Someone pointed this out to me last week on another thread. I’d supposed it was just housing, but last night I heard from a friend whose wife’s unemployment had run out, they’d been spending their retirement funds to make ends meet. It’s very, very tough out there.
We lost 22 million manufacturing jobs over the last 20 years due to trade policies that opened our markets and allowed the Chinese, employing mercantilist trade policies, to acquire a huge part of our manufacturing infrastructure and knowledge. Given that a factory job typically has a 3 to 4 multiple, had we not adopted these policies we would have another 60 million middle class jobs, a strong US economy, the manufacturing infrastructure to protect us if we ever have another major war where imports are cut off, and a much higher tax base. Unfortunately, the bankers on Wall Street became wealthy financing the gutting of our manufacturing base while the average US citizen has enjoyed a decade of declining standard of living.
Americans are falsely taught in school the Smoot Hawley Tariff caused the Great Depression so tariffs are bad. What they don’t tell you is that manufacturing exports at the beginning of the Great Depression in 1920 comprised only 2.5% of total GDP. From 1929 to 1932 GDP declined 45% and manufacturing output declined about the same percentage. If manufacturing exports comprised only 2.5% of the economy, and if retaliation for the Smoot tariff had been responsible for the loss 100% of our manufacturing exports (it wasn’t as our exports didn’t dry up), the most the tariff could have cost the economy was 2.5% of GDP. The remaining 42.5% drop in GDP was due to the downturn in domestic demand, not trade.
Go to a store or look around your house and see how many products you use are imported and how many are made in USA. Consider the difference in our economy if these products were made in the USA again.
We’ve experimented with globalist “free trade” for over 20 years and it has been a disaster for the middle class and while weakening our national security. Raise tariffs to 1980’s levels and rebuild US manufacturing. The US had high tariffs through most of its history to protect domestic industry. The result was the highest standard of living in the world. Our citizens are suffering from globalist trade policies, excess government regulation, and anti-business tax policies. Let’s admit the trade policies of the 1990’s and early 2000’s have been a disaster for the American worker. It is not to late to return to 1980’s prosperity.