[quote=njtosd] Stop looking for someone to protect you from competition and just compete.[/quote]
I think this applies to a lot of Trump voters. The problem is that “compete” used to mean, “join a union and get an unskilled or semi-skilled job that pays a middle-class wage, do that job for 45 years, then collect a pension.” Now it means, “go to college, then fight for a job that pays a middle-class wage, struggle to pay off your student loans, then spend the rest of your life fighting for a string of jobs that pay middle-class wages, hoping that you make it to the upper-middle class, still struggling to pay off your student loans, all the while struggling to put enough into a 401k that you’re not destitute when you retire.”
It’s harder than it used to be. And people are bitter about that.
People harken back to a simpler time, but I think one thing that gets lost is that a middle class existence in the ’50s and ’60s was, from a consumer/financial perspective, not something that would satisfy a lot of people today. A 1200 s.f. house for 4 or 5 people. Maybe only one car. One 19-inch tv. No computer/cell phone/internet. Most things were more expensive, and people had less things. (The debate about whether “things” are important is a separate one. I’m talking about the difference between the financial situations of a middle-class family back then and now.) Part of the reason things were more expensive is that they were manufactured here. We sent those jobs overseas because we could get people to do them for a small fraction of what Americans were paid. And if we bring them back, the price of everything that is currently made overseas and is then made here, which a boatload of stuff – millions of boatloads, actually – doubles or triples or is multiplied by 10. So now you’re back to not being able to afford more than one small tv.
A more important factor, I think, is automation. Even if you bring manufacturing back to the United States, there aren’t going to be 1,000 people on assembly lines in a factory. There will be 25 people overseeing automation in the factory. The rich get richer. The rich can afford to build a highly automated factory and then, instead of creating 1,000 jobs and spreading the wealth, the rich guy is creating 25 jobs and keeping most of wealth for himself.
This brings me to a hypothetical scenario that, I think, merits its own thread:
Trump seems to promise to bring manufacturing jobs back to America, but it seems to me that, with automation, those jobs just don’t exist anymore at the wages Americans want for them. The only ways that things get manufactured is either overseas at minimal cost, or in a mostly automated fashion, with very few workers and, therefore, at minimal cost.
