this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2024
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If tariffs are increased and migration reduced, there is a good chance the working class will get more economic power long term. The inflation will sky rocket, but so may blue collar salaries. I believe that's i big reason why Trump won. Sometimes the gut or common sense triumphs the neoliberal dogma.
I doubt salaries will skyrocket, sure there will be more people being hired to meet domestic demand increasing but I doubt that companies will actually pay more to their employees. And even if they do I can't imagine that it will be a significant increase when taking into account the inflation that will be caused.
The tariffs don't mean that there will be an increase in domestic production. It means manufacturers will seek out a different source for cheap materials. If those happen to be domestic, that's good. Most likely they will be from some other nation like India.
Yeah I agree, I was just looking at it from the best case scenario that might lead to salary increases to show that even then it probably won't happen.
The supply and demand should at least be in favor of blue collar. But there might be a lot of political repression and union busting. Still, there will for sure be some shift in economic power, that will favor unions and the value of labor in general. Exciting times ahead. Similarities with 1920s are overwhelming.
I mean I guess exciting is one way to put it if you find the great depressing exciting. Even if it did lead to FDR and a number of progressive policies it still took around a decade of horrible unemployment and poverty to get to that point.
Yep. Things will only get shittier in the US for as long as they/you don't reverse the inequality trend. It's impossible to have a functional democracy with the current gini coefficient. And it's rapidly getting worse.
At some point, from an evolutionary perspective, it's probably rational to crave chaos, system collapse or revolution, if you're at the perceived socioeconomic bottom. Trump 2.0 might have been that point. Democrats didn't present a credible solution, rather they just demonstrated that they don't understand much. Just more neoliberal globalist crap, sprinkled with a touch of welfare and identity politics. Then it might be better to just opt for high risk and chaos, and hope you get lucky.
(I know there are good democrats as well, but they're not in charge.)
Yeah I totally agree, I'm just still holding out hope there's some way to get real reforms that help people cause that would be the best case scenario. But yeah it is starting to seem that chaos and system collapse might be the only way to get real change. I just worry we're at a point where if the system collapses we'll end up with Nazi Germany rather than New Deal America.
It's a gamble for sure.
Yeah, but the happy times in the 50s to the 70s had one more factor, that the world was recovering from an insanely destructive world war that left the US unscathed, a unique thing at the time.
China was just coming out of a nation-deciding civil war, in addition to the genocide and war with Japan, Japan had Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Europe was in ruins and was gearing up to holding guns to each other's heads for the next 40 years, and Russia was kinda like it is now.
I wasn't even really talking about the boom after the war, I was talking more about the progressive reforms and things that happened that helped end the great depression which was mostly before the war. The war definitely helped continue that recovery and expand it into what we saw after the war but I think generally people agree the great depression was over in 1939 which was right as the war was starting.
Interesting, but wouldn't higher salaries be cancelled out by the higher inflation?
Yes, but there might be a shift in power. It can have a progressive effect as long as there are enough jobs. Everyone will become more poor in absolute terms for sure. It could lead to more domestic productivity enhancing investments, which hopefully will lead to better education and work conditions.
But to be fair, nobody knows what will happen. We're all just guessing and hoping. Usually the poor get fucked no matter what. It's a gamble. But the current trade balance is for sure unsustainable and it relies on military domination (which also is unsustainable).
Could you better explain this cause-effect relationship between higher tariffs coupled with reduced migration and increased blue-collar salaries?