How is Bezos extracting money from the middle class?
You were wrong about the Rust Belt, and it's OK to admit that and move on.
To put it another way: From Poe's Law[0], we know that no matter how outlandish a position you take sarcastically in a forum like this, there's nearly guaranteed to be people who will be taking such a position in full sincerity. If you don't clearly indicate in some way that you're being sarcastic, you're going to be mistaken for the real asshole, because your tone of voice does not come across in plain text.
Next time, just put a /s and save everyone the trouble, hmm?
> If you don't clearly indicate in some way that you're being sarcastic, you're going to be mistaken for the real asshole, because your tone of voice does not come across in plain text.
That's the sign of goooood sarcasm. Most people don't take internet forums as seriously as you seem to.
It's called the "Rust Belt" because it's where we had booming local manufacturing (the iron) in the postwar years that gradually declined over the course of the Cold War (turning to rust).
Hell, by 1995, some parts of the Rust Belt were already starting to recover, though others remain hollowed out to this day.
Do these people really spend a lot of money in the local economy? Realistically, even assuming they pay a couple dozen people $100k/year for service and indulge daily in 3 $500 meals, what will be the actual influence on the local economy?
> The Rust Belt is an example of the latter.
The Rust Belt is an example of what happens when the state allows companies to leave, build their gadgets for a tenth of the price across the Pacific, then sell them back home without serious tariffs; not an example of what happens when Mr. Studebaker or Mrs. Bethlehem Steel leave for Florida.
> the state allows companies to leave
If you have to build a wall around your state to keep people from fleeing, you have failed.
It's not really about building a wall around your country to keep people from fleeing, but to prevent gadgets sold by people leveraging arbitrage in an unfair way to get in – or, as we call them for now millenia, tariffs.
For example, consider Bob and Fred. Bob is good at hunting, but stinks at growing blueberries. Fred grows luscious blueberries, but he's likely to blow his own foot off when hunting.
Bob brings home twice the meat he needs, and Fred grows twice the blueberries he needs, and they trade.
They are both better off than if Bob and Fred each only fended for themselves.
BTW, back in the 80s, my (British) partner at Zortech noticed that boxed software in Britain sold for twice as much as the same box in the US. So he would order large quantities of boxes from the US, mark them up, and sell them locally at a nice profit.
Eventually, other businessmen caught on and this no longer worked.
That's arbitrage in action. It benefits consumers.
On the short term and reasonable spatial scale; sure. What's currently happening in the West is that common people are discovering that on the long term and at world scale, it does not really benefits them for a myriad of reasons, among which unevenly applied norms, difference in regimes, different social models, etc.
I see people moving to other states as a form of load balancing.
The taxes they pay into the local economy have produced obvious civic booms in places like Redmond and Bellevue.
BTW, the Ferrari dealer moved to be close by the Microsoft campus.
I know other people with 8 figure fortunes who left, too.
I didn't know it was controversial that spending a lot of money in a local economy makes it more prosperous, and when a big spender leaves, the local economy goes down.
The Rust Belt is an example of the latter.