Come on, this isn't the thread for it. People don't vote for Trump because they're ignorant or stupid, it's because they're desperate. And if you don't believe that's the case, I'll go spend a day in rural West Virginia with you and show you first hand.
As an American, I despise the man, but fully support his efforts at tempering globalism and clamping down on H1Bs. I don't have to like him to judge his policies on a case by case basis.
This "globalism" you're quick to demonize is one of the greatest forces for progress the world has seen. The world's poverty rates, starvation rates, sicknesses, childhood death rates, illiteracy rates, etc. have dropped like a sack of potatoes as a result of global trade. Nationalism and xenophobia, while definitely common in the 1950's, aren't the tools to bring back the middle class of that era.
Tell that to the midwestern industrial towns, who for decades have massive job and population declines, and who see year after year of opiate deaths that exceed (in each year!!) the deaths from the Vietnam war in total, as a result of economic hopelessness. [0]
You talk about death rates. The suicide rate of working class white Americans has been sky rocketing [1]
You can ignore these and many many other data points to assume a narrative of unceasing improvement, but millions of people would rightly see that as nonsense. [2]
The towns who are relying on cheaper steel and aluminum imports to build air conditioning units for the rest of America?
Or the ones relying upon cheaper steel and aluminum to build cars? Or Airplanes?
Sure, it sucks to be Pittsburgh when steel imports compete against the steel industry. But its great for literally every other industrial town in the USA. There are far more USERS of steel than there are makers of steel.
Tell me: do you think the 25% price increase on imported steel (helping Pittsburgh, and almost no one else) is worth the Chinese tariff on Pork, Nuts, Wine, and other agricultural products (aka: the majority of rural American's exports)?
Pittsburgh is a blueprint for the rest of the country in this regard. It sucked to be Pittsburgh in 1970-1990. Today, Pittsburgh is almost unrecognizable from the Steel City, at least in economic terms, and the county's unemployment rate is right around the national average.
> helping Pittsburgh, and almost no one else
The help to Pittsburgh would be pretty marginal; US Steel isn't even a top 5 employer in the region, and a lot of those jobs are suits that scale logarithmically with output. US Steel employs about the same number of people as Carnegie Mellon, which isn't even a particularly large university among R1 institutions.
But China already has far higher tariffs on many goods, so the deal isn't equal already. To extend your point, I think we need to go further.
Higher oil prices in 2008 did what? Increased domestic oil production, massively.
We'll see this in steel, and we should take measures to do the same for other industries by equalizing tariffs vs China.
But back to my point about globalization leading to massive outsourcing of jobs to China, then leading to massive economic dissolution to large swaths of the country. We can't all be "coders".. So what's the solution?
We "buy local" by spending a little bit higher prices on food and hipster coffee & craft beer and restaurants etc. Why can't we do the same, at the margins for all sorts of industries. Is that "more expensive" than dealing with epidemic levels of Opioid addictions and corresponding healthcare and other costs? The current situation is not working.. or more specifically, it is not working for a particular group of people in any way whatsoever.
As you can see, the US is increasing manufacturing steadily (with exception of the 2008 recession).
The problem is that we've got fewer jobs that produce MORE than we did before. The issue is that the USA is getting incredibly more efficient at manufacturing.
Consider the relatively labor-intensive job of farming. With innovations like "Plant Tape", what used to be a 10-person job is now the job of ~3 people and one tractor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzHo80bO-sU
And said ~3 people+tractor will work more efficiently and get more work done than 10-people in the "old way". Fewer and fewer people are needed to work anymore. That's the problem.
> We can't all be "coders".. So what's the solution?
You seem to have confused the current opioid epidemic as being caused by globalism, or economic hopelessness as you put it.
None of your sources link those two, and U.S. unemployment is at a record low so I'm not sure what the point is you're trying to make here is. Yes, the opioid epidemic exists, but nobody was saying here that it doesn't, so why are you introducing it?
All that says is that joblessness can be one of many factors in the opioid epidemic - it doesn't make a very strong case for it and still comes off as a fishing trip.
It also doesn't explain why GP is introducing the opioid epidemic as a consequence of globalism.
Are you surprised that people are upset when resources that used to be local are spread thinly across the globe? Forgive them, when they don't jump for joy.
You ignore the very real feeling they must be having when they can't afford a home. You ignore how they must feel when they put off marriage, and having children, because they're living paycheck to paycheck. You ignore how it must feel to wonder if you'll ever retire, feeling like you just barely missed the "good times". Its happening in our country, in our neighborhoods, to good people. It's no wonder Trump's slogan was "Make America Great Again". People eat that shit up right now. The standard of living is dropping and the middle and lower classes are feeling it the worst.
But hurray, global poverty is down.
There's a real dilution to the western experience happening right now and it's naïve to brush off the woes of your countryman with the idealistic perspective of a global poverty lift.
The wealthiest 20% of Americans have experienced the opposite of dilution over the past 40 years. Meanwhile the other 80% kept voting for policies that were actively working against spreading the income surplus more evenly.
When they finally woke up to what’s happening, the blame goes on Chinese and Africans — because anything else would be suspiciously close to an argument for socialism.
> Meanwhile the other 80% kept voting for policies that were actively working against spreading the income surplus more evenly.
That would be a fair criticism, but I don't see any major party candidates advocating for wealth redistribution. Maybe if someone was allowed to offer an argument for limited socialism then we could actually vote on it and try it out.
The only semi-socialist candidate in recent memory who came close to winning the primary was railroaded through a combination of systems that favor the status quo (superdelegates), a media that alternately ignored and attacked his candidacy, and a party that actively schemed against him while nominally allowing him to run.
All this after we elected a president who ran as the "change" candidate and promised to hold big banks accountable, only to stick the taxpayers with the bailout bill, increase the scope of domestic spying programs, and implement a flawed health care scheme dreamed up by the Republicans.
I can understand why people are pissed. I can also understand why some might choose to vote for their narrow self-interest, given the state of our democracy.
George Carlin said it well: "Good honest hard-workin people CONTINUE -- these are people of modest means -- continue to elect these RICH COCKSUCKERS who don't GIVE a fuck about them."[1].
I can't say that I didn't feel bad for them but this has been long time coming. How come countries like Germany are at the same time booming, is it because there is something intrinsically different about the two populations? We are not just leaves in a stream floating around aimlessly, the people themselves have to try and change the current status quo. If the system in place does not provide a way to do it or does it inefficiently (how I view Trump election win) it does a disservice to its people.
It disgusts me how any comment like yours that goes against the status quo here is downvoted,and if you are lucky enough to get a reply, it will inevitably avoid your points and just pivot to the same preferred talking points. Ironically, the people here expect uneducated laborers from middle America to completely understand a complex world when they themselves can't participate in good faith in an intellectually honest discussion.
Who will be the first to jump for the report button boys?
The HN voting system only works when most participants can keep an open mind. Unfortunately when it comes to politics it's hard for people to keep an open mind.
If I am wrong then tell me where I am wrong - but don't downvote comments just because they make you feel uncomfortable.
Every time I make a pro bitcoin or pro blockchain comment on HN I get downvoted to hell. So much for open minds here. Seems people are very touchy feely on politics, blockchain or anything else against the grain of the majority.
Global trade is neither going away nor will there be billions more starving babies if we change our trade policies to protect ourselves against totalitarian regimes who have considerably more selfish interests than us.
Most of his votes came from the same place that most of any other Republican candidate's votes come from, including the ones that lost. Most of the swing towards the Republican candidate that caused him to win, unlike John McCain and Mitt Romney who also had the support of those wealthy Republicans, came from working class and less well off voters.
Nobody is claiming that most of his voters are industrial midwestern working class. It is the net change from recent Republican candidates that point to those class of voters.
And it is most certainly this group that explains why he won. He won Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. You realize that hasn't happened in quite a while for a Republican right?
Yes, because the H1Bs are the reason people in rural West Virginia are suffering. People are suffering because the labor movement in this country was effectively killed. Trump and his policies are anti-labor and will not do anything to improve their position in life.
> Yes, because the H1Bs are the reason people in rural West Virginia are suffering.
There is a huge amount of semi-skilled IT work that has been shifted to India. Enough to employ millions in the US.
And this kind of work is a good stepping stone to higher skilled IT work.
A large proportion of this work would never have shifted without H1B/L1. If you work at one of the big body shops you will see how they constantly rotate Indian developers between India and the US.
The outsourcing of the late 90s and early 00s never would have happened without this.
> isn’t h1b a visa to allow you to work in the US?
Yes, and the professional services companies (the body shops I was referring to above) need people on-site in the US. They act as the bridge between the client and offshore workers.
During the outsourcing craze it was incredibly common to bring over a team from India, spend 6-12 months training them up, and then lay off the American workers.
I am not sure you have done your research. Trump's incompetence is ironically helping Indian outsourcers as they can easily abide by Specialty Occupation and Employer Employee control guidance specified by H1. Trump's policy actually is ending up hurting folks who work in Googles and Amazons of the world in related positions like Data Scientist, Growth Makeeteer etc. Because some of these roles can be challenged as "Specialty Occupation".
Further, claiming down on Indian outsourcing companies will not increase American jobs, but will lead to lower blended ratio and more offshoring. No one is ready to pay huge wages to maintain an aging ERP implementations
> Further, claiming down on Indian outsourcing companies will not increase American jobs
Of course it will - Indian outsourcing companies only have onshore staff because they have to.
> No one is ready to pay huge wages to maintain an aging ERP implementations
Costs were only 10-15% higher when the work was done locally. Companies will pay what they have to - I have no doubt American devs can be competitive in this space.
In the long term it will hasten the shift to cloud erp solutions and towards providers with a lower maintenance burden - IMO not a bad thing.
There are as many reasons people vote for someone as there are people voting.
But you can definitely find a contingent of Trump voters who are voting out of ignorance. It’s a whole theme of people saying they support the man for X while you can prove he’s anti-x.
That bothers me a lot less than his voting bloc that votes for him because he emboldens racist actions.
That said, I agree this is off topic & on the point of tariffs Trump has been quite transparent & consistent.
Desperate is why you'll pay a high price to get even a small increase in the chance of a good result.
Ignorant is why you'll choose an option with a worse chance of a better result on the axis of concern.
I think in many cases people ignored the things they couldn't deny that they didn't like about Trump out of desperation, but I think that in many cases they also voted for him out of ignorant belief that he offered a better chance for change they wanted in other dimensions (either ignorance of his likely policies or ignorance of the likely impacts of those policies on things they really wanted out of them.)
not that i think this is a good idea by any stretch, but i know some of my friends and i (outside the US) thought that one good that might come out of is that maybe now politicians and people alike see how totally broken everything about their elections and political system is and shake things up? so far, that’s not the result; there’s been a light shon on many of the failings (electoral college) and 0 change
it’s possible that people just wanted ANYTHING other than the political crap fest that was the whole cycle that world politics is stuck in, and trump was a way to shake things up and help change things in ~10years
For at LEAST the last 20 years, I've heard of people complain about "Trade Deficits" and the perils of "Globalization". Sure, Trump is an anti-globalist. But so are a TON of other people. My statements are aimed at anti-globalists in general.
> And if you don't believe that's the case, I'll go spend a day in rural West Virginia with you and show you first hand.
Indeed. And I've spent a week in rural Washington (Spokane). The town was decimated after a lumber mill closing, and tons of people were on welfare. Trust me dude, I've seen it myself. HUGE stretches of areas where the ONLY revenue source are Native American casinos and/or military bases, with closed down factories overlooking hills. There were some successful farmland, but that's not enough to sustain the economy of the population.
Now explain to me how raising Aluminum / Steel prices is going to improve the position of towns like this? Explain to me why a trade war with China / Europe / Other countries helps at all?
Good luck rust-belt / heartland. The trade war is coming. A good chunk of the rural folks have been wanting this for years. If Trump wasn't going to be elected last year, it'd only be a matter of time before some other "anti-globalist" came into power.
Unfortunately for the rural folks: they're the ones who depend most heavily on exports AND imports. Increase costs of steel and aluminum makes manufacturing more difficult. Sure, it helps the US Steel industry, but there are FAR more rural towns out there who rely upon cheap steel prices for the meager manufacturing that they already have. And obviously, if China stops buying Pork / Fruits / Wine / etc. etc. from American farmers, then those farmers are going to get hurt.
Its obviously lose/lose if you give it some thought. Alas, too many people are focused on the "Trade Deficit" to even care.
Trade deficit is also a red herring. It's accompanied by an equal and opposite capital account surplus. In this case China invests in US Treasuries. Now this is money you could be spending wisely -- funding obligations and social services, investing in education, investing in infrastructure, investing in new technology. The rhetorical question is what has the US been spending it on?
It's crystal clear what the problem is. It's not the trade deficit, which is simply a result of the market's way of allocating where capital and labor should be. The market is giving US laborers an extraordinary break -- let others be slaves, you take the capital. The problem is what the US has been doing with this capital.
> This specific issue has nothing to do with Trump.
I can certainly agree with that. In these sorts of discussions I work hard to ignore the 'people are complaining about ...' sorts of inputs because people complain about everything, it is hard to develop understanding from that.
However it is useful to understand economic value is changing. For example, gasoline was a 'waste product' of refining oil for kerosene[1]. When the economic value of gasoline changed, it changed how the companies were viewed. Nuclear power was once the power of the future with high economic value, until it was perceived (or maligned depending on your point of view) into being a threat to civilization.
So where does economic value arise? It is the ratio of the cost of production over the price of a good. So raising tariffs allows the cost of production of a foreign good to rise, and assuming the buyers are all trying to get the same price, the economic value of aluminum production goes up in the local (tariff free) economy.
So the price of aluminum goes up, and now it can be made profitably in Spokane, so an aluminum plant (mill?) opens up and jobs are created and the town becomes more prosperous.
With tariffs it is possible to raise the effective cost of any good to the point where it can be made profitably locally. However it requires that the local economy be able to pick up production. That is generally not a problem for the US economy, not as easily done on places like Brazil for example which can have high tariffs and still not have a local iPhone factory.
The rust belt folks believe that the country will switch to manufacturing things locally and consumers will eat the cost increase (or not eat, pun intended). They may be correct, they may not. Seems like we get the experiment regardless of our point of view.
> The rust belt folks believe that the country will switch to manufacturing things locally and consumers will eat the cost increase (or not eat, pun intended). They may be correct, they may not. Seems like we get the experiment regardless of our point of view.
They are simply not correct, unfortunately. There's no need to experiment.
The issue is not with manufacturing per se. Its with manufacturing JOBS. The USA is far more efficient today with computers / automation managing huge swaths of our manufacturing process. Even if we increase output dramatically, we won't make many jobs.
The sad fact is that automation is destroying that way of life. US Manufacturing is severely up over the past few decades. Aside from recessionary periods (2008, 2001, etc. etc.), the US has constantly manufactured more and more things.
We've just managed to do it with fewer and fewer people.
Be careful of confirmation bias, it is easy to just say they are wrong but it is important to them that the experiment is run.
Your thesis seems to based on the assertion that 'jobs' are the desired outcome and you will get 'automation' instead.
I don't disagree, that is certainly a possible outcome but having recently read an interesting position paper on Tesla where much of their model 3 woes were being pinned on being too automated it suggests that it isn't as simple as ordering up a few robots and you're done.
Further many of the steel and aluminum plants in the US have been automated as a means of cutting cost, and yet are still made idle by lower cost foreign steel and aluminum. So perhaps it may be a small number of positions that are brought back just by turning the factory back on. Not to mention material transport, etc.
All I'm trying to say is that these things are often more nuanced than they appear on the surface.
> Be careful of confirmation bias, it is easy to just say they are wrong but it is important to them that the experiment is run.
Sure. And its important to me that the USA remains strong and the best in the world. Unfortunately, their perspectives are weakening the USA and therefore, I'll work against them politically.
Various US citizens are entitled to their opinion. And I'm entitled to my opinion of those people.
10K mile view, automation is part of it but offshoring jobs is also part of it. My vehicle was manufactured in Mexico. The one I owned before that was manufactured in the US. The manufacture is still highly automated, but it's cheaper to do in Mexico for various reasons, one being cheaper labor, another being no tariffs.
> one being cheaper labor, another being no tariffs.
The most important of which is that specialization is the key to efficiency.
The USA plants manufacture Ford F-150. But the Ford Fusion is manufactured in Mexico.
Having all of your plants in one city making the F150 and ONLY the F150 means parts for that vehicle are more readily available, more specialists who understand the process are grouped together, and the community grows as a whole.
Cars definitely need to be made per-country basis in general. The USA has slightly different regulations than UK (Driver seat for instance).
Often times: when a plant moves to Mexico, its more so that Ford can increase production of a particular model in a particular area. Scaling up the F150 to even greater production numbers? Well, its cheaper to move the assembly lines to another country, and then grow the F150 plant.
Spokane is not rural. Newport is rural, Yakima is kind of rural, but Spokane has 500,000 people and a grimy downtown. Spokane’s current decline, vs. when I was a kid in the 80s, is due to a decline in...manufacturing. Also, Kaiser as a major aluminum processing center there , fed by cheap hydro power from columbia river dams, so the steel/aluminum should be of some benefit (though that feeds a Boeing operation that could be hurt by retaliation tariffs). (note: I don’t support the tariffs, just pointing out the facts).
Looking back at the map, I landed in Spokane airport and then traveled westward for 2 hours. We passed the Grand Coulee Dam and I stayed in and around that area for roughly a week and got to interact with the locals.
Omak was the actual town I stayed in. Apologies for getting the geography wrong. I had to look up the map and actually remember the names to get this stuff right... I'll check a map next time I start listing off Geography I'm not familiar with...
Specifically for the area I was in: the locals were mostly concerned with a Lumber Mill that shut down relatively recently. Certainly not a town that is affected by the Aluminum or Steel tariffs, and certainly one that will be affected by China's counter-tariffs in Nuts and Dried Fruit. Lots of farms in that area.
You're right though: they have lots of cheap power due to the huge Grand Coulee Dam, so the area should be theoretically a good area for manufacturing.
Ah...that makes much more sense. There is nothing from Spokane to Wenatchee along that route. Spokane is Washington State's second largest airport, but like many airports is located outside of the city.
Washington has been in the metal refining business because of cheap hydro since WW2, Boeing's primary operations are in Washington (Seattle, some in Spokane) because of it.
Also, most of the farms in that part of Washington focus on apples, berries and, oddly enough, grass feed for Kobei beef, nuts are more of a California thing.
Those are largely mega-farms run similar to mega-corporations, and they utilize a lot of immigrant labor. There are a few independent farmers around eeking out a living, but not many.
Capitalism generally favors mega-farms though, due to the efficiencies of scale.
Larger corporations can more reliably offer wages, better plan for trends, better analyze market conditions, afford the latest technologies, etc. etc.
Traditionally, when companies got too big in the USA, the regulators would split them up to allow competitors to flourish. This sort of splitting doesn't happen these days however.
>This sort of splitting doesn't happen these days however.
They sure haven't. Last real breakup was AT&T in the early 1980s? I think that's my biggest gripe with politics today. Neither party is willing to break up these big companies and often gives the green-light for mega mergers without much fuss.
Bringing this back on track. If the market tanks before November, there is a higher chance of dissent against Trumpism, since he tied himself so much to the market, and in a very literal sense, is causing it to tank by policy and by embodying political risk.
Latest figures show a $13B trade deficit with the EU for January of 2018. One month.
Of course, this doesn't account for the several billion we shove into their economy with the tens of thousands of troops and contractors stationed throughout the continent, paying dearly for the privilege of being there.
Nor the trillions of dollars we spend to keep the Russians out, and the Germans from misbehaving. Funny how much thanks we now get from younger Europeans for keeping Europe (mostly) at peace for the longest period in its history, along with rebuilding it.
But I don't even need to show more facts and figures. As an American who has lived in the EU several times, let me tell you just one example of what you'll see in, say, Germany:
About 90% of the cars there are made by them (VW, BMW, Opel, Mercedes, etc), with a few Fords and Peugeot, some Fords and maybe some Toyotas rounding out the other 10%.
I'm looking into my US parking lot right now - I see about 90% foreign cars, and a few US SUVs.
At the time, Mercedes-Benz and Nissan were already building a $1.4 billion plant near Puebla, while BMW was planning a $1-billion assembly plant in San Luis Potosí. Additionally, Audi began building a $1.3 billion factory near Puebla in 2013.[6]...
Funny how only one politician, in my near history, has dared to speak of this in public...
I'm a "buy a US car" guy and have been since I've been buying cars. Sadly, if you want to support US workers, buying a US car probably isn't the best option anymore.
In the modern supply chain the distinction makes no sense whatsoever.
I have former colleagues who are working on a project for Ford with a team spread out across the entire globe: From Michigan to Mexico; with developers in the UK; Germany; India and Japan.
Where is this stuff made? Everywhere at once, and all at the same time.
I think they were bought and then sold by GM, similar to how Chrysler and Mercedes were once paired up. But Opels are still designed and made in Germany (or possibly Poland now).
But this is all just financial games that the parent companies use - Opel never employed any actual Americans other than some financial folks, I'm guessing.
