As they lose jobs and have even less purchasing power… or trade in their machinist job for work at the dollar store… yah. I bet they like that they can buy a $5 T-shirt instead of paying $30, swap their red-wings for off-brand shoes to trudge the dollar store as a security guard. But, it is a lovely bargain for the professional class. Give me cheap and take my middle class job!

> Give me cheap and take my middle class job!

The trade-offs with trade are a little more complex than that. For example, if foreign steel was super cheap, you could have the people previously working in steel work in construction, and build more buildings. Or if midwestern auto manufacturing jobs were middle-class due to unions, but the economy shifts to services like Amazon, there is no inherent reason why service jobs couldn’t also be unionized.

In principle it’s not that different from automation - you can think of either as a black box you put money in and get product out. If you are playing your other cards right (admittedly a big if) it would be possible to largely benefit from either.

Sure! Except instead of replacing the machinists jobs with higher value jobs, they replaced them with security guard jobs at the Walmart and Dollar Tree. That’s happened every round. The working class has never got the long shrift in this deal. They always get screwed but they’re supposed to believe ‘this time’ it will be different.

I wonder if they can’t just be more aggressive on fiscal policy and run the economy hotter, leading to mild labor shortages and people moving away from Dollar Tree jobs (because higher productivity jobs lure the workers away with better wages).

Traditionally they’ve been worried about inflation but they’ve overestimated that most of the past decade (although it’s jumped up recently in response to the massive short term Covid spending). I don’t think the new stuff being proposed, while large, is nearly as high on a yearly basis so hopefully it can hit a non-inflationary sweet spot (although who knows).

Agreed. Dumb tariffs are not the answer. It needs to be a more nuanced strategy that makes US goods competitive locally and abroad.

There will always be certain costs associated with doing business in the West that don't appear in places like China. The most well known one being worker's rights. Even if you come up with some sort of "nuanced" miracle strategy that can make the west competitive whilst maintaining workers' rights, you probably can't prevent China from copying it and yet again being at an advantage due to labor law differences.

One concrete thing I would 100% advocate though, which I guess is an example of a "nuanced" strategy as you alluded to:

Gimp / legislate away white-labelling of foreign products and drop shipping-like businesses. These have had a huge "spam" effect on products and consumer's brand-awareness that it'd be so worth it. It's made people unable to discern quality which is a huge win for places like China that at the bottom-end of the price spectrum simply don't have the quality we expect and would usually want to avoid by virtue of paying more.

This argument could perhaps make sense if you replaced the US with a western country with proper worker rights.

But you're trading that for manufacturing jobs.

Cheaper parts means you can spend on local labor. Its much more complex than "you should be forced to buy American no matter the cost."