How much of a 'pay cut' will you take to 'make America great qgain'?

I want to re-up this. I posted it on Facebook  the other day knowing some would see it as a feel-good reinforcing their view and some would dismiss it. But I was hoping all would stop and think a minute.

Because it is right and wrong -- on both counts.

It's true too many, including the media, parrot or at least let it go without hard questioning "they stole." And too many fervently believe the evil ultra wealthy are to be blamed.
But few to none tell you the other hard truth: Americans, we have been living above our means for several decades. I don't mean beyond our income but beyond the global economy. And now, hastened by the Keystone Cops, it's coming home to roost.

> As to "they stole." Yes, other countries have tariffs. Some are weaponized, as are other policies. But by and large the rest of the world works cheaper than we do.So resources tend to flow in those directions, especially when much of what's involved is lower cost goods that come close to commodity level. (Not all, of course. But the labor to assemble them is fungible.) We didn get it stolen. We largely gave it away because we wanted to live a better life in what became a consumpion, and now an "experience," economy.
> As to the ultra rich, no sympathy here. Companies cut and ran, mostly because they could make more money by producing cheaper and selling to a society willing to spend more. By and large, they really didn't give a darn about workers, thus things like the Rust Belt. But, you know, we've been through this before. See the Gilded Age. It's just that the ultra wealthy then decided to take advantage of people domestically and not flee overseas. So why we'd expect any different? Economics and capitalism are like tigers -- they can't change their stripes because those assumptions of maximizing profits, which means 1) squeezing variable costs (much of it labor) and converting it to fixed capital and 2) that capital flows to where it can get the best return, are the core beliefs. Changing, even seriously challenging, those would mean upending the entire system in which we profess to believe or at least operate.
> To some extent (you can decide s lot or a little) you've been lied to by leaders who frame this as manufacturing and leave out services. etc., in which we have a trade surplus. And those services/professional jobs, which on aggregate allowed us to live the relative high life, were by and large created by the ultra wealthy (in most cases, it's how they became ultra wealthy). Didn't hear a lot of complaining about that.
> Having said that, manufacturing is as strategically important as who is getting your data from TikTok. If nothing else, we learned that from two world wars. Trump et al. may jabber on about the American worker, but defense/national security is what this is all about. But ...
> Yeah, we really need to be able to make guns, tanks and warships with minimal reliance on others. But the wars of the future are increasingly to be fougt digitally and with digitally adjacent weapons like drones. Not only does that get us back to the labor cost issue, but it also raises some thorny questions about other vital inputs like rare earth elements. Unlike iron ore and bauxite of the "good old days," we don't have enough of the eclectic stuff by far. (Thus, think Greenland, and it might become clearer what that's all about). And to full6 develop what we have domestically in some quest to be "independent," well, there's that higher US wage and other costs thing. Hmmm.
> And then there's manufacturing generally. If you've been payimg attention, hindreds of business owners have now repeatedly told us they simply cannot buy what they need domestically, or find someone to make it. And if they can, the price s prohibitive. And the economics of onshoring, even protected by tariffs, just ain't fhere

There's more. We could talk, for instance, about decades of government incentives, both direct and via policy, that effectively encouraged a lot of how things have developed.

But what I'm trying to get across is that while it's easy to sloganeer and play the blame game, global trade and economics is a very complicated weave, and you can't just pull a string and not expect to get a hole -- or even have the entire thing unwind. The blunderbuss approach doesn't work either. It takes surgical and diplomatic skill amd targeted policy/sanctions. Even if we give the current administration the benefit of thinking there may have needed to be an "OK, now that I've got your attention," moment, this still was not the way to continue doing it.

We can debate American "exceptionalism," but it's clear that for many reasonss over the past 80 years the US economy, despite some rocky moments, has been special. We have become wealthy, relative to the globsl economy, off our productivity gains and ability to innovate while we heard few objections to losing manuacturing.

Because it meant we could continue getting cheap stuff.

(Did you even think about it, let alone think about and discuss, with snyone, the implications? If you did, pat yourself on the back. Or were you just vaguely aware, if at all, did a little tut-tut whenever mention of it came up, and rhen go back to hitting the stores or the "buy" button?)

But as exceptional as we might think we are, we no longer live in a walled garden. We can't be isolationist because, if nothing else, unlike iron, aluminum and similar, we don't have the raw materials, or at least enough of them,. And the shift in making stuff has been and will continue to be much more about natural economic flows.

We have largely become a brain economy in whatever form -- data, knowledge, services, even retail -- you want to frame it

The tragedy is that we largely ignored and left behind those from the industrial economy, the ones that could make a good living without having to have a bachelor's degree that now largely has become little more than a screening tool. Thus, we -- and I mean we, all of us as a society, have to own it --  pushed generations into higher ed, helping to fuel the arms race and incessant inflation there. Again, a complicated discussion for another day.

And if you think all this will just get better if countries can be forced to get their living standards closer to the US, and as a result, companies and investors see more upside onshoring at least some production, wait till they decide it's cheaper to "develop" Africa.

Because the hard truth remains that when it comes to making "stuff" we have overpriced ourselves, and if we want to keep going down this road, we're going to have to take a "pay cut." Ten percent? Twenty? Maybe 30? Otherwise, capital *will* flow ro where it can make the best return. (Remember when Walmart used to tout how it was selling "American" products? Seen much of that lately? Wonder why.)

So to "make America great again," how much are you willing to give up? Get back to me after you've logged off of Temu, Shein, Amazon, etc.