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| ▲ | adjejmxbdjdn 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Imagine seeing American wealth increase dramatically over the past several decades, see tax burdens drastically reduced on the top 0.1%, and see almost all of that drastic increase in wealth go to that 1%, and not be able to come up with a solution other than “well, against all evidence I think trade is zero sum”. And worse, your solution then is tariffs, which are little more than a sales tax which are disproportionately paid by the poorest. | | |
| ▲ | WarmWash 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | This is a painfully "coastal elite" take, and totally misses why blue collar middle America fell over themselves to get Trump in office. Trump is doing exactly the things the people who voted for him want him to do, however backwards that is on the whole or however backwards it appears to white collar well paid service industry workers (the richest class of Americans,richer than the 1%, FYI) | | |
| ▲ | preg_match 14 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | It's crab bucket mentality. Poor Americans think if they just fuck over enough other people things will magically improve for them. But that's not how it works. The cost of living skyrocketing is bad for blue collar workers. They suffer the most, actually, because proportionally more of their income is eaten. Salary-paid workers eat the cost much better. The wealthy, even better. Wages are not increasing fast enough to replace the cost of food and materials. Materials matter because they make up everything. In the interim, hourly-paid employees are suffering. | | |
| ▲ | WarmWash 5 minutes ago | parent [-] | | You cannot increase wages without the money to do so. The factories are broke too. Manufacturing has these fundamental deficits that make it very capital punishing compared to software or finance, or consulting. Britain is a better example of this because it's much smaller. The country is pretty much London with wealthy desk workers, and then the rest of country with hollowed out industry that is borderline 3rd world. Naturally the economy wants to kill inefficient businesses, and let the workers fall off the societal wagon. So the question is how do you stop that. The right says give them jobs, the left says give them checks. |
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| ▲ | misnome 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | e.g. hurting the right people, _even if it hurts us too_ | | |
| ▲ | WarmWash 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It's easy to be upset when you see the wealthiest class of Americans spend all their money on cheap Chinese versions of what you build. Not even because they cannot afford your products, but simply because they can cost cut by going with China. This rot is also existential, because as domestic players die, that knowledge is also lost. | | |
| ▲ | fzeroracer an hour ago | parent [-] | | The wealthiest Americans aren't buying shit from China, I have no clue where you managed to get that point from but they're buying boutique shit from Europe or elsewhere. American-made goods have the worst cost:quality ratio for multiple reasons. Capitalism hollowing out quality, businesses capturing markets. They sit in an area which are unaffordable for your average American as a result of the middle class vanishing and not boutique enough for the wealthier ones. People voted for a wealthy man to loot everything and he's doing exactly that. | | |
| ▲ | WarmWash 9 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Like I said in my earlier post, the richest group of Americans is not the 1%. It's middle/upper middle/upper class suburbia. This is even more pronounced because these are the people with cash who spend it. Billionaires aren't bingeing Amazon, shien and temu. That 60-90% class of Americans are the backbone of the economy. And they buy tons, tons, and more tons of Made in China. |
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| ▲ | cheonic025 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [dead] |
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| ▲ | Avicebron 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The business-as-usual multi-international neoliberal supply chain model wasn't benefiting a vast number of Americans with no solution other than "don't complain look at these metrics we made up, you're doing great, don't be upset we are making billions while you struggle to afford to fix your teeth or fix your car". Something had to break and break it did. If you are so non-zero sum, what would you suggest as the fix for those issues if we kept the old model? | | |
| ▲ | padjo 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Americans are upset about not having any money while being the richest and most powerful country in the world. They are throwing a temper tantrum about a world order they created and are the main beneficiary of. | | |
| ▲ | dbdr 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | There's a class of americans that didn't benefit from that world order. However, they elected someone who pretended he was going to help them, and actually is making it even worse for them and better for those who were already benefiting. | |
| ▲ | WarmWash 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The reality is that people judge their quality of life in relevant terms, not absolute ones. Better to be absolutely poor in a poor country than relatively poor in a rich country and all that |
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| ▲ | dpkirchner 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Before engaging, let's get this settled: do you believe that the US economy operates on a zero sum basis? | | |
| ▲ | Avicebron 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | No it's not zero sum but it can also not be benefiting a ton of people. Which is what I said.. |
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| ▲ | g8oz 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Progressive taxation. | |
| ▲ | LastTrain 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I would suggest not going with the dumbest rock you can find and standing behind it against all evidence. | |
| ▲ | vel0city 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [dead] |
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