently communism.

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