The cheerleaders don't care. Americans' relative certainty and quality of life is backstopped by institutions they either barely understand or have never heard of. Let them touch the stove, I guess.
Anyone who knew anything about the public sector knew there were already efficiency initiatives. USDS(which became DOGE) was this, and they were doing a great job. If you care about efficiency this is what you would support, not taking an axe to everything and having a near-singular focus on lower headcount.
3. Refined products can be exported to countries that don't have refinement capabilities. Not just the US and China. This gives Canada better trade leverage.
4. Security. A big one that's emerged in the last few weeks.
I don't see either Poilievre or Carney talking about this which is disappointing but not unexpected.
The people in the areas where things used to be made certainly have more free time, but they don't have disposable income.
Unless we're just here to repeat canards from the 1990s given by financiers which explained why it was good to shut down the main employers for entire towns.
US unemployment rate floats along at about 4%, and is kept from going any lower to prevent inflation.
There are localized problems - and it's all very similar to the post-Thatcher UK - but you cannot be serious in imagining that employment would magically return to the exact spots it left. In fact that's one of the sub-problems OP talks about: so you want a US Shenzen. Where are you going to put it?
(UK equivalent: we're discussing keeping Scunthorpe blast furnaces open, so that we can have a "secure" supply of "domestic" steel .. made entirely from imported ingredients. Because the mines the plant was built to refine are empty)
While the main articles seemed to have a good riddance tone, the HN comment section seemed to be more restricted in that view.
>It's hard to believe that the current Boeing leadership will turn things around with even less focus on quality and talented workers. Feels like they should be moving back towards engineering driven approaches.
You don't hear people complaining about that because the states that are the net losers of those jobs are full of people who think factories are dirty and unsightly and pay garbage wages, etc, etc, hence why they're fine with their politicians implementing the policies that are driving them out in the first place. Sure, the blue collar people know what's up but they're outnumbered by the white collar economy handily enough that it never becomes a leading political gripe you hear about from these states.
Whereas when states that aren't behaving that way lose jobs, factories and industries to Mexico or China they're all "hey WTF" over it because they actually cared and didn't want that economic activity driven off.
> But a person used to be able to graduate high school and get a job that could support a house with a yard, a car, a non-working spouse and children.
> How do we get that level of prosperity back?
The issue is that this is a false premise. The house sucked. Only 1/3rd of American families had a single car at the time, and the cars sucked. We can go on and on about everything else. Not to mention the social environment at the time sucked.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to do something about the issues Americans face. But tariffs with a shifting set of sanewashed justifications are just Not It.
No, it doesn't. There is a presumption that manufacturing is Better, a more ideal way of organizing the economy, based on a false nostalgia of America past.
Trump was always the butt of businessman jokes. He was never "america's darling". He always wanted to be in the club, to be seen as an example of business excellence, but the actual examples are generally pretty quiet and keep to themselves.
I grew up in a town slightly north of Manhattan often known for being the bastion of the Hedge Fund industry. IYKYK.
Donald Trump once owned a home in that town. He didn't hold on to it for very long, as Donald Trump was the butt of every joke those same financiers and their kids told growing up in the 90s and early 2000s. He realized that in the world of UHNW people, wealth is quiet and wealth also knows who's for real, and who isn't.
Turns out, a loudmouth who wears makeup and bankrupted 2 casinos isn't really wealth. Donald Trump was ran out of town because it was clear quickly that he was nothing more than a cartoon character.
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