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.

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WarmWash 38 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 protect industry so they can have jobs, the left says tax rich people so they can have handouts.

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preg_match 30 minutes ago | parent [-]

This is true, but the problem is accelerated with poor fiscal policy like everything the Trump administration does. Tariffs ultimately hurt manufacturing, not desk workers. The idea was solid: implement tariffs to encourage domestic manufacturing. Except, domestic manufacturing requires materials, which are now tariffed. And the tariffs are so volatile that any capital investment, outside of maybe datacenters and some others, is suicide.

The right says give them jobs, but in reality, their policy destroys jobs. It doesn't help that GOP fiscal policy also implodes the deficit further than it already is, so now you can't even use that money to stimulate businesses. We're stuck in a corner. It will take decades to fix this fiscal mess, and in the meantime a lot of people are going to suffer.

	▲	WarmWash 25 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		It's too embattled for me to comment on Trumps execution. I'm just speaking to the theory. Tariffs have been used to protect industry for centuries by every country in the whole current debacle. Again I'm just speaking about what the wrench does, not how the guy wielding is working.