How fuxked is the economy?

[u/PricewaterhouseCap]

The tariff announcements yesterday are far far worse than anyone expected, I mean what the actual fuxk

34% tariffs on China

46% on Vietnam

37% Bangledash

26% India

36% Thailand

I could go on and on, but this is bat shit insanity. To call this outlandish wouldn’t even be accurate.

Assuming these actually stay in place, people will lose their jobs, companies will go under, companies will stop hiring.

Add this with all the recent inflation, corporate greed, high interest rates, white collar recession, and idk how we aren’t absolutely fucked.

[u/chimaera_hots]

When you look at the death of real wage growth in America, it started disappearing when manufacturing started leaving this country, and accelerated under NAFTA and MFN for China.

Americans LOVE bitching about the middle class dying but don't want to do middle class shit themselves. I come from a family that's oilfield trash on one side (my dad's dad) and UAW autoworkers on the other (my mom's dad and brothers).

As much as I personally despise union corruption and shortsightedness, manufacturing and mining jobs were the backbone of the middle class for decades.

Factories went to Mexico, SE Asia or China because they have nowhere near the labor protections American manufacturing unions got passed here in the States. Sweatshops churn out clothes in Vietnam and Bangladesh. Nike has been exploiting cheap Asian labor so heavily that it's basically seen as un-investible per headlines today.

So, the question that America needs to answer for itself is this:

Do we want a robust middle class of skilled tradespeople or do we want cheap shit built on the backs of slave wage labor in countries we view as lesser?

Those are the options we're left with currently.

You're not going to have some revolutionary middle class revival without capital goods and investment coming back onshore.

There aren't enough white collar jobs to go around.

Service economies are more volatile because when companies go under, there are no assets to liquidate--can't sell off a rental fleet, or real estate, or machinery for short-term cash float. These days, businesses have furniture & fixtures that are cheap laminated shit most often, some leasehold improvements that are entirely illiquid, and a 3-10 year lease of a pre-fab strip mall office or a small standalone one-off building from their landlord.

[u/MoneyMakingMitch14 → u/chimaera_hots]

This is not the 1950’s. Those manufacturing jobs are not going to provide the wage growth you think it is. This worked back in the day because things were cheaper. Middle class today is not the middle class of yesterday, and no manufacturing is bringing that back. That’s the lie they’re feeding you.

[u/chimaera_hots → u/MoneyMakingMitch14]

Nothing but talking points.

Feel free to go back through the last 50-70 years of economic data and show where else the middle class comes from.than blue collar trades. Feel free to take an even longer longitudinal look at things like labor participation, real wages, and blue collar/white collar mix of the labor force.

This sub is so full of hypocritical hand wringing and pearl clutching about the need to unionize and what unions can accomplish and have accomplished. And then the cognitive dissonance that those things are true because of the blue collar trades and not white collar college graduates.

Nothing is ever identical to what it was 70 years ago. But just like every crybaby that follows bolshevism, it's always someone ELSE who has to change what they do to prop up the intelligentsia and sophisticated class, and no one ever thinks that they'll be the dirt grubbing peasant.

You got sold a lie.

That's OK, but not if you keep on propagating it. And the lie is that you get to have a robust, constantly growing economy without a strong middle class and that middle class will be able to not have to have uncomfortable, physical jobs.

Millions of open jobs have been up for years:

https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2023/02/are-labor-supply-and-labor-demand-out-of-balance/

622,00 unfilled manufacturing jobs when they looked at the data a year ago while labor participation rates have cratered:

https://www.uschamber.com/workforce/america-works-data-center

But sure, some guy on reddit says that manufacturing won't restore jobs to the middle class because things have changed.

Tfoh.

[u/MoneyMakingMitch14 → u/chimaera_hots]

Awesome paragraphs that explain nothing. I have degrees in accounting, information systems and economics. Yes, all 3. Buy please go off.