I am not smart enough to know whether his arguments on trade are valid. There seem to be good points on both sides. Good jobs have fled overseas, but lower cost goods have improved the quality of life. It’s not as simple as the Trumpsters or Buchananites claim. I DO agree with that group on immigration, though.
When your job consists of asking customers “do you want fries with that?”, you’re not buying a house or investing in your future.
That is what the lack of manufacturing brings.
Those low priced goods are all that most American cans can afford now - it is a self fulfilling prophecy.
It’s called trickle up poverty.
Let me ask you, does it matter to you whether Boeing makes aircraft in the USA or China?
I despise Trump and think he would be a disaster as president.
But worse than Hillary?
Haven’t read the article, but I’ve been arguing for a while against the protectionists that increased standard of living based on us paying less for more has been a benefit of more free trade. It’s simply the principles of capitalism at work.
I’m open to saying trade is a risk with countries who we could potentially go to war with, since an economic hit would come with the start of a war. But all Americans are getting a benefit from lower prices or from being able to choose what we buy from more options, including overseas ones. Competition is a basic principle of capitalism. It works to make better products available for a lower cost.
If Trump truly wanted to tax imports, it would be so opposed by Congress, they would be able to override a presidential veto. The Constitution can save us from a totally out-of-control President.
For Trump’s part, he usually says he only wants to threaten tariffs and not actually put them into place. Even W. Bush put in tariffs on steel imports, I believe it was. So the mere idea of a tariff isn’t necessarily an extremely dangerous or unheard of notion in modern government. We can oppose them in general without being seriously afraid the whole world will blow up if a President wants to do it.
The reduced production costs from moving offshore went to profits and the stock holders NOT the consumer.