I think this is all so short sighted. If you bring a bunch of high paying jobs back and there are jobs for everyone who is willing to do the work and improve skills etc no one is going to care if it cost more because they’ll also have more. If my income grows i’ll pay more for things and I’d manage.
Yep. Give the working class decent wages again and they’ll be higher-level consumers. Henry Ford figured that out long ago.
“If you bring a bunch of high paying jobs back and there are jobs for everyone who is willing to do the work and improve skills etc no one is going to care if it cost more because they’ll also have more. “
Most of the high paying jobs in companies like Apple and many others ARE HERE ALREADY. They are not in production. They are in the R&D and design and engineering, supply chain managing, programming and development. But those jobs are many times fewer in number than all the jobs in production, even with automation. The point of the article on that point is clear - multiply the “lowe paying” jobs in production, times the higher U.S. labor costs and “moving” jobs to the U.S.” is not about moving high paying jobs, but it is about moving (or supplying) a great many jobs and at much higher labor costs above what Apple has now.
And when it comes to U.S. labor costs, when jobs become more plentiful than the willing supply of possible job holders, you can expect labor costs to go up and companies try higher starting salaries to attract the employees thet need. Those sorts of things trickle through the economy as other unrelated companies try to compete for the talent pool. On one side it appears as a plus - average wages, but on the other side it is cost for business which along the way bleeds into prices at the retail level. THE ONLY WAY THE U.S. CAN ESCAPE aborbing all that additional labor cost is the U.S. has to become a global exporting manufacturer to increase - in mass - the units being produced, to spread U.S. labor costs into massive numbers of units, to being able to sell worldwide competitively. If all “brining it home” did was replace imports with domestic production, all wages and all prices as well would likely go up, with increased prices offsetting wage gains. Asian economies have mostly missed that conundrum by manufacturing massively more than their own consumers can consume. That is not what U.S. manufacturing does today and not what policy makers are seeking to achieve. The sole goal seems to be merely to import less. That will not be enough.
I’m not so sure about that. Retirees for example won’t add to their income and will see increases. True boomers are almost retired but X has begun and they definitely are technologically involved.