Don't Get Confused. This Is Not About Tariffs
Well, kind of...
Excessive debt growth and unsustainable debt balances between debtor nations and creditor nations. Trump thinks his job is to fix it, so he comes up with a term his crowd can digest: tariffs -- they impose them on us and we don't. So he takes the trade surplus, and use that as a basis for the "tariff". Fox agrees and pushed it. MAGA gets all riled up.
Socio-Economic imbalance. This is a combination of skill set (education chief among them), and opportunity. It's the basis of the blue states/red states rift, and the red states' answer is to destroy "woke", to regain respect.
Reality check: we ruled the world since WWII and our goods and services were imported all over the world. Europe was the first to recover, and within 20 years, European educational institutions and industry start to challenge and eventually edge ours.
China went from almost no literacy to a fully literate STEM savvy population. We declined. Our workforce, and industry were not interested in the small returns on investment in the apparel industry, pencils and other low end products. China was more than happy to take over. The "peasants" learned how to make our electronics cheaper and more reliably.
We cannot fix this problem. Paying the same wages in the US, is not feasible and will not bring back the jobs.
The Trump machine convinced MAGAs that so called tariffs will bring back factories and good paying jobs.
A couple of problems:
1. Unemployment rate is extremely low. We would need to import people to keep the factories running, but we don't have an immigration system that can deal with this, and Trump's signature promise is that he's going to deport millions of people here illegally. These goals are incompatible.
2. To prevent price of goods from skyrocketing, those jobs will have to pay wages that will not qualify employees as middle class.
I would have to think that the GOP leadership should be aware of all this, but every indication tells me that they're not and are only driven by empty rhetoric.
These are issues worth discussing, but I doubt MAGA is interested in anything other than "owned" memes.
Excessive debt growth and unsustainable debt balances between debtor nations and creditor nations. Trump thinks his job is to fix it, so he comes up with a term his crowd can digest: tariffs -- they impose them on us and we don't. So he takes the trade surplus, and use that as a basis for the "tariff". Fox agrees and pushed it. MAGA gets all riled up.
Socio-Economic imbalance. This is a combination of skill set (education chief among them), and opportunity. It's the basis of the blue states/red states rift, and the red states' answer is to destroy "woke", to regain respect.
Reality check: we ruled the world since WWII and our goods and services were imported all over the world. Europe was the first to recover, and within 20 years, European educational institutions and industry start to challenge and eventually edge ours.
China went from almost no literacy to a fully literate STEM savvy population. We declined. Our workforce, and industry were not interested in the small returns on investment in the apparel industry, pencils and other low end products. China was more than happy to take over. The "peasants" learned how to make our electronics cheaper and more reliably.
We cannot fix this problem. Paying the same wages in the US, is not feasible and will not bring back the jobs.
The Trump machine convinced MAGAs that so called tariffs will bring back factories and good paying jobs.
A couple of problems:
1. Unemployment rate is extremely low. We would need to import people to keep the factories running, but we don't have an immigration system that can deal with this, and Trump's signature promise is that he's going to deport millions of people here illegally. These goals are incompatible.
2. To prevent price of goods from skyrocketing, those jobs will have to pay wages that will not qualify employees as middle class.
I would have to think that the GOP leadership should be aware of all this, but every indication tells me that they're not and are only driven by empty rhetoric.
These are issues worth discussing, but I doubt MAGA is interested in anything other than "owned" memes.
