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Comment by Marsymars | Hacker News Reader

> I personally want to onshore as much production as I can

What's the rationale for this? Like if you're already close to full employment, this isn't even zero-sum, you're throwing away your comparative advantage and spending part of your economy on production rather than higher-value services.

I'm willing to spend part of my country's wealth to counteract, say, other countries' lack of environmental protections, but if you're spending that wealth on counteracting lower offshore labour costs... in effect, the net impact is that you're just reducing the value of your own labour to match the offshore labour. (ergo, tariffs are a real clunky way to support local labour that isn't competitive with offshore labour costs... you could achieve the same ends more efficiently via income taxes and UBI.)

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I want a better quality of jobs, in my experience service oriented industry often have a thinner margin than hardware.

Like walmart is the largest private employer in the US, the working conditions, pay and benefits one gets from working at walmart isnt comparable to what we used to give what was the largest private employer 50 years ago (which was AT&T) - nor can the margins that walmart generates support those kinds of generous pay and benefits either.

This story is repeated a 100 times over thruout the US - while yes we have full employment, its in service jobs (retail, food service, hospitality) and not in manufacturing or other high paying jobs.

The second thing I'm trying to deal with, for lack of a more polite way (without lapsing too far into euphemism) to put it is "jobs for stupid people" (edit, in hindsight the best way to put this is "good jobs for everyone") - for a significant portion of the population, the best job they can hope for in terms of wages and benefits is working on a production line in a factory, while you and I (presumably) work in some sort of information job - thats just not an option for a significant portion of the population, and until we solve that we're going to keep having an issue with a K-shaped economy.

I get what you're saying, but I'm not getting any way that the economics here work. Expanding (rather than shrinking) the economy that way only works if you can export some of your production, which you won't be able to do if the production only exists because of tariffs. (Because other countries will enact counter-tarrifs.)

If you move Walmart employees to building widgets at a somewhat higher wage and that shrinks your economy, you'd have better overall results if you just raised taxes and gave the money to Walmart employees directly.

If every high wage country did the same thing - and specifically targeted low regulation places - it would. I'm certain that the US can build something that is competitive in Europe, and most of the Americas.

Also flatly, people cannot pay their rent, or eat GDP, its possible to have lower GDP growth and still be more prosperous country, most of the GDP loss will be to upper income earners.

> Also flatly, people cannot pay their rent, or eat GDP, its possible to have lower GDP growth and still be more prosperous country, most of the GDP loss will be to upper income earners.

Right, but then you’re working with a smaller pie than if you just skipped tariffs, taxed the upper income earners, and redistributed that.

And tariffs are particularly regressive - mostly resulting in higher costs for your low income earners, since tariffed goods are a relatively higher part of their expenses than they are for the wealthy.

Tariffs are an economically inefficient way to get a bigger pie slice for the median earner.

Sure - but they're a politically possible one.

I'm a big fan of UBI - love it, make all my librarian bits very happy! - but I also acknowledge the political reality of it.

I also do see the value in work, people derive significant mental health benefits from meaningful work too, that shouldn't be discounted.

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