> Your Cost of Living argument is lame; the term has a definition which you have overloaded to mean something completely different.
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.
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.