America Must Reindustrialize—Tariffs are Existential Necessity

America has run global trade deficits every year since 1974. The cumulative value of these deficits is over $25 trillion in today’s dollars. Americans have also invested $6.68 trillion abroad, building factories, laboratories and infrastructure in foreign countries. To add insult to injury, foreigners have stolen almost $10 trillion worth of American intellectual property and technology.

This has been catastrophic for America’s industrial base. To begin with, over 60,000 factories have been relocated to China, Mexico, and Europe. This caused job loss on an unprecedented scale—America has lost over 5 million good-paying manufacturing jobs since the 1980s.

Large-scale unemployment has obviously had downstream effects on wages. The grim reality is that the ability to offshore factories shifted bargaining power away from workers to employers. This uncoupled the historic link between productivity and wages—in the past, more productive workers were compensated accordingly. Now, workers take what they can get. If not, the job goes to China. American wages have been gutted by this “race to the bottom”."

George Washington wrote:

"A free people ought not only to be armed, but . . . their safety and interest require that they should promote such manufactories as tend to render them independent of others for essential, particularly military, supplies . . ."

How can America be free if we buy tools, machinery, and computers from China? A junkie is not free from the drug dealer.

This guy uses selective memory. What did he leave out?

1. Unions elected Dem presidents for half of the years since 1974. Unions require specific exemptions from anti-trust laws, so that marriage is fundamental. Unions priced themselves out of the market at a time when international shipping logistics were becoming much more efficient.

2. We bought more environmental “protection” than necessary or affordable.

3. We taxed investment at a rate higher than our competition to ‘get even’ with the evil rich.

4. Nixon took us the rest of the way off of the gold standard, freeing congress to accelerate deficit spending. The 1973 oil crunch was mostly about the dollar’s loss in value and our slowing domestic production.

5. After the space race and the Cold War were won, we accelerated spending om higher education. Since almost all college presidents are either lawyers or liberal arts majors, way too much was spent on nonsense.

6. We overspent on housing subsidies - developers insisted on subsidizing second homes for well off people through the tax code.

It’s a wonder the game continued as long as it did.

We must bring manufacturing back to the U.S., it is a exisential necessity. For the last 30 years most of the country has rejoiced in shipping jobs to china so everyone could afford a $10 toaster. The result is what we see now, people without jobs that pay living wages and half the country on welfare while the corporate class gets rich beyond belief and installs bought & paid for politicians who go about screwing the middle class on their behalf. We celebrate because we can buy a $10 toaster while wondering why our kids will never be able to afford a home. We've offshored ourselves into slavery.

When you import cheap chinese schit you also import the chinese way of life. I've been to china, I don't want to live like that. Shifting manufacturing overseas in order to avoid U.S. wages is no different than opening the border to allow in illegals who will work for $10 a day. All it does is make make money for a few select people while the rest of the country has to pay for it. Yeah, you get your grass mowed for $10 but meanwhile you have to pay for their crime, health care, welfare, etc. That cheap labor costs us a whole lot more in the end than it saves. Offshoring manufacturing is the same, it gets you cheap toasters, Iphones, etc., but we pay for it with lost jobs and lower the standard of living of all Americans. All so the corporate giants can get richer. The way you make them move manufacturing back to the U.S. is to make it less profitable for them to manufacture overseas. Tariffs are how you do this, Trump knows this and the founding fathers knew this, that's why tariffs are in the constitution. Yes, they'll make some things cost more, that's the point.

Trump knows that if we continue down the road we're on we cease to exist as a country, we become like Rome where there were few actual Romans in the end and they relied upon the far flung provinces for everything. They collapsed in upon themselves as will we if we continue to rely upon people that hate us for everything.

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