America pays the price for its short sighted hubris chasing profits and thinking we could turn China into a liberal democracy if we threw enough money at them
It’s also worth considering that the cost of living in the US has been lowered because China has been the factory for our WalMart / Target / IKEA goods. If we didn’t open up China to the US / WTO markets, the world would be a very different place and that counterfactual is pretty difficult to calculate.
Also cost of living for who? The now-unemployed swaths of the country certainly didn't see their cost of living go down in terms of hours worked.
Yes, there are people who will lose jobs for all sorts of reasons, including competitive advantage of different regions (eg China and Mexico have labor that is far cheaper than Americans are willing to work for) or the euphemistic “creative destruction”.
I don’t feel sorry for horse buggy whip salespeople who had to search for a different purpose in life. They already won a lottery by being born in the USA in the most affluent time in history. The economy doesn’t owe anyone anything.
The only thing I wished we as a country had done during multinational trade pacts was not to put the onus on individual employees for proving jobs lost to offshoring; there was moral hazard and the evidence to prove causation was hidden from those who needed the evidence. Other than that, these trade pacts simply accelerated the changes that were going to happen anyway. It’s better not to live in a one-industry town where the winds of change can decimate the Un-diversified local economy.
Your usage of the term has a loaded definition. You're trying to thread a needle between the nominal cost of living (which has increased) and effective cost of living (which has increased for some), presumably by appealing to CPI. But you can't appeal to a measure that's from the exact paradigm I'm criticizing - of course things look consistent and reasonable from inside that paradigm (but its results on the real world are problematic).
> I don’t feel sorry for horse buggy whip salespeople who had to search for a different purpose in life. They already won a lottery by being born in the USA in the most affluent time in history
I'm not arguing that we should have held back offshoring, and you can spare me the race-to-the-bottom privilege indictment.
> The economy doesn’t owe anyone anything
This is a passive voice, while I'm criticizing a specific actor. "The economy" didn't decide that prices have to go up year over year, and in fact they would have naturally gone down with offshoring. Rather, the government decided that prices still needed to go up year over year, despite the gains made from offshoring.
If prices had been allowed to decrease, then the communities that lost manufacturing jobs would have at least seen some benefit from goods costing less as their own expenses would have gone down. But rather than the promised benefit of "cheaper goods" being realized throughout society, those gains were collected centrally far away from the people most impacted.
Savings from China trade are fairly trivial, calculated in a few hundreds dollars per family per year. And if the US need a cheap factory hub there's Mexico.