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Re:Six Months into Tariffs, Businesses Have No Idea How to P... by dragonwriter on Sunday August 31, 2025 @12:12PM (#45084276)
Its not “due to decades of abti-labor practices" but “due to a century of economic progress driving higher expectations”.

Now, its true that there have, within that, been a few decades of regression in tax and other policy effecting a worsening of the distributional situation, such that labor gets a smaller share of the returns that are returned. But even with that, basically every segment of society is better off in absolute terms than when manufacturing was more dominant: working against comparative advantage and regressing on the US’s industrial mix would only reduce aggrgeate output and do nothing to improve distribution. And that's the point, because its a policy proposed by those who don't want to deal with distribution, and in fact want to take further steps to worsen it, because they expect the benefit their narrow group will receive from that will outweigh, for them, the impact of shrinking the total output.

Re:Six Months into Tariffs, Businesses Have No Idea How to P... by hippo22 on Sunday August 31, 2025 @12:25PM (#45084400)
The worsening of the distribution of wealth is exactly the problem. Productivity is increasing faster than wages. That means labor is losing out on economic gains. Your argument is that labor should just accept this because “at least they’re better off than before.”

Imagine you invest $1000 in the stock market and the market is growing at 10%. But when you open your brokerage account, you see only 5% growth, and it turns out someone has been pocketing the difference. When you confront this person, they say: don’t be angry, you’re still better off than you were before. You would be right to be angry and you would be right to demand policies that force this person to give you your fair share.

Re:Six Months into Tariffs, Businesses Have No Idea How to P... by dragonwriter on Sunday August 31, 2025 @01:35PM (#45085084)
> The worsening of the distribution of wealth is exactly the problem.

That's literally what I said, and why the solution is to undo the things that produced that instead of undoing the things that fueled the aggregated growth while doubling down on the sources of inequality.

Re:Six Months into Tariffs, Businesses Have No Idea How to P... by hippo22 on Sunday August 31, 2025 @01:48PM (#45085215)
Then I agree. But, one of the sources of inequality is labor arbitrage by the capitalist class. Tariffs decrease the utility of that arbitrage.
Re:Six Months into Tariffs, Businesses Have No Idea How to P... by SR2Z on Sunday August 31, 2025 @04:55PM (#45086999)
Tariffs decrease that utility by decreasing the utility of all imports, even the ones that were supporting domestic employment.

It's not 1910 anymore. The US is integrated into the global economy and many if not most jobs export to a global audience. Do you want to hurt the labor arbitrage that allows us to support advanced manufacturing?