>The "good news" is that there is no reason to believe that we will fare less well than India or China. We will always be able to have standards of living at least as good as either of them. <
You are assuming that anyone here has a service or skill anyone will pay anything for. Even health care skills will be next to worthless if no one can pay for them, or they want to barter 10 years of corn for setting a broken finger.
Several years ago my wife and I visited Shanghai. We were amazed by the fact that every store had a group of clerks waiting at the door as customers would enter. Every customer got their own clerk.
Such clerks were paid very little, no doubt, and their standards of living are low. Typically they are able to rent just a single room and share a toilet with others on their floor. There are no showers in the building, but shower rooms can be rented for the equivalent of a few cents.
These single rooms have no kitchen facilities. Instead, other people with low standards of living fix food for them. Every meal time, vendors appear in virtually every side street and prepare simple food at amazingly low prices.
If a tourist such as ourselves goes into a fancy restaurant, we have to pay very nearly the same price as here in the west. That is, ten bucks a head for a fancy meal.
Fortunately, we were travelling with a Chinese couple. We joined the mass of the population in enjoying simple food at "affordable" prices. One serving of meat with rice was sufficient to feed three of us for one meal. The cost was less than fifty cents. The expensive restaurants were for the tourists. There was plenty of food at affordable prices available along every side street in Shanghai.
We didn't see any "homeless" people holding signs saying "Will work for food". Everybody was already working for food and making their way as best they could in the world.
There will never be a lack of jobs preparing food for others. Or cleaning washrooms for others. Or doing laundry for others. What I am describing is a lower standard of living than most of us are used to seeing. But that is the economic reality for much of the world. The advantages that freedom and capitalism have given us in the US is becoming available to the rest of the world. Their standard of living will rise. Ours will probably fall.
Those who lack the fortitude to get themselves a pot and some rice and to prepare food for others, or who lack the fortitude to make themselves available to clean shower rooms, will suffer. Perhaps they will be taken care of by family members. Perhaps they will be seen as deserving by some philanthropist such as Bill Gates.
What cannot happen, is that incomes and taxes will remain as they are and that the US government will become the caretaker for people who cannot or will not help themselves. There just will not be resources for it.
What I have described in terms of incomes and taxes is what must happen to preserve any jobs at all in the US. If we deny this reality, then there may well be NO jobs in the US and a starving population. Once we have adopted a standard of living on par with the developing world, then there will be manufacturing jobs here, since there will be no economic justification to move them away.