One of the goals of the Heritage Foundation is a weak dollar. They believe they can bring manufacturing back to the US this way. I don't think they're right. I do think they will continue weakening the dollar.
Only cheap labor can bring manufacturing back to the US. Are Americans willing to work in factories for the same wages as the Chinese and Indians? I don't see it happening.
Create enough poverty and soon people will be willing to do an awful lot of things.
Under conditions of free trade with low-wage countries.
Free trade with low-wage countries is a policy choice, but a lot of people confuse it for a natural law.
How do you bring down costs? generally you'd need to restrict real estate. Lock down rent costs for both residential and commercial.
But the US is a major manufacturing nation anyway. US manufacturing output is more than half of that of China while having only a quarter of the population.
When groups like the far right say bring back manufacturing they are just posturing to those voters who have been disadvantaged by changes in the commercial landscape that reduces the number of unskilled and semi-skilled jobs. If they really cared about those people they would support massive improvements to education and training so that at least the next generation had a chance rather than idiotic schemes to 'bring back' the kinds of work that no one needs.
The Heritage guys have a weird perspective where they idolize the early Federalist US and the Reagan Era. Prosperity for the common man wasn’t a highlight of either era, to put it mildly.
In 1790s New York, for example, “local control” meant that many of the people of upstate New York were a sort of serf-like tenant living on the estates of the great men, Dutch patroons who played ball with the colonial and State political infrastructure. They had the freedom to pay rent until their landlord was willing to let them go. That existed into the 1840s, when the country started getting woke.
So we can address housing issues with creative solutions. Why do poor people need their own apartments? Stuff them into a tenement. You can easily fit 15 people in a two bedroom apartment so they can build drones or whatever.
Not every kind of "bringing manufacturing back" brings the same kind of wealth and quality of life.
And the Heritage Foundation is not in the business of improving quality of life for everyone, or even the average American.
Most billionaires will lose both money and power on the timeframe of a couple of years due to the destruction of the value of the dollar. Even internally to the US.
Some may gain both. Someone will probably gain both, and the odds are good some billionaires are included.
As to how much actual money was taxed at 91%, we don’t really have records for that but certainly the top 0.01% paid significantly more in taxes as a rate than they do today.
Oh, they fight that actually.
A team of 10 SWEs can create a product worth $1B with the cost of 10 laptops. You get ten people worth $100M each.
To create $1B in value with any kind of manufacturing business, is going to take hundreds of people utilizing millions in various costs. You end up with something like 10,000 people worth $100k each once you wind your way through all those supply lines.
The endemic anti-intellectualism among white communities (especially rural and southern) has resulted in a steady decline of white people in well-paying professions in America. If you count the Jewish as a separate group, white people are likely a minority in corporate America. Combined with social upliftment of other groups ("wokism") and the opioid crisis (that has disproportionately affected hinterland communities but immigrant groups seem immune to), white people are sliding down the American totem pole. Trumpism, alt-right, anti-woke, and the general resurgence of racist rhetoric are basically just reactions to all this.
These people want manufacturing because manufacturing is largely considered a "white people sport". If America becomes a manufacturing-first society, the hope is that it puts white people at the front and center of American society again.
JD Vance wrote a book about this.
But I don't resent the people who stepped up to fill the jobs.
Rather, I am disappointed that these amazing jobs were basically gifted to US residents, but my fellow white people "Opted Out" of these high paying jobs.
Oh boy am I gonna need some actual data for this claim.
You can construct the definition of white collar in a way that makes it seem like it's mostly white people, but among high paying job titles within a company, absolutely I would say there are fewer than 50% non-Jewish whites.
Race is generally a misused concept because 99% of the time people actually mean culture, as anyone from any race can be part of a culture.
In my experience, you wouldn't know most Jews are Jews unless you start quizzing them about their religious practices.
This is one of the main points of bigotry. The facts don't matter. So when a person says something obviously ridiculous like
> among high paying job titles within a company, absolutely I would say there are fewer than 50% non-Jewish whites
the proper way to interpret is "I feel like there are too many unworthy people working there," where "too many" is entirely subjective and could be as few as one.
Not at all. That was not my implication even slightly. I'm non-white btw.
One's information environment can mislead, but perhaps the process of finding information sources you consider objective, then studying them, will lead you to reevaluate the information diet that is creating a false picture of reality.
I don't see how this can possibly be true.
> that has disproportionately affected hinterland communities but immigrant groups seem immune to
Or this, especially in light of data such as this: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db549.htm
White American overdose deaths per capita are 6x that of Asian-Americans.
Manufacturing is just their preferred lie to get otherwise intelligent people to support their insanity.
it's worse then them not being right
the only way a weak dollar would majorly matter for bringing back production is iff production is cheap
so a 20% weaker dollar must not come with 20% higher "dollar" prices (living cost, salary). You need to decrees living cost and dollar value in lock step (i.e. weaker dollar without inflation!). But this seem impossible IMHO. And if we look at what happened, if anything, it went the other way.
And if you try to force it anyway you are basically saying "we effectively disown most money of most US citizens" and use that to try to attack manufacturing, while likely not relevantly affecting the wealthiest.
That is just plain evil.
And not very surprising if you consider that many "manufacturing countries" have pretty horrifying working conditions often not "that" far apart from slavery.
Worse this likely wouldn't work either, because iff your countries population doesn't have the money to buy stuff anymore, and investments are risky, why would you even bother to produce there? To then export to countries where investments into production lines are more reliable? Like how is that supposed to work?
Naturally things can be different if we only speak about high-tech / high-end manufacturing. But the current steps do not seem promising to archive that either:
1) this kind of manufacturing lines need even higher investments, i.e. act even more allergic wrt. trade instability and uncertainty
2) Trump has brought some high tech manufacturing into the US with a mixture of force and bribes/subsidization. But honestly it looks a lot of it is mostly hollow promises, not making a relevant difference long term.
3) More then one case where companies did agree had a lot of big problems. One of the biggest issue being, that missing in depth know-how requires temp. importing people which can make sure things work while teaching that know how (if you want things to get going fast. If you go slow you can send your people to other countries to learn.). But a destroyed visa system makes this a high risk for anyone coming to the US and did lead to more then one person like that being detained and deported by ICE. The other risk is if this people don't teach enough you become dependent on foreign workers in a strange way for a while.
Either way nothing in the current politics seems to be actually well thought through ways to archive (relevantly) more manufacturing in the US long term. But everything seems to be designed to destroy the wealth of the majority of US citizens.