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[Baffler]

Eh. There's reason to develop a domestic manufacturing industry more (though, do note, the US output in terms of raw goods has barely stagnated at best, and for most things have maintained or increased. We have a domestic manufacturing industry, it's just steadily employing less people even as it grows), but what there isn't is a way to do it without losing any number of things on the net. Price increases, job loss, political and trade repercussions, so on, so forth. If you're demanding companies produce in a specific place they're going to lose out to companies that aren't so fettered, and that's going to cost one way or another. And what we don't have right now is an administration willing to pay that cost, which means the population supposedly trying to be helped with that industry gets screwed over by the attempt. Even if we did it would still be a pretty bad idea. Trying to get more jobs out of an industry that has been steadily needing less of them for the same output is a fool's errand.

As for the "so be it" to getting into a trade war. I'm among the people that actually have to live with the consequences of that instead of just be inconvenienced by it, and it's a position that can frankly go fuck itself. Too much of my family and too many of my neighbors are close enough to the edge the bullshit that would come out of that would start putting them in graves. If that's what it takes to give manufacturing folks more work they can go screw themselves, never mind anyone claiming it would, particularly to a degree that would save areas that were dependent on it and didn't start transitioning when it left, is lying out of their ass. If "just tax the rich" was an actual bloody option we wouldn't be having the problems we are.

You seem to be willfully ignoring what that "given time" at the end of your spiel means, rp. It's not happy fun times. Some of us actually have to live with it, and if there's other options -- and there are -- I'd really rather friggin' not.

The "other options" are simply to allow someone other than you and yours to be "put in graves" as you so eloquently put it. Or do I misinterpret your first paragraph and previous posts, where you seem to say middle America has one foot in already and we should just let it happen?

You're allowed to believe that. You're hardly the only one after all, but the horse you're on while proclaiming it is a bit distasteful.

[Frumple]

Bloody hell baff, you've seen me rant on this before. No, that's not the answer. You need education, investment, welfare to make the interim and those necessarily slipping through the cracks bearable. Basically everything the GOP isn't doing and manufacturing can no longer provide to the extent the areas need it. What we don't need is fucking the rest of the country just to fuck middle america marginally slower, assuming the efforts directed by republican policy even manage that much.

[smjjames]

The thing though is that a trade war would affect everybody, rich and poor alike, just to different degrees. Also, we're not talking about some specific type of import like Chinese steel or Canadian cheese, we're talking about tariffs on EVERYTHING.

There would also be no real winners in a trade war as it'd be a game of chicken to see who gives out first.

Bloody hell baff, you've seen me rant on this before. No, that's not the answer. You need education, investment, welfare to make the interim and those necessarily slipping through the cracks bearable. Basically everything the GOP isn't doing and manufacturing can no longer provide to the extent the areas need it. What we don't need is fucking the rest of the country just to fuck middle america marginally slower, assuming the efforts directed by republican policy even manage that much.

All of that won't fix things if there's a trade war going on because it has no effect on the trade war. I get what you're saying, but it's not relevant in a trade war situation.

Edit: Seems like theres two threads of conversation here, one on tariffs and trade wars, and bringing manufacturing back and the GOP being shitty in general.

[Frumple]

... if I said it was, it wasn't intentional. The bits on manufacturing and the societal miniature suicide of a trade war were meant to be separate things.

E: Ah, as the edit noticed. Ah well.

[Baffler]

Bloody hell baff, you've seen me rant on this before. No, that's not the answer. You need education, investment, welfare to make the interim and those necessarily slipping through the cracks bearable. Basically everything the GOP isn't doing and manufacturing can no longer provide to the extent the areas need it. What we don't need is fucking the rest of the country just to fuck middle america marginally slower, assuming the efforts directed by republican policy even manage that much.

Welfare, education, and investment (I assume you mean roads and bridges and such) are, as you say, only stopgaps. Certainly not a solution for more than a small few. Without actual economic activity those places are dead. They might have their needs met, but they're not producing anything. They're extra, like the farmers displaced during the early industrial revolution, except there's no factory in the city to go to this time. Manufacturing isn't going to do it like it used to, but what else is there? Producing what we need for ourselves, at least where we can, is the only useful way forward I can see in a world where American exports are becoming less and less competitive. Maybe even targetting heavy taxes to slow down the process of automatization and convincing other countries to do the same.

[Reelya]

Welfare isn't a stopgap. Money flows upwards. Giving money to those with the least money generates the highest amount of GDP of any spending. Because someone has to have a job feeding those people. That's based on real measurable economic effects, and since the money cycles around, it's stable.

The idea of permanent economic growth is actually the pipedream.

[Neonivek]

Welfare isn't a stopgap. Money flows upwards. Giving money to those with the least money generates the highest amount of GDP of any spending. Because someone has to have a job feeding those people.

Yeah Welfare probably earns a society more money then it spends on it.

Because without it the drain on society would be much more immense.

[Reelya]

Getting rid of welfare would be a push down on wages. The amount worker's save on taxes would be offset by having less bargaining power. Because even if you never take welfare, you have the theoretical ability to, and so do your co-workers. It's an *option*, and the option merely existing gives you increased bargaining power, even if the option is never actuated.

This is the real reason business owners are so dead against welfare, but they'll never say it to your face. The tax burden is fairly minimal, and businesses get all that back anyway: it's stimulus money. Companies like that the government spends stimulus capital. They like the government spending part of it. What they don't like is that poor people get it, and that workers can fall back on it. Because that tips the workplace bargaining power in the favor of employees. The whole anti-welfare thing from employers is merely an anti-employee tactic.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Regardless of whether it's a stopgap or not, the best singular way to ensure economic activity would be promotion of service economy employee-owned businesses. It localizes labor that will always be needed and does not require the impossibility of mass industrial revival.

And the only problem is that it undermines transnational corporations.

[Frumple]

Welfare, education, and investment (I assume you mean roads and bridges and such) are, as you say, only stopgaps. Certainly not a solution for more than a small few. Without actual economic activity those places are dead. They might have their needs met, but they're not producing anything. They're extra, like the farmers displaced during the early industrial revolution, except there's no factory in the city to go to this time. Manufacturing isn't going to do it like it used to, but what else is there? Producing what we need for ourselves, at least where we can, is the only useful way forward I can see in a world where American exports are becoming less and less competitive. Maybe even targetting heavy taxes to slow down the process of automatization and convincing other countries to do the same.

Nah, investment was business investment significantly more than infrastructure (though they're hand in hand to a fair degree since the latter is part of what's depressing the former for the areas in question). Subsidies to bring in new industry, tax breaks for retraining or whatev', stuff along those lines. Trying to turn insular isn't going to work, especially not to do anything but stabilize things with the areas significantly worse off or less populated. You need to incentivize economy to come to the areas in question, have working populations they're looking for and environments they can function in, so on and so forth. And if manufacturing isn't managing that you find something that will. Or start working to get your populations out of the areas that aren't going to be able to support themselves anymore, since they're no longer viable (and I'unno about you, but I care a hell of a lot more about the people around here than the rotting barns and swampland).

Like, the flat fact is that if these areas are going to not die, they have to transition. Change the nature of the work being done there, and how the population interacts with it. Localizing production isn't some kind of panacea or solution, it's intentionally strangling the size and strength of your economy, limiting it to what you can produce in that area and largely denying yourself access to all the shit elsewhere you could be leveraging to improve things. If that's your solution you've already decided to roll over and die, and what you should actually be doing is figuring out how to get your people out rather than trying to trap them under a corpse. At least that way the people that can manage to still stick around don't drag everyone else under as part of it.

[Reelya]

But ... worker ownership = Communism.

... Kidding ... There was one KGB "sleeper" agent in America who stayed in the USA after the cold war ended. He recalls fondly working for a big insurance agency, because they reminded him of his communist homeland. It's actually not that surprising that large corporations strongly resemble how the USSR operated. Corporations telling you that worker's not being under the bosses thumbs are commies is basically the most hypocritical thing ever, because those corporations in fact resemble Uncle Joe Stalin's operation much more than any co-op / collective does.

[smjjames]

Welfare isn't a stopgap. Money flows upwards. Giving money to those with the least money generates the highest amount of GDP of any spending. Because someone has to have a job feeding those people. That's based on real measurable economic effects, and since the money cycles around, it's stable.

The idea of permanent economic growth is actually the pipedream.

Doesn't permanent economic growth require something like infinite resources? Which may require infinite people as well, depending on how you define resource. Though you may be thinking more like high growth like the 3 or 4% that Trump and Co. are dreaming of attaining, and THAT would be the pipedream which requires infinite resources.

Though really, permanent growth is going to require infinite resources (be it space, food, etc) regardless because the growth is going to hit some sort of limit eventually, even if it's finite and really high.

[Reelya]

4% per year would require doubling the economic output every 20 years. Of course we're considering inflation-adjusted growth here.

Personally I think part of the problem is "affluenza". The fact that it's very easy to have too much ... stuff. Since population growth is flatlined, who is going to be consuming twice as much stuff in 2035 as now? I also think that AI and associated optimization tech are going to be able to be used to cut waste. But one person's waste is another person's profit. 40% of food in America is wasted, with better planning we could halve that. But then, the food industry isn't going to like that very much.

EDIT This is relevant:
https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/17/03/28/1532230/evidence-that-robots-are-winning-the-race-for-american-jobs

The industry most affected by automation is manufacturing. For every robot per thousand workers, up to six workers lost their jobs and wages fell by as much as three-fourths of a percent, according to a new paper by the economists, Daron Acemoglu of M.I.T. and Pascual Restrepo of Boston University. It appears to be the first study to quantify large, direct, negative effects of robots. The paper is all the more significant because the researchers, whose work is highly regarded in their field, had been more sanguine about the effect of technology on jobs.
...
They found that each new robot added to the workforce meant the loss of between 3 and 5.6 jobs in the local commuting area. Meanwhile, for each new robot added per 1,000 workers, wages in the surrounding area would fall between 0.25 and 0.5 percent.

Basically some economists who previously (up to last year) argued that robots will be offset with new, better jobs cruched the actual numbers and found that it's bullshit. Things like tax incentives etc and lower regulations aren't going to bring the jobs back to middle America.

[wierd]

Not really. Capital growth far exceeds material growth or labor growth in the US, and has for some time now. The "smart money", is investing in "money."

You only need an inexhaustible supply of currency, and activity requiring currency to drive the demand for currency. Even still, there is no such thing as either of those. While currency might be theoretically inexhaustible, it is based on debts/promise of repayment. There is only so much debt a person can get into, or even theoretically be able to pay back, so not in actual practice. Similar with economic activity that drives demand for currency. There is only so much raw material that can be utilized at any one time, etc-- so there is indeed some limit on the maximum possible economic activity.  So, quite right, the notion of eternal economic growth is the pipedream.

Concerning robots--

NO. The financial industry has been hit hard by intelligent software agents, replacing human investment brokers and the like as well. Automation hits everyone, everywhere. Only those vocations where robots are, for some reason other than cost, not able to replace humans acceptably are safe from the scourge of automation destroying jobs.

About 4 years ago now, Oxford University ran a pilot study into the effects of automation on the US economy. The results were not pretty. They estimated that 25 to 30% of US employment will be replaced with robots or software agents within 20 years. They additionally torpedo the canard that new jobs will replace the old ones, citing work by several of their peers indicating that at an increasing rate, college educated students are seeking employment traditionally held by significantly less educated people, as the jobs that are supposed to be being created for them, are not being created.

http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Future_of_Employment.pdf

[Reelya]

That's why I said inflation-adjusted growth. Capital growth without underlying productive growth is merely an increase in numbers in bank accounts. But governments can point at the short-term numbers and say they look good, even if they're meaningless.