We're collectively waking up to the fact America's manufacturing industry is in dire straits, and it needs our immediate attention, and it gets worse as people retire and leave their positions...
We're collectively waking up to the fact America's manufacturing industry is in dire straits, and it needs our immediate attention, and it gets worse as people retire and leave their positions unfilled.
This Youtube video is really insightful about the current situation, showing us how hard it is to find made in America components, but how it's still possible if someone puts in enough effort
At one point they talk to this company called Mantle, who do 3D metal printing, which sounds very cool and innovative, their website is https://mantle3d.com/
As usual, I'll point out I have no relation with any of these people or companies, it's just something we should all be paying attention to imho
It really is a travesty we have Golden Age Fallacy: The President in power. We absolutely need to bring back manufacturing to the US but Destin makes a great point that what we actually need to...
It really is a travesty we have Golden Age Fallacy: The President in power. We absolutely need to bring back manufacturing to the US but Destin makes a great point that what we actually need to bring back is the skills.
It was interesting when he got into tool and die manufacturing because my ex father in law worked in the US for a German based tool and die company (Trumpf with an f). When he was showing how that kid used to be a machine operator and how he was moving to designing tools, that was literally my ex fil's job, designing tools (well, managing managers that manage people who design tools).
That work is indeed challenging, and the factory he works out of is truly state of the art.
That wraps back to my bigger point, that we need to focus on education, training, and mentorship and none of that will be happening under the current administration. The Golden Age Fallacy tells us we do not need to learn or grow, we just have to turn back the wheels of time.
This is a really good video. It highlights and shows the struggle of manufacturing things in the USA, even for something as "simple" as a grill scrubber! It touches on deeper topics without...
This is a really good video. It highlights and shows the struggle of manufacturing things in the USA, even for something as "simple" as a grill scrubber! It touches on deeper topics without getting political on why this was hard and where this manufacturing went.
I don't know what the answer is to solve this. The hyper-consumerist culture in the US where everything has to be as cheap as possible is bad for us. It's bad for jobs in the US. It's bad for the environment. But the average American is barely getting by and increasing the cost of every objects is political suicide.
I don't think this framing really makes sense. It's not in the range of "it's just a little more expensive". The reality is that manufacturing something in the US is 2 to 3x more expensive. And...
The hyper-consumerist culture in the US where everything has to be as cheap as possible is bad for us
I don't think this framing really makes sense. It's not in the range of "it's just a little more expensive". The reality is that manufacturing something in the US is 2 to 3x more expensive. And not just more expensive, but slow, and less flexible. A 2x increase in costs is not something that's just "oh, people just want cheap things".
The reality is, if you want the US to have manufacturing to exists in the US, you're swimming upstream of a very basic economic reality that has existed since the dawn of civilization: the power of comparative advantage and trade. To do so, then, you need to be willing to massively subsidize the US manufacturing industry.
That means that everyone in the US will have a substantial amount of their income taken away in the form of taxes and that every year where we're not in war with the rest of the world or in a global pandemic, that money is essentially spent on nothing. And if many, and indeed perhaps the majority, of people would not make that choice - fair's fair.
Geopolitically, the context in which this discussion occurs mainly is about over-reliance on China. But within that sphere, another path is to form more diverse trade links with other developing nations that can be, or become, competitive with China, and to foster those connections and those countries.
Of course, if the negative side you're trying to hedge is that the US is enemies against EVERYONE in the world... then yeah, prepare to pay and become poorer for this self-reliance. Is what it is.
And I would add, with significantly worse QA/QC. Who wants a product that’s 2-3x more expensive with worse quality and reliability? The interesting thing is that many of these issues predate the...
And not just more expensive, but slow, and less flexible.
And I would add, with significantly worse QA/QC. Who wants a product that’s 2-3x more expensive with worse quality and reliability?
The interesting thing is that many of these issues predate the current era significantly. The founder of TSMC originally worked for Texas Instruments and noticed a large gap between TI’s US plant and their Japan plant back in the late 70s/early 80s, with the latter having both better quality and higher throughput. It’s part of why TSMC is now in Taiwan.
This suggests that there’s a cultural element at play. At some point, the US embraced mediocrity, and that impacts everything we do including manufacturing.
I think you have something with the cultural element. I seem to remember this sense of 'society looking down on' people with blue collar / manufacturing jobs combined with the rather harmful...
This suggests that there’s a cultural element at play. At some point, the US embraced mediocrity, and that impacts everything we do including manufacturing.
I think you have something with the cultural element. I seem to remember this sense of 'society looking down on' people with blue collar / manufacturing jobs combined with the rather harmful concept of 'unskilled labor' having, in my opinion, a rather severe case of scope creep.
Going through school, it felt like there was this push towards 'if you don't have a college degree you're without worth' and 'people without college degrees are stuck working with their hands and getting dirty for a living, barely making anything'.
So yes, at least from what I remember back then, there was definitely a sense of looking down on blue collar workers. No one wants to be looked down upon, and I can see that contributing to a drying up of new candidates for those fields.
I remember, collectively, another set of experiences early-ish in my life, before I started work in telecom. I had a string of short-term-ish jobs in manufacturing environments, ranging from a couple months to half a year, in manufacturing environments. All were temp jobs with minimum, or near-minimum wage pay and all were both very harsh on me and the management was clear in making me know I was disposable and replaceable. It was outright depressing.
I wasn’t alive to experience it and haven’t taken time to go down that rabbit hole, but I suspect that blue collar work being looked down on came about due to decreasing wages. Even today, in the...
I wasn’t alive to experience it and haven’t taken time to go down that rabbit hole, but I suspect that blue collar work being looked down on came about due to decreasing wages. Even today, in the US a person’s occupation represents a large chunk of their social worth, with jobs with low pay and little mobility being perceived as worth very little. You see people conflating their paycheck their importance on both ends of the scale all the time.
As I understand, the situation was quite different up through the 60s or so, with manufacturing paying very well (I’ve seen calculations that put a 50s autoworker as being paid more than modern senior software engineers, adjusted for inflation) and because most people only worked a handful of jobs over the course of their lives, upward mobility was of little importance. Manufacturing work was still hard, but much more respected.
As labor became devalued (largely thanks to the efforts of the Reagan administration), it lost respect and emphasis on obtaining credentials that allowed one to do white collar work became emphasized. Or at least, that’s my hunch about how things went.
The thing I don't get is how you solve this problem. People in countries with strong manufacturing bases aren't better paid in nominal wages. They have strong manufacturing bases because their...
The thing I don't get is how you solve this problem.
People in countries with strong manufacturing bases aren't better paid in nominal wages. They have strong manufacturing bases because their average wages are extremely low, so manufacturing is an extremely lucrative and attractive field that driven people compete for.
It was easy post-WW2 when we were literally the only mechanized country that came out of WW2 unscathed. Now, most countries have access to the equipment and education necessary to run a competitive manufacturing industry. Only some of them have the right market conditions though.
You're never going to get to a point where $4 an hour is an attractive wage in the US though. (At least I hope we don't). When wages rise in a country, manufacturing starts leaving because it's no longer competitive to manufacture goods there on a global market.
The obvious solution is tarrifs, but those have all sorts of horrible negative effects as we're living through firsthand in the US, and tarrifs to make US manufacturing competitive with Asia would be so astronomical that you may as well just embargo all trade with them.
I've heard people say "automation" as a solution, but that's just a pipe dream in my opinion. Sure, you can automate to make manufacturing more productive, but you still need qualified, interested people. More importantly, it's not like the US is the only country with access to automation. As soon as an aspect of the manufacturing chain can be automated, it quickly gets automated everywhere it's feasible to, and poorer countries still have much lower labor costs.
So what can you do to boost wages for manufacturing while remaining competitive on a global market? Honest question, because I really don't know.
I honestly think that we've been living in a fantasy land abberation for the past 70 years, where the US and it's western hegemony has been able to live extremely privileged, inflated lifestyles off of the backs of labor from the third world. As time goes on, and capital continues to flow from that hegemony to that third world, I suspect an equalization has to happen. It will likely be pretty jarring for most of us, having to live in a way the way thats more similar to what most of the world has had to endure for the past 70 years, rather than in a way similar to how our parents and grandparents lived.
Something the video points out is that its not just wages. We assume everything is made in China because of low wages, but it is also where the expertise is now. In the video he mentions that we...
Something the video points out is that its not just wages. We assume everything is made in China because of low wages, but it is also where the expertise is now. In the video he mentions that we used to do the work of creating the tooling in the US and then exporting the machinery to lower cost labor markets, but we've gone so far in abandoning manufacturing that the complex tools are now an import too.
To use a concrete example from the video, he was adamant about getting the injection molds made in the US. It didn't sound like he had much trouble finding a company that could put mold plates into a machine and operate it, but when he asked about getting the molds made he was told that they ship the files off to China and let China do the work of actually designing and creating the molds. When he further pushed saying that he really wanted the molds actually made in the US they told him "good luck". Not only could the injection molding company not do the mold creation, they couldn't even point him toward any company in the US that would make the most important thing to their business: the mold plates. He was being told to outsource to China not for price, but because that tool design skill has nearly evaporated from the US.
I could be gullible, but based on how hard a time the video had in sourcing simple things like bolts and injection mold plates I believe there is some truth in the embedded Tim Cook clip that claims part of why Apple manufactures in China is that the US doesn't even have the relevant field expertise to handle their complex tooling needs. I don't think that's even close to the whole story regarding those decisions, but it does seem believable that the talent is abroad.
I'm also vaguely reminded of an article posted a few months back about the Repebble watch. When I read that the process was to go to China and work directly with the design department of a Chinese manufacturer it seemed rather obvious that's what someone would do. In the past it may have been designed and tooled locally with the tooling exported to lower wage areas to run the machines, but now the expectation is that the knowledge has also gone abroad to the extent that it just felt like common sense to export even the technically skilled design processes.
It's not just wages. Not even close. There's also environmental laws (and concern) in the U.S. that don't exist in other countries. Things like strip mining in getting raw materials, or...
It's not just wages. Not even close. There's also environmental laws (and concern) in the U.S. that don't exist in other countries. Things like strip mining in getting raw materials, or environmentally damaging productions that require mitigation here that don't require that elsewhere. And then there are worker protections, where PPE and training are required here that aren't used overseas. There's laws here over operating machinery for excessive hours, over breaks, etc. Just look at all the sweatshop exposes we've seen from overseas, of child labor and what amounts to slave labor in factories.
There is no silver bullet, there are dozens of issues at play, and frankly the American public can't accept and won't accept egregious steps back in these areas unless we are neck deep in a war or recession. We had better all hope it doesn't come to that.
There are several countries with strong environmental laws and labor laws that still manage to have solid manufacturing industries. I'm not sure that it's possible to manufacture cheap landfill...
There are several countries with strong environmental laws and labor laws that still manage to have solid manufacturing industries. I'm not sure that it's possible to manufacture cheap landfill junk this way, but it's certainly possible to manufacture high-quality goods.
I'll take a shot at this: you need friendshoring and low cost of living. Friendshoring is necessary because ultimately, that's how you get buy-in from a larger scale of customers. Otherwise you...
So what can you do to boost wages for manufacturing while remaining competitive on a global market? Honest question, because I really don't know.
I'll take a shot at this: you need friendshoring and low cost of living.
Friendshoring is necessary because ultimately, that's how you get buy-in from a larger scale of customers. Otherwise you have a ton of parallel made-in-democracy efforts that all fail for lack of scale. Sounds simple enough, although not easy.
Cost of living directly ties into wages; if your workers can't pay rent, they'll ask for a raise or look for a job that doesn't leave them homeless. The US has a couple of special parasitic forces (healthcare, college debt) but what's pretty widespread in most countries right now is the cost of housing, and transport.
We need to get away from car-centric suburbia (A Traditional City Primer) because if cars are necessary, you're basically adding $15k/year to your labor costs. We also need to build more densely (and what do you know, traditional cities are more dense due to their much smaller streets!) and tamp down on NIMBYism (of which, a major cause is people being afraid development will increase car traffic and take up car parking slots). Reduce the minimum house/apartment size (if it's legal to live 4 to a house, it should be legal to build 4 quarter-sized houses), give builders permission by-right to build 1 storey above the street-average building height (so if the houses on Bobcat St average to 2 storeys, it should be automatically legal to build a 3 storey house there without waiting for approval or rezoning).
You're 100% right; we have been living inflated lifestyles. The thing is, a lot of that lifestyle is unnecessarily wasteful and doesn't even add to quality of life; if we're serious about making our manufacturing competitive with China then changing this is basically required. And right now, necessities are expensive, luxuries are cheap so reducing the cost of necessities is more useful than reducing the cost of luxuries.
What's more, I have a suspicion that necessities are pegged to wages - for instance, the cost of housing is largely limited by what people can bid for houses, so if everyone gets a raise then the auction for the same house will just go for a little bit higher. And the cost of construction labor is also largely dictated by the cost of rent/housing. So if we reduce the cost of living a bit, we increase wage pressure which then reduces the cost of living. Assuming the extra doesn't just go to increased profits.
I agree with all of this, but I don't think it's just blue-collar workers. In many office jobs, if you aren't management in some capacity (and sometimes even when you are) you aren't given much...
I agree with all of this, but I don't think it's just blue-collar workers. In many office jobs, if you aren't management in some capacity (and sometimes even when you are) you aren't given much dignity. Your opinion isn't respected, your pay is low, conditions feel dehumanizing. In most states, employment is at-will. You can be fired for pretty much anything and that's true of white-collar jobs too.
Bouncing from the mediocrity post above, I feel like that's at the heart of it. American workers in general are given very little dignity unless the position is deemed important somehow. There's not much respect paid to the front-line folks who do the front-line work. We saw that all over during the pandemic. So of course most workers don't take any pride in their work or feel invested in their places of employment. Those employers don't care much for them, and they are returning that sentiment.
70's/80's puts us under the Nixion through Reagan Era. So yeah, that sounds right around the shift from where unions were strong and employees were valued and kept for a career, into more of this...
At some point, the US embraced mediocrity, and that impacts everything we do including manufacturing.
70's/80's puts us under the Nixion through Reagan Era. So yeah, that sounds right around the shift from where unions were strong and employees were valued and kept for a career, into more of this job hooping economy of the mid 90's-'10's. Japan has had a rough economy for decades as well (and its culture can make it slow to adopt new technology), but its talent is top of the line because of strong labor laws that encourage the older career model.
tl;dr for below: 2-3x would be considered awesome in some industries. There's a handful of people trying to bring American mechanical watchmaking back. And when I say handful, I can name them on...
tl;dr for below: 2-3x would be considered awesome in some industries.
There's a handful of people trying to bring American mechanical watchmaking back. And when I say handful, I can name them on one hand: Roland Murphy, Cameron Weiss, and JN Shapiro. I don't really think Weiss's watches count as American; they're European parts imported, "finished", then assembled. Shapiro's are very American, but they're $70k+ and I've never heard of anyone buying one. Roland sells a relatively decent amount, so let's look one of his watches, the RGM 801/40.
The watch uses a movement that's 90% made in America. 10% of the parts are imported from Europe. That's actually very good, but not enough to qualify the watch as being made in the US. Not only that, but the movement is advertised as an in-house one while it's based on the Unitas/ETA 6948, a Swiss movement. It's fairly common practice to take that movement, decorate it, and then plop it into a watch. It looks good and it's very easy to work on. But since RGM is effectively at the forefront of American watchmaking, this is a sad state of affairs indeed.
The dial of the 801/40 is made of enamel done with the Grand Feu technique, a technique that they always play up in their marketing. I'm sure it looks amazing in person! But their enamel dials are actually produced by an expert in Switzerland. I just learned this today and was quite gutted.
Okay, so this watch above is $15k. A comparable watch with a Unitas/ETA 6498 is this Stowa Marine Original which costs ~$1700 USD. The RGM has a few more finishing touches than the Stowa, but the meat and bones of the two watches are the same, yet it's a 9x difference in price. I want to buy an American watch. I want to very badly, but can I justify paying 9x more for a product that's not even legally allowed to use the Made in USA label?
This is fascinating - my mind immediately went to Chinese manufacturing, which comes with questions around pay and working conditions being traded off against those low prices, but it sounds like...
This is fascinating - my mind immediately went to Chinese manufacturing, which comes with questions around pay and working conditions being traded off against those low prices, but it sounds like your comparisons are to European craftspeople who presumably have an equal or better quality of life than the equivalent American workers?
Do you think it's actually a difference in cost that's driving this, or a difference in price? I.e. does it actually cost 10x as much to have the watch manufactured in America (something I could feasibly believe based on the video and wider conversation), or does it cost maybe a bit more but then work as a selling point for the manufacturers to go with much more premium market positioning?
There's big labor differences, but I cannot imagine anything in the craft that would, for example, have a us watch maker making 300k compared to a Swiss one making 34k. That has to be branding and...
There's big labor differences, but I cannot imagine anything in the craft that would, for example, have a us watch maker making 300k compared to a Swiss one making 34k. That has to be branding and premiums at that point over a need to cover labor costs. I.e. They charge that much because the company is appealing to a very niche, upper class demographic over say, a middle class enthusiast who saves up for a few months.
I am but a layman, so this is just speculation. It's almost entirely driven by the premium market positioning. Weiss is profitable importing movement parts to assemble and finish and sells watches...
I am but a layman, so this is just speculation. It's almost entirely driven by the premium market positioning. Weiss is profitable importing movement parts to assemble and finish and sells watches at $2k, and while Roland does a higher degree of finishing on his movements, they're not $13k more work. However, it's the inability to source and make parts at scale in the US that gives Roland the ability to corner the market of "pretty much made in the USA" watches.
Bleh. As an Australian, should I try to avoid buying US then? Anti-China sentiment is about avoiding corrosion of democracy; anti-Swiss watches is just pride, in the biblical sense. The reality of...
I want to very badly, but can I justify paying 9x more for a product that's not even legally allowed to use the Made in USA label?
Bleh. As an Australian, should I try to avoid buying US then? Anti-China sentiment is about avoiding corrosion of democracy; anti-Swiss watches is just pride, in the biblical sense.
The reality of manufacturing is that either you export or you import, and not everyone can export, so something has to give.
Apologies if I gave off the wrong impression. There's no anti-Swiss sentiment here in that sense. Mechanical watches are all silly little doodads, so there's no need for the US to create a strong...
Apologies if I gave off the wrong impression. There's no anti-Swiss sentiment here in that sense. Mechanical watches are all silly little doodads, so there's no need for the US to create a strong industry, but I'd like there to be something here at a small scale. It's just a sense of pride in one's own country.
The US used to be a leader in the category. Standards for US-made railroad watches were, in some ways, held to a higher bar than Swiss watches are today. Railroad-grade watches needed to stay within +/-30 seconds per week. COSC-certified watches are within -4/+6 seconds per day. Several large watch-making companies were based in my home state. To me, a watch is art you can wear and art has more emotional power when you feel a connection to it. I own Swiss-manufactured watches as well.
Yes, I know, but by the same logic most western countries should look away from importing from the US and towards domestic production. So should everyone else aspire to "self-sufficiency" like the...
Yes, I know, but by the same logic most western countries should look away from importing from the US and towards domestic production. So should everyone else aspire to "self-sufficiency" like the US is? Refusing to buy from allies just makes everyone poorer, and less competitive with China.
Right now there is a tendency to do the same thing when discussing offshore manufacturing that we do when we discuss recycling, or the use of fossil fuels: try to offload the responsibility on the...
Right now there is a tendency to do the same thing when discussing offshore manufacturing that we do when we discuss recycling, or the use of fossil fuels: try to offload the responsibility on the consumer. The reality is that the consumer has very little control over any of these things, if any. Having worked at companies as they offshore their teams, the problem isn't that the consumer wants cheaper and cheaper things. The problem is that the company wants cheaper and cheaper things, so that they can make more profit. I don't think we make that clear enough in our discussions on these topics. The decision was often short sighted, but that doesn't matter to the managers making these choices, because we exist in a culture where they will get yelled at and miss their incentive plan if they do not meet their growth for any given month, quarter, and year.
I do 90% agree. But the 10% knows that if something is truly slop that consumers will resist. Some things like market capture (in software) or elasticity mitigating than, but to a very small...
I do 90% agree. But the 10% knows that if something is truly slop that consumers will resist. Some things like market capture (in software) or elasticity mitigating than, but to a very small extent there is an acceptance (or at least apathy) for worse stuff as long as it's cheap.
In some extent, this pushback is already happening. Mostly because of recessionary behavior forcing consumers to reel in non-essential spending
Manufacturing things in the US is expensive because we pay the actual costs for manufacturing here. There are a number of industries that aren't cheaper in other parts of the world just because of...
Manufacturing things in the US is expensive because we pay the actual costs for manufacturing here. There are a number of industries that aren't cheaper in other parts of the world just because of the local industries there, but because they are flat-out using slave labor. Many industries use forced or child labor; there's countless stories out there of cacao and sugar producers doing such. Many non-domestic food products use these labor practices; your bananas might, and the palm oil in the packaged foods you eat are likely tainted by it as well.
I think the most obvious place where slave labor is being used, though, is in fashion. Last month I bought a button-up short-sleeved shirt from Walmart for $12.99. Two weeks later I got some discounted fabrics from Joann and decided to make a simple tote bag as a gift for someone. It took me about 3-4 hours to do everything. Granted, I'm slow and nowhere near as fast as a professional, but does anyone really think that the shirt could have been made in fair working conditions? Before retail, Walmart bought that shirt for less than $6. A quick scan shows that that shirt is made of 21 stitches, has 12 buttons, and 14 cut pieces of fabric. How long do you think it took to make that shirt?
The shirt was made in Bangladesh, which, according to this website, has a cost of living amounting to $608 in USD per month for a single person. If they actually took all of that $6 USD home with them - they would still have to make over 100 shirts just to meet a bare minimum.
Of course this is an oversimplification; the factory in which it was made undoubetdly has some specialized machines that make the construction very fast. It's also not likely one person making the shirt, but many people doing each of the many steps required to make it. But keep in mind that we're using impossibly good metrics to determine what that worker makes, because they are absolutely not making that full $6 for it; half or more of that cost is probably materials, and management is also taking a cut out of it. Plus there's logistical costs of importing materials and exporting the finished clothes to the US.
And the thing is that all of this is just inference. There are countless examples of articles from journalists who have actually gone out and confirmed the use of sweatshops with child and forced labor practices. But they don't get much traction simply because nobody actually cares. We have given up on human rights that exist outside of our borders.
This is the current economic state of the world. Trump is an idiot for bringing up this anti-China rhetoric and pumping US manufacturing because our economy is based on consuming garbage. Do you want to know why China is a manufacturing powerhouse? It's because they invested in those industries heavily and grew them to what they are today. But here in the Western nations, we can't even be bothered to invest in the very clothes on our backs. We buy cheap disposable garbage made of plastic instead of repairable long-term clothing. On a larger scale, we have chosen to invest our money in cheap overseas production rather than quality domestic production. At this point, we don't really have much choice but to accept these practices because our economies do not allow us to make other choices. I asked a seamstress how much it would cost to alter the sides and sleeves of a shirt, and she told me it would be $40 - three times more than I paid for an entirely brand new shirt. I wouldn't even know where to find someone who would make me a brand new shirt from scratch.
Normally I'm quick to say we need some sort of socialist solution to systemic problems, but this is something so big, so baked into everything, that we would need to change every society on the planet. It's not just the US doing this, after all.
It's much much much more complicated than that. Throughout most of human history children have worked, and just about every industrialized nation had an era of children working in sweatshops when...
There are countless examples of articles from journalists who have actually gone out and confirmed the use of sweatshops with child and forced labor practices. But they don't get much traction simply because nobody actually cares. We have given up on human rights that exist outside of our borders.
It's much much much more complicated than that.
Throughout most of human history children have worked, and just about every industrialized nation had an era of children working in sweatshops when that was cutting edge technology. Countries lagging in the economic race are stuck in a lousy spot where removing the sweatshops can actually be more harmful to the people reliant on the income than allowing them to stay.
That's not to say that there aren't 100% unethical practices and outright slavery (with or without extra steps) going on, but "hey just stop ok" isn't really a solution even locally. Let alone whatever the price someone has to pay down the line is.
Child labor is indeed a very complicated issue. To give an example, I used to work for a Dutch agricultural business that has subsidiaries and contract growers all over the world (for purposes for...
Child labor is indeed a very complicated issue.
To give an example, I used to work for a Dutch agricultural business that has subsidiaries and contract growers all over the world (for purposes for breeding crops that excel in different climates). While I was working there, they were working on expanding into southern India, and child labor was a major point of friction with prospective contract growers.
The business disallows child labor by any of its contract growers, and in countries where child labor is rife (including India), this is enforced with auditing. This made the Indian growers very angry; when they visited the Netherlands to receive training, they saw that Dutch farmers' children would come help out on the farms after school, but this wasn't considered child labor — it was simply "doing chores" or "learning how to run the family farm". But if Indian farmers let their kids do the exact same things for the exact same reasons, they would be pinged by the auditors and could lose their contracts.
The Indian farmers felt that they were being told to essentially shut their children out of the family business for racist reasons. The Dutch representatives were sympathetic and agreed that it really wasn't fair, but they couldn't budge due to Western certification and regulation pressures, which are indeed much more aggressive in developing nations.
Yeup. The family "helping out with the business" is such a common practice, and seen as not really a problem, but a company saying "ok what if we pay these kids" very quickly turns into outrage....
Yeup. The family "helping out with the business" is such a common practice, and seen as not really a problem, but a company saying "ok what if we pay these kids" very quickly turns into outrage.
Obviously this is often because we expect a company to not give a shit about if a child is safely working while their parents would, but it's a very removed point of view to think that the business and the family aren't one in the same.
As always there's a lot of nuance to these issues that get lost when people just make sweeping legislation/rules. Its a very difficult issue to find the middle ground on, especially when you consider that in no other issue throughout history have we ever perfectly policed something, and yet quality of life has, in general, improved.
I'm not sure what the answer on things like this is, because its so often framed and studied in the light of developed nations taking advantage of undeveloped ones, but even ignoring that there's major questions of how you properly allow for development with modern morals, which were clearly ignored in the development of nearly every other developed nation.
Of course. I hope I didn't come across as saying "just say no". I meant to say the opposite: often, we have no choice than to participate in it. I purchased that shirt because I needed one, and...
Of course. I hope I didn't come across as saying "just say no". I meant to say the opposite: often, we have no choice than to participate in it. I purchased that shirt because I needed one, and it's not like I could find one that I could trust was made entirely with domestic labor and materials even if I tried. I could try to give up coffee, chocolate, and sugar, but it wouldn't affect a damn thing unless I could get at least a few million other people to do it along with me. The complicated system of systems that reinforce these practices are why I said that we would have to change every society on the planet.
Feedback on your phrasing; the first sentence below made me think you were placing the blame on the consumer. After all, the government isn't shopping at Dollar Tree or Old Navy. It's softened by...
Feedback on your phrasing; the first sentence below made me think you were placing the blame on the consumer. After all, the government isn't shopping at Dollar Tree or Old Navy. It's softened by saying that at this point our economy doesn't leave us with much choice, but it still sounds like you're saying the choices I made in the past led to my not having choices now.
We buy cheap disposable garbage made of plastic instead of repairable long-term clothing. On a larger scale, we have chosen to invest our money in cheap overseas production rather than quality domestic production. At this point, we don't really have much choice but to accept these practices because our economies do not allow us to make other choices.
I don't know what's ultimately 'fair,' but China is using a lot more than comparative advantage to gain the edge. The video has a whole section on IP theft, so that even products designed in the...
I don't know what's ultimately 'fair,' but China is using a lot more than comparative advantage to gain the edge. The video has a whole section on IP theft, so that even products designed in the US and manufactured in China are getting stolen by alphabet soup random named companies on Amazon and Amazon is slow to react to disputes on IP theft (another problem fueling this entire thing).
What is the implication of dominating tooling and this kind of manufacturing for new tech? Drones were once cheap hobbyist toys, and we've seen them rapidly advance and become critical in the Ukraine-Russian war. China almost completely owns this manufacturing space, over 90% of the entire market. Now much of the west is left without this kind of manufacturing, and restarting this is a daunting task.
There are huge national security and energy stability concerns with ceding this much manufacturing ground to China. That doesn't mean we should make everything here in the US (or a staunch ally), but we should make some things, especially important things we can't do without (chips, cars, ships, future tech, etc).
I just have to say, since your example is pointing out alleged (but a good chance of being true) slave labour in the Chinese cotton industry, America's been doing that for ages, in the very same...
America's the largest exporter in the world for cotton apparently, and is doing that off of legal slave labour. Outside of cotton, there's plenty of similarly exploitative cheap labour happening in this country, namely the agricultural industry, meat packing, construction, and whatever textile industry is leftover here.
This isn't the only way. Flat tax is not a great idea, as it hurts low to mid income brackets significantly, while tiered tax rates take the majority of tax from top earners ("1%'ers"). So...
That means that everyone in the US will have a substantial amount of their income taken away in the form of taxes
This isn't the only way. Flat tax is not a great idea, as it hurts low to mid income brackets significantly, while tiered tax rates take the majority of tax from top earners ("1%'ers").
So "everyone" does not have to be taxed for this to work. Technically speaking, as this administration has shown (though not in the way most of us want), funds can even be reallocated.
The biggest mistake in the US is people thinking we already have flat taxes. Especially that mentality thinking that if someone gets promoted, then they might make less after taxes. Education...
The biggest mistake in the US is people thinking we already have flat taxes. Especially that mentality thinking that if someone gets promoted, then they might make less after taxes.
Education about tax backets really needs to be drilled into them at grade school level.
It’s one and the same. Money is fungible after all. You can say, what if we tax the rich? But you can also tax the rich and use it to pay for productive things like social security or whatever....
It’s one and the same. Money is fungible after all. You can say, what if we tax the rich? But you can also tax the rich and use it to pay for productive things like social security or whatever. Allocating money to burn for manufacturing is money that is not spent elsewhere.
It’s like saying, it’s OK that I’m buying a new car because the money is coming mainly out of my video game funds. It’s a neat mental trick to justify things, but objectively and accounting-wise it doesn’t make a difference.
That makes an assumption that the level of funding from taxes is "merely" billions, and not trillions. It's not chump change. The factor your missing is that we tax multiple ways. Someone making...
I’m buying a new car because the money is coming mainly out of my video game fund
That makes an assumption that the level of funding from taxes is "merely" billions, and not trillions. It's not chump change.
The factor your missing is that we tax multiple ways. Someone making 50k will spend that money to survive. Stimulating sales tax. Someone making a million dollars who gets a tax break will just invest more into other companies, they don't need more groceries, and this economy isn't necessarily one where they will create new jobs or make large purchases (a house that's prone to property tax, for instance).
That hoarding is a big part of why the trickle down theory has failed in lra twice.
Not really? It’s just an orthogonal part of the metaphor I was using. The point is that money is fungible. I don’t see what any of Has to do with anything. I’m not saying that a flat tax rate is...
That makes an assumption that the level of funding from taxes is "merely" billions, and not trillions. It's not chump change.
Not really? It’s just an orthogonal part of the metaphor I was using.
The point is that money is fungible. I don’t see what any of
The factor your missing is that we tax multiple ways.
Has to do with anything. I’m not saying that a flat tax rate is the only way to do things - that’s honestly orthogonal to everything. The key is that money is fungible and thus so is the opportunity cost.
I think it has a lot to do with everything in this situation. I don't know why you downplay it just because our form of barter we rally around is arbitrary. Let me know when rent takes crypto, or...
I think it has a lot to do with everything in this situation. I don't know why you downplay it just because our form of barter we rally around is arbitrary. Let me know when rent takes crypto, or I can offer farmland to the government for my taxes.
I think we're talking about different things. Fungible doesn't mean that the currency is arbitrary. It means that it's the same. As an example of something that's non-fungible, consider a target...
I think we're talking about different things. Fungible doesn't mean that the currency is arbitrary. It means that it's the same. As an example of something that's non-fungible, consider a target gift card and a lowe's gift card. You can't use a target gift card at lowes and vice versa. This changes how you can use that money. If you want to buy a shovel, for instance, target MAY have a shovel, but you'd rather use it at lowe's, because lowe's is more specific.
To bring it back to the context, the point is that "money taxed from billionaires" is NOT a lowe's gift card. There's nothing limiting about where you can use this money. So you can use it on, say, building new roads, funding transportation development, federally funded medical research, and so forth.
That means that burning money to support manufacturing ISN'T free just because it comes from billionaires. Billionaire money isn't something that can only be used to buoy a dying market. Billionare tax revenue can in fact be spent on anything the government currently spends its money on. $1 burned on trying to hedge manufacturing capacity is DIRECTLY $1 that isn't spent on investments whichs are known to compound.
It's be ideally spent on paying off debts so we don't default before 2030. You don't even need to tax everyone more. The wealth disparity makes it do properly taxing even the top 1% would go a...
That means that everyone in the US will have a substantial amount of their income taken away in the form of taxes and that every year where we're not in war with the rest of the world or in a global pandemic, that money is essentially spent on nothing.
It's be ideally spent on paying off debts so we don't default before 2030. You don't even need to tax everyone more. The wealth disparity makes it do properly taxing even the top 1% would go a long way. Taxing the top 5% wouldn't impact any qualify of life and may even let the lower income get a tax relief.
The math is there, but greed ruins it all.
And if many, and indeed perhaps the majority, of people would not make that choice - fair's fair
Not really the majority. Just a hundred or so billionaires.
Not anywhere near enough money. People seem to miss this a lot. There are issues with these multi billionaires, but "oh we can just tax them to pay for X" really isn't true. Especially when you...
Not really the majority. Just a hundred or so billionaires.
Not anywhere near enough money. People seem to miss this a lot. There are issues with these multi billionaires, but "oh we can just tax them to pay for X" really isn't true. Especially when you realize they aren't liquid billionaires (I believe the most liquid rich person on the books is still Gates), and so it's not really something you can easily "tax" without nuking.
Tax the billionaires and their companies. Walmart and Amazon both posted more than $500bn in revenue last year. Cut government contracts to private businesses and other backroom tax breaks....
Tax the billionaires and their companies. Walmart and Amazon both posted more than $500bn in revenue last year. Cut government contracts to private businesses and other backroom tax breaks. There's options other than chipping into capital gains.
Amazon dumps a ton of what would otherwise be profit into AI, exciting new ways to undercut competition, and otherwise "reinvest" in itself and I'd like to tax them into obliteration but I'd...
Amazon dumps a ton of what would otherwise be profit into AI, exciting new ways to undercut competition, and otherwise "reinvest" in itself and I'd like to tax them into obliteration but I'd settle for normalizing to a slight edge over local markets. We should be extracting a toll on these corporations commenserate to their burden on society.
This is not really correct from a tax perspective. I'm all for closing loopholes, taxing mega corps more, and making these companies give back more to the community. I don't think it helps though...
This is not really correct from a tax perspective.
I'm all for closing loopholes, taxing mega corps more, and making these companies give back more to the community. I don't think it helps though when people spout off inaccurate or incorrect information in regards to what they are/aren't doing, and what is/isn't a problem.
Doubly so when they expect the revenue to somehow come up with the TRILLIONS of dollars most of their desires require.
They are though. It's called 'loans'. Taking out astronomical loans with your stock equity as collateral and you have a pile of cash that you didn't need to pay taxes on.
Especially when you realize they aren't liquid billionaires
They are though. It's called 'loans'. Taking out astronomical loans with your stock equity as collateral and you have a pile of cash that you didn't need to pay taxes on.
While yes thats an interesting loophole that should be dealt with (although its often misrepresented), its still not anywhere near the money the original comment was discussing.
While yes thats an interesting loophole that should be dealt with (although its often misrepresented), its still not anywhere near the money the original comment was discussing.
Do you have an example in mind? To my knowledge the most you usually see in "impulse" buy style behavior is in the millions, which yes should still be addressed, but again given we started at 500...
Do you have an example in mind? To my knowledge the most you usually see in "impulse" buy style behavior is in the millions, which yes should still be addressed, but again given we started at 500 billion, is significantly less
I don't really have any specific examples. True liquidity really only is needed for those "small" transactions. You could by the most expensive house in America for less thant $200 million....
I don't really have any specific examples. True liquidity really only is needed for those "small" transactions. You could by the most expensive house in America for less thant $200 million. Everything else is why they have a legion of staff managing private equity and shell LLC corporations.
For what us small folk have access to via internet searches, it looks like we could borrow up to 50% of total equity value. Which would translate to 100 billion dollars, which can be used to seed things like LLCs, which take on their own debt to pay back their investors, then declare bankruptcy if/when the whole scheme collapses. But the billionaires got paid and are not liable for the debt taken on by the LLC.
This is the whole problem with your argument in relation to my original point. Most of this isn't right, nor how this really works. Spreading misinformation like this makes it trivial for those...
This is the whole problem with your argument in relation to my original point.
For what us small folk have access to via internet searches, it looks like we could borrow up to 50% of total equity value. Which would translate to 100 billion dollars, which can be used to seed things like LLCs, which take on their own debt to pay back their investors, then declare bankruptcy if/when the whole scheme collapses. But the billionaires got paid and are not liable for the debt taken on by the LLC.
Most of this isn't right, nor how this really works. Spreading misinformation like this makes it trivial for those who are abusing the system to keep getting away with it, because refuting this based on actual practices isn't hard. Private equity isn't even really related to this, and a totally different problem.
And again, in relation to the original claim that we just need to tax "100 or so billionaires" to get the money, we're no longer anywhere near the same ballpark.
There is very justified and accurate frustration with the wealth inequality and how it negatively affects countries, but it bothers me that rather than really learn the underlying mechanisms and what's going on, people use bad math and "and i heard on the internet" logic that just doesn't track.
If you want to subsidize manufacturing in America, its GOING to raise taxes on everyone. Full stop. There is no way you could get a reasonable amount of money just taxing "100 or so billionaires" even if every single one of them sat down and helped you do it.
If you want to better tax those billionaires, and their companies, actually understanding what you can and can't tax, and where the loopholes are is essential to making any real progress.
You're not entirely wrong, though I do disagree with this one particular statement in particular: You can tax whatever you gain the political will to do. It might not be a good idea to do so, but...
You're not entirely wrong, though I do disagree with this one particular statement in particular:
actually understanding what you can and can't tax
You can tax whatever you gain the political will to do. It might not be a good idea to do so, but it is possible.
Simple tax that will work and will raise billions: Every individual with over $10 million net worth must pay 5% of the total value until their net worth is under $5 million. People with over $100 million must pay 10% until they hit that threshold. People over $500 million must pay 50%.
The wealthy will argue that this is an unreasonable distribution of wealth that is impossible to quantify. The masses will argue that it's better than getting their heads lopped off.
I have other disagreements about the relevance of private equity, but it's not really worth arguing.
This feels needlessly nitpicky. Yes you could tax breathing tomorrow for 8 quadrillion dollars. It's not a good idea, but it's possible. A huge issue is that you have to tax value that exists...
You can tax whatever you gain the political will to do. It might not be a good idea to do so, but it is possible.
This feels needlessly nitpicky. Yes you could tax breathing tomorrow for 8 quadrillion dollars. It's not a good idea, but it's possible.
A huge issue is that you have to tax value that exists somewhere, and a lot of the value of these "billionaires" is tied up in either stocks or assets.
Assets is easy in that its mostly already taxed. If you want to tax it more, sure go ahead. How you stop them from passing that on to the consumer is a much larger issue, and you do hit a point where the value of the tax can cause problems for the existence of the asset. Office buildings, infrastructure, trucks, products, whatever. Anything digital is a little more wonky but even that counts.
Stocks are where people get these "richest people" lists, and they're dumb. It's from a totally unrealistic calculation that somehow assumes they could just cash out the entire pile at this moment. That's not real in ANY other world than headlines, even when they're getting their bank loans using it as collateral.
It's still an obscenely large amount of money, but taxing on a value that basically no one but buzzfeed and forbes articles respects is going to constantly cause you issues.
And that's where you come into net worth problems. Net worth is a trivial number to manipulate. It's why so many taxes are on the purchase of goods, because then its harder to get around it. If I tax you on net worth, you shift your net worth around 100 different ways, but if you buy a yacht you buy a yacht, and it's much much harder to shift the tax burden (it can, and does, happen, but not in the ways most people think).
It doesn't help that the lack of financial literacy worldwide has led to these people being disproportionately powerful and that's also where a lot of their "wealth" comes from. Being able to get in the ear of whoever you want, or have the clout to be listened to is worth millions, but also very hard to "tax" in any reasonable way.
So again, you tax their purchases and their lifestyle. Your proposed simple tax is going to be paid by people with over $10 million net worth (which while a lot, is probably not the lifestyle you're imagining), and just about everyone else is going to have the funds and means to get around it.
I'm all for simplifying the tax code. I'm all for making the hyper rich, and their companies, pay what needs paying. People much much smarter than me have written a lot about how that could be done, and it doesn't ever boil down to these awkward net worth/wealth tax things that get all the headlines.
From 100 billionaires? Sure. It's a pretty penny, enough to fund entire departments. But I should note that this is less people than your average large office room determining the fate of an...
From 100 billionaires? Sure. It's a pretty penny, enough to fund entire departments. But I should note that this is less people than your average large office room determining the fate of an entire country.
That's why any tax hike should target more aroind the top 1-5%. IIRC the top 1% is making 530k and the top 5% 230k. Funds well past the point where basic necessities are met.
so it's not really something you can easily "tax" without nuking.
Okay, is not easy but I'm sure the government can figure out a proper method. It's liquid enough thst they can make massive purchases to begin with so it's not like it's all in some value of stocks.
My naive approach is to first target any stock buybacksa over a certain amount thst may already be done but.
We're talking somewhere in the range of 2-5 trillion required for what's being discussed. If you get 100 billion out of 100 billionaires, then you're at best half way, and that's extremely...
From 100 billionaires? Sure. It's a pretty penny, enough to fund entire departments.
We're talking somewhere in the range of 2-5 trillion required for what's being discussed. If you get 100 billion out of 100 billionaires, then you're at best half way, and that's extremely optimistic and not really representative of what's actually likely.
But I should note that this is less people than your average large office room determining the fate of an entire country.
But they're not. They do have a disproportionate representation by far, but it's a far cry from this hyperbole.
That's why any tax hike should target more aroind the top 1-5%. IIRC the top 1% is making 530k and the top 5% 230k. Funds well past the point where basic necessities are met.
I know people making somewhere between those ranges. I would bet money you wouldn't be able to determine them by their quality of living if I don't point out they mostly live in LA and New York. Cost of living is a huge part of this equation and it constantly gets ignored and they already pay more in taxes than anyone I know (and MASSIVE student loans). The difference between 530k and 5 million ANYWHERE in the world is huge, and yet since both are "top 1%" the attitude is "fuck em", when they're basically living what you'd imagine a middle, maybe upper middle, class lifestyle would be. None of them have children, and that's going to be a serious cost for them as well. They are far from the level of insulated someone actually pulling in even 2 million a year is.
Yes if you could just uplift them to kansas tomorrow they'd live great until they ran out of money, but it's wild to me how cavalier people are about "well this number is higher, so it must be high enough.". It's my whole issue with this entire approach that's based on bad math and headlines.
Okay, is not easy but I'm sure the government can figure out a proper method. It's liquid enough thst they can make massive purchases to begin with so it's not like it's all in some value of stocks.
Right, which leads us back to "why not tax the purchases". Why screw with all this nonsense when the person buying companies and yachts is going to be a hell of a lot easier to target at the sale level, then having people who make identical amounts a year, but live in different states, taxed as if they're both massively wealthy?
There are other sane ways to try and do this, but so many of these ideas start with a popeconomics understanding of what's actually going on.
My naive approach is to first target any stock buybacksa over a certain amount thst may already be done but.
I mean personally I'd rather just outlaw those entirely. There's some interesting arguments that they're "good" but this gets into weirder topics about growth vs meaningful growth and the whole issue of "cashing out" brand recognition, which I think is what we're mostly going through right now with all sorts of companies. That said, now you're talking about targeting companies, not individuals, which while I get why people relate them, is also another thing entirely. I promise you that every person I know in that 200-500k a year range isn't benefiting from any stock buyback. You're talking whole other tiers of wealthy at that point and it's self defeating when you start lumping these people together.
Yeah, amazing, isn't it? 100 people can get you nearly halfway there if they capitulate. 100 out of 330 million. And I was careful to mention departments, not the entire government. Outisde of...
If you get 100 billion out of 100 billionaires, then you're at best half way, and that's extremely optimistic and not really representative of what's actually likely.
Yeah, amazing, isn't it? 100 people can get you nearly halfway there if they capitulate. 100 out of 330 million.
And I was careful to mention departments, not the entire government. Outisde of military, operating costs per year tend to be in the billions to 10's of billions. There's just a lot of departments to fund.
But they're not. They do have a disproportionate representation by far, but it's a far cry from this hyperbole.
1 single billionaire made a call to the white house and probably paid the president off a few million. He made an exception in his tarriff plans for him. This is no longer hyperbole in 2025.
I would bet money you wouldn't be able to determine them by their quality of living if I don't point out they mostly live in LA and New York.
I was close-ish to that range at my peak (I live in LA). I would make due just fine. Rent and mortgage is expensive, but I was never worrying about fixing a $500 dishwasher or needing to pay $2000 in taxes instead of inspecting a return (I always got a return, though. since I just report 0 instead of 1 for taxes). It's night and day from today where I'm pinching pennies and have maybe a budget of $500 after rent, utilities, and credit card bills.
why not tax the purchases
because at that level, most billionaires are not really purchasing. Maybe they get a yatcht a few times, but these aren't regular, steady purchases like groceries, clothes, etc. Any utility payments isn't much different from the people making minimum wage.
The main issue that really disrupts stuff is kids, and I do agree we should subsidize facilities that care for children.
I promise you that every person I know in that 200-500k a year range isn't benefiting from any stock buyback. You're talking whole other tiers of wealthy at that point and it's self defeating when you start lumping these people together.
I agree. The brackets for someone making 5k, 5m, and 100m are not the same. But the wealth disparity makes it hard for people to really imagine the ranges properly. The top 1% is somewhere around 800k. The top 0.1% is 3 million. For people who don't understand large numbers, these just blend in.
Also, my numbers aren't hard sciences. My main point was that we do not need to tax people who make 30k more while given billionaires tax cuts.
Yes...if you totally ignore I was looking at magical land best case scenario based on overstated numbers, you can get halfway. Consolidation of wealth is a major problem, but this kind of "damn...
Yeah, amazing, isn't it? 100 people can get you nearly halfway there if they capitulate. 100 out of 330 million.
Yes...if you totally ignore I was looking at magical land best case scenario based on overstated numbers, you can get halfway.
Consolidation of wealth is a major problem, but this kind of "damn the facts" rhetoric isn't helping.
1 single billionaire made a call to the white house and probably paid the president off a few million. He made an exception in his tarriff plans for him. This is no longer hyperbole in 2025.
While basically true it still is hyperbole. Ignoring reality for the worst case doesn't produce results.
I was close-ish to that range at my peak (I live in LA). I would make due just fine. Rent and mortgage is expensive, but I was never worrying about fixing a $500 dishwasher or needing to pay $2000 in taxes instead of inspecting a return (I always got a return, though. since I just report 0 instead of 1 for taxes). It's night and day from today where I'm pinching pennies and have maybe a budget of $500 after rent, utilities, and credit card bills.
So you'd be happy to drag them into that same situation? Why not focus on the people who are actually far and above the comfortable limit instead of just taxing the few who've finally gotten comfortable (and who are basically one termination from being screwed)? There's still plenty of them?
because at that level, most billionaires are not really purchasing. Maybe they get a yatcht a few times, but these aren't regular, steady purchases like groceries, clothes, etc. Any utility payments isn't much different from the people making minimum wage.
So then what do you see as the problem? The fact the money isn't circulating, the fact they have too much influence, the fact that they're buying too much, or the fact they have too much power? If it's the last one, the simple truth is that money is often a symptom of that as much as a cause, and just "tax them more" is unlikely to fix it because they have the power. I suspect the real answer is "all of the above", because it certainly is to me, but these supposed solutions don't actually solve half of this. They mostly just get used to once again kick people far far far lower down the chain in the teeth.
Also, my numbers aren't hard sciences. My main point was that we do not need to tax people who make 30k more while given billionaires tax cuts.
But your numbers explicitly include people who are still far away from "hah i'll never have problems again" which makes no sense to me.
I thought I clarified the scales I was talking at already. Is there anything else you want me to clarify? We seem to be talking past each other. I can give a few dozen examples of quid pro quo...
this kind of "damn the facts" rhetoric isn't helping.
I thought I clarified the scales I was talking at already. Is there anything else you want me to clarify? We seem to be talking past each other.
While basically true it still is hyperbole.
I can give a few dozen examples of quid pro quo from this year alone. I don't think it's hyperbole at this point that the president can be bought.
So you'd be happy to drag them into that same situation?
Where they get laid off and make 20% of their income compared to last year? Not really. If your tax bracket changes they pay less, and ideally they pay even less than now. When they make more they can contribute more. Is there something controversial about this suggestion?
Why not focus on the people who are actually far and above the comfortable limit instead of just taxing the few who've finally gotten comfortable
I believe I already mentioned that my numbers are arbitrary. 5, 1, 0.1%. I don't know the proper range. Your response seems contradictory since you're also accusing me of exaggerating over billionaires contribution.
Yes, we can keep tax brackets. I'm just saying higher brackets needs to be taxed more (and perhaps, lower ones less). I don't have the finance chops to make a specific code. You're free to make suggestions (I'm not a useful judge of character here, though).
So then what do you see as the problem? The fact the money isn't circulating, the fact they have too much influence, the fact that they're buying too much, or the fact they have too much power?
All of them, yes.
but these supposed solutions don't actually solve half of this.
It solves most of this. I don't remember where I said this was a simple 3 step process and thst billionaires would not in fact resist such a movement. It won't be easy but that doesn't mean we shouldn't push for it.
100 times 100 billion is 10 trillion, so that wouldn't be too bad.
We're talking somewhere in the range of 2-5 trillion required for what's being discussed. If you get 100 billion out of 100 billionaires, then you're at best half way
100 times 100 billion is 10 trillion, so that wouldn't be too bad.
I think this is a very narrowminded view. Manufacturing in other countries is cheaper because the standard of living is worse and environmental impacts are ignored (i.e. kicked down the road for...
I think this is a very narrowminded view. Manufacturing in other countries is cheaper because the standard of living is worse and environmental impacts are ignored (i.e. kicked down the road for future generations to deal with). This isn't sustainable. Foreigners are catching up on western living standards, and eventually the ecological externalities will impact the manufacturing output negatively. China will eventually stop producing cheap crap. And even if other countries will take its place, they will also stop at some point.
Even if you ignore that basing your consumption on other people's suffering is an ethical nightmare, it's also irrational in every way. So far, we haven't been able to suppress people in a sustainable way and it's wasting so many resources. It's not like we haven't tried.
Basing a whole economy on the suppression of other countries is just stupid. Consumerism will stop eventually. The only question is if it's happening in a controlled way or if the global economy has to collapse first.
What’s not sustainable about that? Sure, maybe one day the marginal value of American workers will be lower than other countries in the world. In that situation, no one needs to worry about...
What’s not sustainable about that? Sure, maybe one day the marginal value of American workers will be lower than other countries in the world. In that situation, no one needs to worry about bringing manufacturing to the US - it will come, for the same reason that it’s done elsewhere. It’s about relative income.
Manufacturing is a great boon for low income countries. It’s the only form of wealth transfer that will realistically occur. Is it a tougher occupation than that in a cushy developed country? Sure, but so is every job in a developing country, and so is life in a developing country. Many of my extended family worked in Chinese manufacturing. They did so because it’s better than the alternative.
It's not sustainable because it's based on people in some countries having worse living standards so that the people in other countries can consume more. China is already catching up. So...
It's not sustainable because it's based on people in some countries having worse living standards so that the people in other countries can consume more. China is already catching up. So manufacturing is moved to some other developing country (which now has to produce cheap goods for the US and China). Until that country is fully deveoloped, too. We can repeat that, but we will eventually run out of developing countries. And then oversea production is as expensive as local production. So we might as well figure out a way now to produce locally.
First of all - that would be fantastic. All the countries in the world having roughly the same worker productivity? I think being glossed away as just a downside, when it would be the greatest...
Until that country is fully deveoloped, too.
First of all - that would be fantastic. All the countries in the world having roughly the same worker productivity? I think being glossed away as just a downside, when it would be the greatest step in global equality that has ever occurred in human history. The entire human race with the same per capita gdp is the “what if” situation lol.
Second, even if it did occur, this is on the timeframe of centuries. It’s not like overnight world inequality would be solved. Like I said, if the US ends up being the place where worker productivity is the lowest, and therefore has the comparative advantage for simple manufacturing, manufacturing jobs would come back. Why prepare now for that? It would be a centuries long process.
If this was to happen, then in the future it would no longer be cost ineffective to manufacture in the US to begin with, so you don’t need to burn money doing so in the present.
Cheapness as a primary metric for how consumers make decisions makes sense if you consider that consumers don't necessarily have any way to differentiate products otherwise. To assume that...
Cheapness as a primary metric for how consumers make decisions makes sense if you consider that consumers don't necessarily have any way to differentiate products otherwise.
To assume that something more expensive is higher quality is to be a fool, because companies will exploit that thinking. Why sell a cheaper made product for less when you can sell it for more and people will pay more because they think it means it's higher quality?
Beyond that, sometimes there are ways to tell, but many wouldn't be educated on the very specific things to look for that give away the quality of a product. You could be comparing two tools made of metal and say the heavier one is higher quality, and maybe thats true. Maybe it's solid metal and the other is hollow or filled with something else or maybe the tool part is metal but the handle is plastic while the heavier one it's all one solid piece of metal. If you're talking about a hammer, anyone who has used a hammer probably knows some of the pitfalls of cheap hammers that are made from multiple pieces stuck together, you hit something hard enough with enough hits and it comes apart somewhere. But there's also a possibility that one is filled with sand to make it heavier because some manufacturers know that consumers view the heavier tool as higher quality. Then it may also be the case that you aren't using a hammer for anything more than putting nails in the drywall to hang pictures so it doesn't matter how poorly made the hammer is, it probably won't break under those conditions.
There's all kinds of BS that consumers I think have experienced collectively for years where the price of the product could not be trusted to be indicative of the quality of the product, and more and more people just started buying what was cheaper. If you're going to gamble on quality either way, why pay more?
Americans have the most disposable income in the world, even when adjusted for PPP. According to this self-storage industry article: There is 40–50x more self-storage available per capita in the...
But the average American is barely getting by and increasing the cost of every objects is political suicide.
The most well-known of those comparative figures is the United States has about 4 square feet to 5 square feet of self-storage per capita vs. 0.1 or fewer square feet per capita across Europe. The figure in the Australian market is about 1 square foot per person.
There is 40–50x more self-storage available per capita in the US than in Europe. And Europeans have smaller homes. All data points to Americans buying and consuming lots of cheap crap, so much so that self-storage solutions are prolific across the US so that Americans can store that cheap crap once their homes are filled with it.
By global standards the average American isn't facing life or death consumer decisions where buying an American-made scrubber means giving up feeding the kids for the day. It just means eating out less often or buying two pairs of shoes a year instead of four a year.
So much of our narrative dances around the fact that the average American consumes (and pollutes) far more than any other human on earth. We want to have our cake and eat it too.
Without fail, you can predict that if an article is reporting based on a group's findings, those findings always align with the group's mission. This group, which I'd never heard of, exists to...
Without fail, you can predict that if an article is reporting based on a group's findings, those findings always align with the group's mission. This group, which I'd never heard of, exists to "help achieve shared economic prosperity". Guess what? They will never put out a paper stating that economic prosperity has been achieved and their group will disband. I guarantee it.
Anyway, their website states that unemployment is really 24%. That personally doesn't pass the sniff test for me.
The 4% rate cited is the U3 rate, which is likely accurate given the definition. The U6 rate, which includes underemployed and discouraged workers, is currently 7.8%. More, but not 24%. I’d need...
The 4% rate cited is the U3 rate, which is likely accurate given the definition. The U6 rate, which includes underemployed and discouraged workers, is currently 7.8%. More, but not 24%. I’d need to read the full paper to parse it.
Edit:
or does not earn a living wage, conservatively pegged at $25,000 annually before taxes.
And there it is. That part is likely to be significantly over sampling, including people who wouldn’t consider themselves un/underemployed or are deliberately doing part time work.
I did not say there aren't people struggling. I did not say that people stating they are struggling are lying. No, I said the numbers in your linked article are wrong and that the group sourced is...
I did not say there aren't people struggling. I did not say that people stating they are struggling are lying. No, I said the numbers in your linked article are wrong and that the group sourced is lying.
To add to what others have said, I don't think this is a great framing. The reason people want things as cheap as possible is because people have less money to expend. What we need to work on is...
The hyper-consumerist culture in the US where everything has to be as cheap as possible is bad for us.
To add to what others have said, I don't think this is a great framing.
The reason people want things as cheap as possible is because people have less money to expend.
What we need to work on is wages and distributing wealth better. People won't mind more expensive things when their wages rise alongside them so they can actually afford them.
Also, USD is the reserve currency for international trade. The cast majority of international trade is conducted in USD. USD is the major export of the the US. To get USD, you need to sell...
Also, USD is the reserve currency for international trade. The cast majority of international trade is conducted in USD. USD is the major export of the the US. To get USD, you need to sell something to Americans. So countries have an incentive to export cheap goods to the US so they can get USD to buy the things they need/want from other countries.
This puts US manufacturing at a distinct disadvantage. To buy a US export, you need USD to do the transaction, so you need to sell something to the US first. This outcome was well known and was why economist warned the US against becoming the reserve currency at Bretton-Woods, but the US politicians want the power that comes with being the reserve currency.
Everyone wants USD since that is the currency you have to use. Every country maintains a stockpile of USD. It's why Americans can go pretty much anyplace in the world, and the locals will accept...
Everyone wants USD since that is the currency you have to use. Every country maintains a stockpile of USD. It's why Americans can go pretty much anyplace in the world, and the locals will accept USD. Even places in Europe will happily take USD. Everyone else wants USD, and that's the power. Piss of the USA, like N. Korea or Iran and we will embargo you, which means we won't trade with you which means it's difficult to get USD. It's why N Korea has an entire USD counterfeit industry.
Without a reserve currency, international trade become difficult and risky since you are exposed to every countries inflation. It's also why the Fed's main goal is keep USD inflation low.
Destin is such a quality human being. I appreciated how he just now put words to the concept of the 'knowledge chain' for me. That was a concept that I did not understand or appreciate fully until...
Destin is such a quality human being.
I appreciated how he just now put words to the concept of the 'knowledge chain' for me. That was a concept that I did not understand or appreciate fully until he used it to describe the knowledge/experience loss he saw.
Incidentally this is why tariffs or other trade restrictions--administered in the public interest--can actually be useful. Personally, I'm not concerned about jobs, I say bring on the automation...
Incidentally this is why tariffs or other trade restrictions--administered in the public interest--can actually be useful.
Personally, I'm not concerned about jobs, I say bring on the automation and UBI. Abundance should equal freedom from pointless labor at the population level.
I am concerned about the global life support system and social costs. So many of these products are cheap because they lack regulation, environmental, labor, etc. Charging a tax equal to externalized costs makes sense to me (even for domestic production, for that matter).
It's a wicked problem though. To take China as an example their overall quality of life has improved as a result of their manufacturing expansion, at least for now, and maybe at the cost of slave labor, which, if we were a just society, would automatically exclude imports made thusly.
I think it's also a myth that "Manufacturing" writ large has left the US. My understanding is that basic manufacturing is almost gone, but complex, bespoke manufacturing is booming. Sure, ASML and TSMC are non-domestic, but a lot of large scale, special use equipment is made here (like Ag stuff, space stuff, energy stuff, mining stuff, advanced material production stuff).
There’s a brief test on Jeff Geerling’s second channel, which pretty much amounts to “yeah idk seems solid”. I actually went to buy one myself after watching the original video - mainly for...
There’s a brief test on Jeff Geerling’s second channel, which pretty much amounts to “yeah idk seems solid”.
I actually went to buy one myself after watching the original video - mainly for practical reasons, because I’ve also been concerned about my existing brush shedding metal bristles that could get into food - but they’re sold out (unsurprising), and weren’t shipping internationally anyway. Probably a bit ironic that I was trying to buy one outside the US after watching a whole video about the importance of onshore manufacturing, but think it’s fair to support the ethos through the lens of capability being distributed rather than centralised, rather than necessarily local to the customer.
I bought this scrubber when I listened to the podcast about it a couple months ago. It's good. Solid. I paid $50 for it and I feel like that's too much. I probably wouldn't buy another one but I'd...
I bought this scrubber when I listened to the podcast about it a couple months ago. It's good. Solid. I paid $50 for it and I feel like that's too much. I probably wouldn't buy another one but I'd buy a knockoff instead. It feels like it'll last a few years.
Someone else said it's $75 now which is definitely too much, and it's sold out anyhow. Destin is doing excellent marketing and it must be exciting for him and his partners to see demand outstrip supply for such an expensive product.
Yeah. $75 seems like more than it’s “worth” for sure. I’d think a rubberized grip on the handle would be nice too. But, I do think the reason it’s $75 is because the manufacturing costs are so...
Yeah. $75 seems like more than it’s “worth” for sure. I’d think a rubberized grip on the handle would be nice too.
But, I do think the reason it’s $75 is because the manufacturing costs are so much higher, for all the reasons laid out in the video. I doubt the profit margin on the thing is high…but I also don’t think I can justify spending $75 on one.
Though also, it seems like it should be repairable enough if they sold replacement parts for it. I think the “handle” would probably significantly outlast the “head”.
It's worth noting this product costs $75. The one slimy part of the video is priming the viewer to be ready for a 4x price increase without telling the viewer the price. He did that so you have to...
It's worth noting this product costs $75. The one slimy part of the video is priming the viewer to be ready for a 4x price increase without telling the viewer the price. He did that so you have to go the Buy It Now!!! Page to see the price, which is $75.
Honestly, I think this is indeed the direction the US should head in. We need manufacturing know how for self sufficiency, and I don't see why we can't reduce the wealth gap so that more of the population could afford "buy it for life" stuff like this. That being said, I'm not optimistic, of course. The entire federal government is incompetent and being made less competent by the day. The future will need some serious steering, and I'm not optimistic on that front.
Since I'm rambling I bet we get a Joe v2 boring white guy for the next one who is probably a hardcore neoliberal, and they'll get right to solving immediate problems and deepening long term ones.
Something that I have not seen pointed out yet is that this is a COVID response and not a tariff response. Destin's concern for onshore manufacturing started with COVID, not the tariffs. For John...
Something that I have not seen pointed out yet is that this is a COVID response and not a tariff response. Destin's concern for onshore manufacturing started with COVID, not the tariffs. For John Youngblood (owner of the BBQ company partnered with) the concern is due to cheap knockoffs on Amazon, and Amazon's slow response to take down copyright infringing products. It took several years to get a product designed and source manufacturing in the USA. I would assume that a significant portion of that several year timeline was due to designing and prototyping. So, for an already existing product, it could be made with American production sooner. So I think this product highlights and makes tangible the idea that bringing manufacturing to the states is not some short term goal that can be achieved, but will take time.
The other issue is with manufacturing capacity in the states. For the Smarter Scrubber, they had to source some products from India (which actually ended up being extremely likely to be made in China, and sold via an Indian supplier) because the manufacturers in the states could not produce at the quantities needed.
We're collectively waking up to the fact America's manufacturing industry is in dire straits, and it needs our immediate attention, and it gets worse as people retire and leave their positions unfilled.
This Youtube video is really insightful about the current situation, showing us how hard it is to find made in America components, but how it's still possible if someone puts in enough effort
At one point they talk to this company called Mantle, who do 3D metal printing, which sounds very cool and innovative, their website is https://mantle3d.com/
As usual, I'll point out I have no relation with any of these people or companies, it's just something we should all be paying attention to imho
It really is a travesty we have Golden Age Fallacy: The President in power. We absolutely need to bring back manufacturing to the US but Destin makes a great point that what we actually need to bring back is the skills.
It was interesting when he got into tool and die manufacturing because my ex father in law worked in the US for a German based tool and die company (Trumpf with an f). When he was showing how that kid used to be a machine operator and how he was moving to designing tools, that was literally my ex fil's job, designing tools (well, managing managers that manage people who design tools).
That work is indeed challenging, and the factory he works out of is truly state of the art.
That wraps back to my bigger point, that we need to focus on education, training, and mentorship and none of that will be happening under the current administration. The Golden Age Fallacy tells us we do not need to learn or grow, we just have to turn back the wheels of time.
This is a really good video. It highlights and shows the struggle of manufacturing things in the USA, even for something as "simple" as a grill scrubber! It touches on deeper topics without getting political on why this was hard and where this manufacturing went.
I don't know what the answer is to solve this. The hyper-consumerist culture in the US where everything has to be as cheap as possible is bad for us. It's bad for jobs in the US. It's bad for the environment. But the average American is barely getting by and increasing the cost of every objects is political suicide.
I don't think this framing really makes sense. It's not in the range of "it's just a little more expensive". The reality is that manufacturing something in the US is 2 to 3x more expensive. And not just more expensive, but slow, and less flexible. A 2x increase in costs is not something that's just "oh, people just want cheap things".
The reality is, if you want the US to have manufacturing to exists in the US, you're swimming upstream of a very basic economic reality that has existed since the dawn of civilization: the power of comparative advantage and trade. To do so, then, you need to be willing to massively subsidize the US manufacturing industry.
That means that everyone in the US will have a substantial amount of their income taken away in the form of taxes and that every year where we're not in war with the rest of the world or in a global pandemic, that money is essentially spent on nothing. And if many, and indeed perhaps the majority, of people would not make that choice - fair's fair.
Geopolitically, the context in which this discussion occurs mainly is about over-reliance on China. But within that sphere, another path is to form more diverse trade links with other developing nations that can be, or become, competitive with China, and to foster those connections and those countries.
Of course, if the negative side you're trying to hedge is that the US is enemies against EVERYONE in the world... then yeah, prepare to pay and become poorer for this self-reliance. Is what it is.
And I would add, with significantly worse QA/QC. Who wants a product that’s 2-3x more expensive with worse quality and reliability?
The interesting thing is that many of these issues predate the current era significantly. The founder of TSMC originally worked for Texas Instruments and noticed a large gap between TI’s US plant and their Japan plant back in the late 70s/early 80s, with the latter having both better quality and higher throughput. It’s part of why TSMC is now in Taiwan.
This suggests that there’s a cultural element at play. At some point, the US embraced mediocrity, and that impacts everything we do including manufacturing.
I think you have something with the cultural element. I seem to remember this sense of 'society looking down on' people with blue collar / manufacturing jobs combined with the rather harmful concept of 'unskilled labor' having, in my opinion, a rather severe case of scope creep.
Going through school, it felt like there was this push towards 'if you don't have a college degree you're without worth' and 'people without college degrees are stuck working with their hands and getting dirty for a living, barely making anything'.
So yes, at least from what I remember back then, there was definitely a sense of looking down on blue collar workers. No one wants to be looked down upon, and I can see that contributing to a drying up of new candidates for those fields.
I remember, collectively, another set of experiences early-ish in my life, before I started work in telecom. I had a string of short-term-ish jobs in manufacturing environments, ranging from a couple months to half a year, in manufacturing environments. All were temp jobs with minimum, or near-minimum wage pay and all were both very harsh on me and the management was clear in making me know I was disposable and replaceable. It was outright depressing.
I wasn’t alive to experience it and haven’t taken time to go down that rabbit hole, but I suspect that blue collar work being looked down on came about due to decreasing wages. Even today, in the US a person’s occupation represents a large chunk of their social worth, with jobs with low pay and little mobility being perceived as worth very little. You see people conflating their paycheck their importance on both ends of the scale all the time.
As I understand, the situation was quite different up through the 60s or so, with manufacturing paying very well (I’ve seen calculations that put a 50s autoworker as being paid more than modern senior software engineers, adjusted for inflation) and because most people only worked a handful of jobs over the course of their lives, upward mobility was of little importance. Manufacturing work was still hard, but much more respected.
As labor became devalued (largely thanks to the efforts of the Reagan administration), it lost respect and emphasis on obtaining credentials that allowed one to do white collar work became emphasized. Or at least, that’s my hunch about how things went.
The thing I don't get is how you solve this problem.
People in countries with strong manufacturing bases aren't better paid in nominal wages. They have strong manufacturing bases because their average wages are extremely low, so manufacturing is an extremely lucrative and attractive field that driven people compete for.
It was easy post-WW2 when we were literally the only mechanized country that came out of WW2 unscathed. Now, most countries have access to the equipment and education necessary to run a competitive manufacturing industry. Only some of them have the right market conditions though.
You're never going to get to a point where $4 an hour is an attractive wage in the US though. (At least I hope we don't). When wages rise in a country, manufacturing starts leaving because it's no longer competitive to manufacture goods there on a global market.
The obvious solution is tarrifs, but those have all sorts of horrible negative effects as we're living through firsthand in the US, and tarrifs to make US manufacturing competitive with Asia would be so astronomical that you may as well just embargo all trade with them.
I've heard people say "automation" as a solution, but that's just a pipe dream in my opinion. Sure, you can automate to make manufacturing more productive, but you still need qualified, interested people. More importantly, it's not like the US is the only country with access to automation. As soon as an aspect of the manufacturing chain can be automated, it quickly gets automated everywhere it's feasible to, and poorer countries still have much lower labor costs.
So what can you do to boost wages for manufacturing while remaining competitive on a global market? Honest question, because I really don't know.
I honestly think that we've been living in a fantasy land abberation for the past 70 years, where the US and it's western hegemony has been able to live extremely privileged, inflated lifestyles off of the backs of labor from the third world. As time goes on, and capital continues to flow from that hegemony to that third world, I suspect an equalization has to happen. It will likely be pretty jarring for most of us, having to live in a way the way thats more similar to what most of the world has had to endure for the past 70 years, rather than in a way similar to how our parents and grandparents lived.
Something the video points out is that its not just wages. We assume everything is made in China because of low wages, but it is also where the expertise is now. In the video he mentions that we used to do the work of creating the tooling in the US and then exporting the machinery to lower cost labor markets, but we've gone so far in abandoning manufacturing that the complex tools are now an import too.
To use a concrete example from the video, he was adamant about getting the injection molds made in the US. It didn't sound like he had much trouble finding a company that could put mold plates into a machine and operate it, but when he asked about getting the molds made he was told that they ship the files off to China and let China do the work of actually designing and creating the molds. When he further pushed saying that he really wanted the molds actually made in the US they told him "good luck". Not only could the injection molding company not do the mold creation, they couldn't even point him toward any company in the US that would make the most important thing to their business: the mold plates. He was being told to outsource to China not for price, but because that tool design skill has nearly evaporated from the US.
I could be gullible, but based on how hard a time the video had in sourcing simple things like bolts and injection mold plates I believe there is some truth in the embedded Tim Cook clip that claims part of why Apple manufactures in China is that the US doesn't even have the relevant field expertise to handle their complex tooling needs. I don't think that's even close to the whole story regarding those decisions, but it does seem believable that the talent is abroad.
I'm also vaguely reminded of an article posted a few months back about the Repebble watch. When I read that the process was to go to China and work directly with the design department of a Chinese manufacturer it seemed rather obvious that's what someone would do. In the past it may have been designed and tooled locally with the tooling exported to lower wage areas to run the machines, but now the expectation is that the knowledge has also gone abroad to the extent that it just felt like common sense to export even the technically skilled design processes.
It's not just wages. Not even close. There's also environmental laws (and concern) in the U.S. that don't exist in other countries. Things like strip mining in getting raw materials, or environmentally damaging productions that require mitigation here that don't require that elsewhere. And then there are worker protections, where PPE and training are required here that aren't used overseas. There's laws here over operating machinery for excessive hours, over breaks, etc. Just look at all the sweatshop exposes we've seen from overseas, of child labor and what amounts to slave labor in factories.
There is no silver bullet, there are dozens of issues at play, and frankly the American public can't accept and won't accept egregious steps back in these areas unless we are neck deep in a war or recession. We had better all hope it doesn't come to that.
There are several countries with strong environmental laws and labor laws that still manage to have solid manufacturing industries. I'm not sure that it's possible to manufacture cheap landfill junk this way, but it's certainly possible to manufacture high-quality goods.
I'll take a shot at this: you need friendshoring and low cost of living.
Friendshoring is necessary because ultimately, that's how you get buy-in from a larger scale of customers. Otherwise you have a ton of parallel made-in-democracy efforts that all fail for lack of scale. Sounds simple enough, although not easy.
Cost of living directly ties into wages; if your workers can't pay rent, they'll ask for a raise or look for a job that doesn't leave them homeless. The US has a couple of special parasitic forces (healthcare, college debt) but what's pretty widespread in most countries right now is the cost of housing, and transport.
We need to get away from car-centric suburbia (A Traditional City Primer) because if cars are necessary, you're basically adding $15k/year to your labor costs. We also need to build more densely (and what do you know, traditional cities are more dense due to their much smaller streets!) and tamp down on NIMBYism (of which, a major cause is people being afraid development will increase car traffic and take up car parking slots). Reduce the minimum house/apartment size (if it's legal to live 4 to a house, it should be legal to build 4 quarter-sized houses), give builders permission by-right to build 1 storey above the street-average building height (so if the houses on Bobcat St average to 2 storeys, it should be automatically legal to build a 3 storey house there without waiting for approval or rezoning).
You're 100% right; we have been living inflated lifestyles. The thing is, a lot of that lifestyle is unnecessarily wasteful and doesn't even add to quality of life; if we're serious about making our manufacturing competitive with China then changing this is basically required. And right now, necessities are expensive, luxuries are cheap so reducing the cost of necessities is more useful than reducing the cost of luxuries.
What's more, I have a suspicion that necessities are pegged to wages - for instance, the cost of housing is largely limited by what people can bid for houses, so if everyone gets a raise then the auction for the same house will just go for a little bit higher. And the cost of construction labor is also largely dictated by the cost of rent/housing. So if we reduce the cost of living a bit, we increase wage pressure which then reduces the cost of living. Assuming the extra doesn't just go to increased profits.
I agree with all of this, but I don't think it's just blue-collar workers. In many office jobs, if you aren't management in some capacity (and sometimes even when you are) you aren't given much dignity. Your opinion isn't respected, your pay is low, conditions feel dehumanizing. In most states, employment is at-will. You can be fired for pretty much anything and that's true of white-collar jobs too.
Bouncing from the mediocrity post above, I feel like that's at the heart of it. American workers in general are given very little dignity unless the position is deemed important somehow. There's not much respect paid to the front-line folks who do the front-line work. We saw that all over during the pandemic. So of course most workers don't take any pride in their work or feel invested in their places of employment. Those employers don't care much for them, and they are returning that sentiment.
70's/80's puts us under the Nixion through Reagan Era. So yeah, that sounds right around the shift from where unions were strong and employees were valued and kept for a career, into more of this job hooping economy of the mid 90's-'10's. Japan has had a rough economy for decades as well (and its culture can make it slow to adopt new technology), but its talent is top of the line because of strong labor laws that encourage the older career model.
tl;dr for below: 2-3x would be considered awesome in some industries.
There's a handful of people trying to bring American mechanical watchmaking back. And when I say handful, I can name them on one hand: Roland Murphy, Cameron Weiss, and JN Shapiro. I don't really think Weiss's watches count as American; they're European parts imported, "finished", then assembled. Shapiro's are very American, but they're $70k+ and I've never heard of anyone buying one. Roland sells a relatively decent amount, so let's look one of his watches, the RGM 801/40.
The watch uses a movement that's 90% made in America. 10% of the parts are imported from Europe. That's actually very good, but not enough to qualify the watch as being made in the US. Not only that, but the movement is advertised as an in-house one while it's based on the Unitas/ETA 6948, a Swiss movement. It's fairly common practice to take that movement, decorate it, and then plop it into a watch. It looks good and it's very easy to work on. But since RGM is effectively at the forefront of American watchmaking, this is a sad state of affairs indeed.
The dial of the 801/40 is made of enamel done with the Grand Feu technique, a technique that they always play up in their marketing. I'm sure it looks amazing in person! But their enamel dials are actually produced by an expert in Switzerland. I just learned this today and was quite gutted.
Okay, so this watch above is $15k. A comparable watch with a Unitas/ETA 6498 is this Stowa Marine Original which costs ~$1700 USD. The RGM has a few more finishing touches than the Stowa, but the meat and bones of the two watches are the same, yet it's a 9x difference in price. I want to buy an American watch. I want to very badly, but can I justify paying 9x more for a product that's not even legally allowed to use the Made in USA label?
This is fascinating - my mind immediately went to Chinese manufacturing, which comes with questions around pay and working conditions being traded off against those low prices, but it sounds like your comparisons are to European craftspeople who presumably have an equal or better quality of life than the equivalent American workers?
Do you think it's actually a difference in cost that's driving this, or a difference in price? I.e. does it actually cost 10x as much to have the watch manufactured in America (something I could feasibly believe based on the video and wider conversation), or does it cost maybe a bit more but then work as a selling point for the manufacturers to go with much more premium market positioning?
There's big labor differences, but I cannot imagine anything in the craft that would, for example, have a us watch maker making 300k compared to a Swiss one making 34k. That has to be branding and premiums at that point over a need to cover labor costs. I.e. They charge that much because the company is appealing to a very niche, upper class demographic over say, a middle class enthusiast who saves up for a few months.
There’s that price point balance where you decide if you want to sell fewer of a thing for a higher price or sell more of them for a lower price.
I am but a layman, so this is just speculation. It's almost entirely driven by the premium market positioning. Weiss is profitable importing movement parts to assemble and finish and sells watches at $2k, and while Roland does a higher degree of finishing on his movements, they're not $13k more work. However, it's the inability to source and make parts at scale in the US that gives Roland the ability to corner the market of "pretty much made in the USA" watches.
Bleh. As an Australian, should I try to avoid buying US then? Anti-China sentiment is about avoiding corrosion of democracy; anti-Swiss watches is just pride, in the biblical sense.
The reality of manufacturing is that either you export or you import, and not everyone can export, so something has to give.
Apologies if I gave off the wrong impression. There's no anti-Swiss sentiment here in that sense. Mechanical watches are all silly little doodads, so there's no need for the US to create a strong industry, but I'd like there to be something here at a small scale. It's just a sense of pride in one's own country.
The US used to be a leader in the category. Standards for US-made railroad watches were, in some ways, held to a higher bar than Swiss watches are today. Railroad-grade watches needed to stay within +/-30 seconds per week. COSC-certified watches are within -4/+6 seconds per day. Several large watch-making companies were based in my home state. To me, a watch is art you can wear and art has more emotional power when you feel a connection to it. I own Swiss-manufactured watches as well.
Anti import sentiment is driven by desire for self sufficiency.
Yes, I know, but by the same logic most western countries should look away from importing from the US and towards domestic production. So should everyone else aspire to "self-sufficiency" like the US is? Refusing to buy from allies just makes everyone poorer, and less competitive with China.
Right now there is a tendency to do the same thing when discussing offshore manufacturing that we do when we discuss recycling, or the use of fossil fuels: try to offload the responsibility on the consumer. The reality is that the consumer has very little control over any of these things, if any. Having worked at companies as they offshore their teams, the problem isn't that the consumer wants cheaper and cheaper things. The problem is that the company wants cheaper and cheaper things, so that they can make more profit. I don't think we make that clear enough in our discussions on these topics. The decision was often short sighted, but that doesn't matter to the managers making these choices, because we exist in a culture where they will get yelled at and miss their incentive plan if they do not meet their growth for any given month, quarter, and year.
I do 90% agree. But the 10% knows that if something is truly slop that consumers will resist. Some things like market capture (in software) or elasticity mitigating than, but to a very small extent there is an acceptance (or at least apathy) for worse stuff as long as it's cheap.
In some extent, this pushback is already happening. Mostly because of recessionary behavior forcing consumers to reel in non-essential spending
Manufacturing things in the US is expensive because we pay the actual costs for manufacturing here. There are a number of industries that aren't cheaper in other parts of the world just because of the local industries there, but because they are flat-out using slave labor. Many industries use forced or child labor; there's countless stories out there of cacao and sugar producers doing such. Many non-domestic food products use these labor practices; your bananas might, and the palm oil in the packaged foods you eat are likely tainted by it as well.
I think the most obvious place where slave labor is being used, though, is in fashion. Last month I bought a button-up short-sleeved shirt from Walmart for $12.99. Two weeks later I got some discounted fabrics from Joann and decided to make a simple tote bag as a gift for someone. It took me about 3-4 hours to do everything. Granted, I'm slow and nowhere near as fast as a professional, but does anyone really think that the shirt could have been made in fair working conditions? Before retail, Walmart bought that shirt for less than $6. A quick scan shows that that shirt is made of 21 stitches, has 12 buttons, and 14 cut pieces of fabric. How long do you think it took to make that shirt?
The shirt was made in Bangladesh, which, according to this website, has a cost of living amounting to $608 in USD per month for a single person. If they actually took all of that $6 USD home with them - they would still have to make over 100 shirts just to meet a bare minimum.
Of course this is an oversimplification; the factory in which it was made undoubetdly has some specialized machines that make the construction very fast. It's also not likely one person making the shirt, but many people doing each of the many steps required to make it. But keep in mind that we're using impossibly good metrics to determine what that worker makes, because they are absolutely not making that full $6 for it; half or more of that cost is probably materials, and management is also taking a cut out of it. Plus there's logistical costs of importing materials and exporting the finished clothes to the US.
And the thing is that all of this is just inference. There are countless examples of articles from journalists who have actually gone out and confirmed the use of sweatshops with child and forced labor practices. But they don't get much traction simply because nobody actually cares. We have given up on human rights that exist outside of our borders.
This is the current economic state of the world. Trump is an idiot for bringing up this anti-China rhetoric and pumping US manufacturing because our economy is based on consuming garbage. Do you want to know why China is a manufacturing powerhouse? It's because they invested in those industries heavily and grew them to what they are today. But here in the Western nations, we can't even be bothered to invest in the very clothes on our backs. We buy cheap disposable garbage made of plastic instead of repairable long-term clothing. On a larger scale, we have chosen to invest our money in cheap overseas production rather than quality domestic production. At this point, we don't really have much choice but to accept these practices because our economies do not allow us to make other choices. I asked a seamstress how much it would cost to alter the sides and sleeves of a shirt, and she told me it would be $40 - three times more than I paid for an entirely brand new shirt. I wouldn't even know where to find someone who would make me a brand new shirt from scratch.
Normally I'm quick to say we need some sort of socialist solution to systemic problems, but this is something so big, so baked into everything, that we would need to change every society on the planet. It's not just the US doing this, after all.
It's much much much more complicated than that.
Throughout most of human history children have worked, and just about every industrialized nation had an era of children working in sweatshops when that was cutting edge technology. Countries lagging in the economic race are stuck in a lousy spot where removing the sweatshops can actually be more harmful to the people reliant on the income than allowing them to stay.
That's not to say that there aren't 100% unethical practices and outright slavery (with or without extra steps) going on, but "hey just stop ok" isn't really a solution even locally. Let alone whatever the price someone has to pay down the line is.
Child labor is indeed a very complicated issue.
To give an example, I used to work for a Dutch agricultural business that has subsidiaries and contract growers all over the world (for purposes for breeding crops that excel in different climates). While I was working there, they were working on expanding into southern India, and child labor was a major point of friction with prospective contract growers.
The business disallows child labor by any of its contract growers, and in countries where child labor is rife (including India), this is enforced with auditing. This made the Indian growers very angry; when they visited the Netherlands to receive training, they saw that Dutch farmers' children would come help out on the farms after school, but this wasn't considered child labor — it was simply "doing chores" or "learning how to run the family farm". But if Indian farmers let their kids do the exact same things for the exact same reasons, they would be pinged by the auditors and could lose their contracts.
The Indian farmers felt that they were being told to essentially shut their children out of the family business for racist reasons. The Dutch representatives were sympathetic and agreed that it really wasn't fair, but they couldn't budge due to Western certification and regulation pressures, which are indeed much more aggressive in developing nations.
Yeup. The family "helping out with the business" is such a common practice, and seen as not really a problem, but a company saying "ok what if we pay these kids" very quickly turns into outrage.
Obviously this is often because we expect a company to not give a shit about if a child is safely working while their parents would, but it's a very removed point of view to think that the business and the family aren't one in the same.
As always there's a lot of nuance to these issues that get lost when people just make sweeping legislation/rules. Its a very difficult issue to find the middle ground on, especially when you consider that in no other issue throughout history have we ever perfectly policed something, and yet quality of life has, in general, improved.
I'm not sure what the answer on things like this is, because its so often framed and studied in the light of developed nations taking advantage of undeveloped ones, but even ignoring that there's major questions of how you properly allow for development with modern morals, which were clearly ignored in the development of nearly every other developed nation.
Of course. I hope I didn't come across as saying "just say no". I meant to say the opposite: often, we have no choice than to participate in it. I purchased that shirt because I needed one, and it's not like I could find one that I could trust was made entirely with domestic labor and materials even if I tried. I could try to give up coffee, chocolate, and sugar, but it wouldn't affect a damn thing unless I could get at least a few million other people to do it along with me. The complicated system of systems that reinforce these practices are why I said that we would have to change every society on the planet.
Feedback on your phrasing; the first sentence below made me think you were placing the blame on the consumer. After all, the government isn't shopping at Dollar Tree or Old Navy. It's softened by saying that at this point our economy doesn't leave us with much choice, but it still sounds like you're saying the choices I made in the past led to my not having choices now.
I also want to point out that we the consumers have been tricked in the past. TW: description of violence
There's also the confusion on what qualifies as "Made in USA". Even if you don't want to read that whole thing, look how long the document is.
I don't know what's ultimately 'fair,' but China is using a lot more than comparative advantage to gain the edge. The video has a whole section on IP theft, so that even products designed in the US and manufactured in China are getting stolen by alphabet soup random named companies on Amazon and Amazon is slow to react to disputes on IP theft (another problem fueling this entire thing).
When a consumer only cares about the price at the end of the day, and China is using literal slave labor to manufacture and assemble products, how does a company wanting to do things ethically and/or locally compete with that?
What is the implication of dominating tooling and this kind of manufacturing for new tech? Drones were once cheap hobbyist toys, and we've seen them rapidly advance and become critical in the Ukraine-Russian war. China almost completely owns this manufacturing space, over 90% of the entire market. Now much of the west is left without this kind of manufacturing, and restarting this is a daunting task.
There are huge national security and energy stability concerns with ceding this much manufacturing ground to China. That doesn't mean we should make everything here in the US (or a staunch ally), but we should make some things, especially important things we can't do without (chips, cars, ships, future tech, etc).
I just have to say, since your example is pointing out alleged (but a good chance of being true) slave labour in the Chinese cotton industry, America's been doing that for ages, in the very same industry! https://daily.jstor.org/slavery-and-the-modern-day-prison-plantation/
America's the largest exporter in the world for cotton apparently, and is doing that off of legal slave labour. Outside of cotton, there's plenty of similarly exploitative cheap labour happening in this country, namely the agricultural industry, meat packing, construction, and whatever textile industry is leftover here.
This isn't the only way. Flat tax is not a great idea, as it hurts low to mid income brackets significantly, while tiered tax rates take the majority of tax from top earners ("1%'ers").
So "everyone" does not have to be taxed for this to work. Technically speaking, as this administration has shown (though not in the way most of us want), funds can even be reallocated.
The biggest mistake in the US is people thinking we already have flat taxes. Especially that mentality thinking that if someone gets promoted, then they might make less after taxes.
Education about tax backets really needs to be drilled into them at grade school level.
It’s one and the same. Money is fungible after all. You can say, what if we tax the rich? But you can also tax the rich and use it to pay for productive things like social security or whatever. Allocating money to burn for manufacturing is money that is not spent elsewhere.
It’s like saying, it’s OK that I’m buying a new car because the money is coming mainly out of my video game funds. It’s a neat mental trick to justify things, but objectively and accounting-wise it doesn’t make a difference.
That makes an assumption that the level of funding from taxes is "merely" billions, and not trillions. It's not chump change.
The factor your missing is that we tax multiple ways. Someone making 50k will spend that money to survive. Stimulating sales tax. Someone making a million dollars who gets a tax break will just invest more into other companies, they don't need more groceries, and this economy isn't necessarily one where they will create new jobs or make large purchases (a house that's prone to property tax, for instance).
That hoarding is a big part of why the trickle down theory has failed in lra twice.
Not really? It’s just an orthogonal part of the metaphor I was using.
The point is that money is fungible. I don’t see what any of
Has to do with anything. I’m not saying that a flat tax rate is the only way to do things - that’s honestly orthogonal to everything. The key is that money is fungible and thus so is the opportunity cost.
I think it has a lot to do with everything in this situation. I don't know why you downplay it just because our form of barter we rally around is arbitrary. Let me know when rent takes crypto, or I can offer farmland to the government for my taxes.
I think we're talking about different things. Fungible doesn't mean that the currency is arbitrary. It means that it's the same. As an example of something that's non-fungible, consider a target gift card and a lowe's gift card. You can't use a target gift card at lowes and vice versa. This changes how you can use that money. If you want to buy a shovel, for instance, target MAY have a shovel, but you'd rather use it at lowe's, because lowe's is more specific.
To bring it back to the context, the point is that "money taxed from billionaires" is NOT a lowe's gift card. There's nothing limiting about where you can use this money. So you can use it on, say, building new roads, funding transportation development, federally funded medical research, and so forth.
That means that burning money to support manufacturing ISN'T free just because it comes from billionaires. Billionaire money isn't something that can only be used to buoy a dying market. Billionare tax revenue can in fact be spent on anything the government currently spends its money on. $1 burned on trying to hedge manufacturing capacity is DIRECTLY $1 that isn't spent on investments whichs are known to compound.
It's be ideally spent on paying off debts so we don't default before 2030. You don't even need to tax everyone more. The wealth disparity makes it do properly taxing even the top 1% would go a long way. Taxing the top 5% wouldn't impact any qualify of life and may even let the lower income get a tax relief.
The math is there, but greed ruins it all.
Not really the majority. Just a hundred or so billionaires.
Not anywhere near enough money. People seem to miss this a lot. There are issues with these multi billionaires, but "oh we can just tax them to pay for X" really isn't true. Especially when you realize they aren't liquid billionaires (I believe the most liquid rich person on the books is still Gates), and so it's not really something you can easily "tax" without nuking.
Tax the billionaires and their companies. Walmart and Amazon both posted more than $500bn in revenue last year. Cut government contracts to private businesses and other backroom tax breaks. There's options other than chipping into capital gains.
I mean...revenue isn't the value to be looking at? For record Amazon posted $60bn last year after costs, including taxes.
Amazon dumps a ton of what would otherwise be profit into AI, exciting new ways to undercut competition, and otherwise "reinvest" in itself and I'd like to tax them into obliteration but I'd settle for normalizing to a slight edge over local markets. We should be extracting a toll on these corporations commenserate to their burden on society.
This is not really correct from a tax perspective.
I'm all for closing loopholes, taxing mega corps more, and making these companies give back more to the community. I don't think it helps though when people spout off inaccurate or incorrect information in regards to what they are/aren't doing, and what is/isn't a problem.
Doubly so when they expect the revenue to somehow come up with the TRILLIONS of dollars most of their desires require.
They are though. It's called 'loans'. Taking out astronomical loans with your stock equity as collateral and you have a pile of cash that you didn't need to pay taxes on.
While yes thats an interesting loophole that should be dealt with (although its often misrepresented), its still not anywhere near the money the original comment was discussing.
If you can pull out a billion dollars on demand via a debit card linked to a SBLOC, it's liquid, damn what the paperwork says.
Do you have an example in mind? To my knowledge the most you usually see in "impulse" buy style behavior is in the millions, which yes should still be addressed, but again given we started at 500 billion, is significantly less
I don't really have any specific examples. True liquidity really only is needed for those "small" transactions. You could by the most expensive house in America for less thant $200 million. Everything else is why they have a legion of staff managing private equity and shell LLC corporations.
For what us small folk have access to via internet searches, it looks like we could borrow up to 50% of total equity value. Which would translate to 100 billion dollars, which can be used to seed things like LLCs, which take on their own debt to pay back their investors, then declare bankruptcy if/when the whole scheme collapses. But the billionaires got paid and are not liable for the debt taken on by the LLC.
This is the whole problem with your argument in relation to my original point.
Most of this isn't right, nor how this really works. Spreading misinformation like this makes it trivial for those who are abusing the system to keep getting away with it, because refuting this based on actual practices isn't hard. Private equity isn't even really related to this, and a totally different problem.
And again, in relation to the original claim that we just need to tax "100 or so billionaires" to get the money, we're no longer anywhere near the same ballpark.
There is very justified and accurate frustration with the wealth inequality and how it negatively affects countries, but it bothers me that rather than really learn the underlying mechanisms and what's going on, people use bad math and "and i heard on the internet" logic that just doesn't track.
If you want to subsidize manufacturing in America, its GOING to raise taxes on everyone. Full stop. There is no way you could get a reasonable amount of money just taxing "100 or so billionaires" even if every single one of them sat down and helped you do it.
If you want to better tax those billionaires, and their companies, actually understanding what you can and can't tax, and where the loopholes are is essential to making any real progress.
You're not entirely wrong, though I do disagree with this one particular statement in particular:
You can tax whatever you gain the political will to do. It might not be a good idea to do so, but it is possible.
Simple tax that will work and will raise billions: Every individual with over $10 million net worth must pay 5% of the total value until their net worth is under $5 million. People with over $100 million must pay 10% until they hit that threshold. People over $500 million must pay 50%.
The wealthy will argue that this is an unreasonable distribution of wealth that is impossible to quantify. The masses will argue that it's better than getting their heads lopped off.
I have other disagreements about the relevance of private equity, but it's not really worth arguing.
This feels needlessly nitpicky. Yes you could tax breathing tomorrow for 8 quadrillion dollars. It's not a good idea, but it's possible.
A huge issue is that you have to tax value that exists somewhere, and a lot of the value of these "billionaires" is tied up in either stocks or assets.
Assets is easy in that its mostly already taxed. If you want to tax it more, sure go ahead. How you stop them from passing that on to the consumer is a much larger issue, and you do hit a point where the value of the tax can cause problems for the existence of the asset. Office buildings, infrastructure, trucks, products, whatever. Anything digital is a little more wonky but even that counts.
Stocks are where people get these "richest people" lists, and they're dumb. It's from a totally unrealistic calculation that somehow assumes they could just cash out the entire pile at this moment. That's not real in ANY other world than headlines, even when they're getting their bank loans using it as collateral.
It's still an obscenely large amount of money, but taxing on a value that basically no one but buzzfeed and forbes articles respects is going to constantly cause you issues.
And that's where you come into net worth problems. Net worth is a trivial number to manipulate. It's why so many taxes are on the purchase of goods, because then its harder to get around it. If I tax you on net worth, you shift your net worth around 100 different ways, but if you buy a yacht you buy a yacht, and it's much much harder to shift the tax burden (it can, and does, happen, but not in the ways most people think).
It doesn't help that the lack of financial literacy worldwide has led to these people being disproportionately powerful and that's also where a lot of their "wealth" comes from. Being able to get in the ear of whoever you want, or have the clout to be listened to is worth millions, but also very hard to "tax" in any reasonable way.
So again, you tax their purchases and their lifestyle. Your proposed simple tax is going to be paid by people with over $10 million net worth (which while a lot, is probably not the lifestyle you're imagining), and just about everyone else is going to have the funds and means to get around it.
I'm all for simplifying the tax code. I'm all for making the hyper rich, and their companies, pay what needs paying. People much much smarter than me have written a lot about how that could be done, and it doesn't ever boil down to these awkward net worth/wealth tax things that get all the headlines.
From 100 billionaires? Sure. It's a pretty penny, enough to fund entire departments. But I should note that this is less people than your average large office room determining the fate of an entire country.
That's why any tax hike should target more aroind the top 1-5%. IIRC the top 1% is making 530k and the top 5% 230k. Funds well past the point where basic necessities are met.
Okay, is not easy but I'm sure the government can figure out a proper method. It's liquid enough thst they can make massive purchases to begin with so it's not like it's all in some value of stocks.
My naive approach is to first target any stock buybacksa over a certain amount thst may already be done but.
We're talking somewhere in the range of 2-5 trillion required for what's being discussed. If you get 100 billion out of 100 billionaires, then you're at best half way, and that's extremely optimistic and not really representative of what's actually likely.
But they're not. They do have a disproportionate representation by far, but it's a far cry from this hyperbole.
I know people making somewhere between those ranges. I would bet money you wouldn't be able to determine them by their quality of living if I don't point out they mostly live in LA and New York. Cost of living is a huge part of this equation and it constantly gets ignored and they already pay more in taxes than anyone I know (and MASSIVE student loans). The difference between 530k and 5 million ANYWHERE in the world is huge, and yet since both are "top 1%" the attitude is "fuck em", when they're basically living what you'd imagine a middle, maybe upper middle, class lifestyle would be. None of them have children, and that's going to be a serious cost for them as well. They are far from the level of insulated someone actually pulling in even 2 million a year is.
Yes if you could just uplift them to kansas tomorrow they'd live great until they ran out of money, but it's wild to me how cavalier people are about "well this number is higher, so it must be high enough.". It's my whole issue with this entire approach that's based on bad math and headlines.
Right, which leads us back to "why not tax the purchases". Why screw with all this nonsense when the person buying companies and yachts is going to be a hell of a lot easier to target at the sale level, then having people who make identical amounts a year, but live in different states, taxed as if they're both massively wealthy?
There are other sane ways to try and do this, but so many of these ideas start with a popeconomics understanding of what's actually going on.
I mean personally I'd rather just outlaw those entirely. There's some interesting arguments that they're "good" but this gets into weirder topics about growth vs meaningful growth and the whole issue of "cashing out" brand recognition, which I think is what we're mostly going through right now with all sorts of companies. That said, now you're talking about targeting companies, not individuals, which while I get why people relate them, is also another thing entirely. I promise you that every person I know in that 200-500k a year range isn't benefiting from any stock buyback. You're talking whole other tiers of wealthy at that point and it's self defeating when you start lumping these people together.
Yeah, amazing, isn't it? 100 people can get you nearly halfway there if they capitulate. 100 out of 330 million.
And I was careful to mention departments, not the entire government. Outisde of military, operating costs per year tend to be in the billions to 10's of billions. There's just a lot of departments to fund.
1 single billionaire made a call to the white house and probably paid the president off a few million. He made an exception in his tarriff plans for him. This is no longer hyperbole in 2025.
I was close-ish to that range at my peak (I live in LA). I would make due just fine. Rent and mortgage is expensive, but I was never worrying about fixing a $500 dishwasher or needing to pay $2000 in taxes instead of inspecting a return (I always got a return, though. since I just report 0 instead of 1 for taxes). It's night and day from today where I'm pinching pennies and have maybe a budget of $500 after rent, utilities, and credit card bills.
because at that level, most billionaires are not really purchasing. Maybe they get a yatcht a few times, but these aren't regular, steady purchases like groceries, clothes, etc. Any utility payments isn't much different from the people making minimum wage.
The main issue that really disrupts stuff is kids, and I do agree we should subsidize facilities that care for children.
I agree. The brackets for someone making 5k, 5m, and 100m are not the same. But the wealth disparity makes it hard for people to really imagine the ranges properly. The top 1% is somewhere around 800k. The top 0.1% is 3 million. For people who don't understand large numbers, these just blend in.
Also, my numbers aren't hard sciences. My main point was that we do not need to tax people who make 30k more while given billionaires tax cuts.
Yes...if you totally ignore I was looking at magical land best case scenario based on overstated numbers, you can get halfway.
Consolidation of wealth is a major problem, but this kind of "damn the facts" rhetoric isn't helping.
While basically true it still is hyperbole. Ignoring reality for the worst case doesn't produce results.
So you'd be happy to drag them into that same situation? Why not focus on the people who are actually far and above the comfortable limit instead of just taxing the few who've finally gotten comfortable (and who are basically one termination from being screwed)? There's still plenty of them?
So then what do you see as the problem? The fact the money isn't circulating, the fact they have too much influence, the fact that they're buying too much, or the fact they have too much power? If it's the last one, the simple truth is that money is often a symptom of that as much as a cause, and just "tax them more" is unlikely to fix it because they have the power. I suspect the real answer is "all of the above", because it certainly is to me, but these supposed solutions don't actually solve half of this. They mostly just get used to once again kick people far far far lower down the chain in the teeth.
But your numbers explicitly include people who are still far away from "hah i'll never have problems again" which makes no sense to me.
I thought I clarified the scales I was talking at already. Is there anything else you want me to clarify? We seem to be talking past each other.
I can give a few dozen examples of quid pro quo from this year alone. I don't think it's hyperbole at this point that the president can be bought.
Where they get laid off and make 20% of their income compared to last year? Not really. If your tax bracket changes they pay less, and ideally they pay even less than now. When they make more they can contribute more. Is there something controversial about this suggestion?
I believe I already mentioned that my numbers are arbitrary. 5, 1, 0.1%. I don't know the proper range. Your response seems contradictory since you're also accusing me of exaggerating over billionaires contribution.
Yes, we can keep tax brackets. I'm just saying higher brackets needs to be taxed more (and perhaps, lower ones less). I don't have the finance chops to make a specific code. You're free to make suggestions (I'm not a useful judge of character here, though).
All of them, yes.
It solves most of this. I don't remember where I said this was a simple 3 step process and thst billionaires would not in fact resist such a movement. It won't be easy but that doesn't mean we shouldn't push for it.
100 times 100 billion is 10 trillion, so that wouldn't be too bad.
I think this is a very narrowminded view. Manufacturing in other countries is cheaper because the standard of living is worse and environmental impacts are ignored (i.e. kicked down the road for future generations to deal with). This isn't sustainable. Foreigners are catching up on western living standards, and eventually the ecological externalities will impact the manufacturing output negatively. China will eventually stop producing cheap crap. And even if other countries will take its place, they will also stop at some point.
Even if you ignore that basing your consumption on other people's suffering is an ethical nightmare, it's also irrational in every way. So far, we haven't been able to suppress people in a sustainable way and it's wasting so many resources. It's not like we haven't tried.
Basing a whole economy on the suppression of other countries is just stupid. Consumerism will stop eventually. The only question is if it's happening in a controlled way or if the global economy has to collapse first.
What’s not sustainable about that? Sure, maybe one day the marginal value of American workers will be lower than other countries in the world. In that situation, no one needs to worry about bringing manufacturing to the US - it will come, for the same reason that it’s done elsewhere. It’s about relative income.
Manufacturing is a great boon for low income countries. It’s the only form of wealth transfer that will realistically occur. Is it a tougher occupation than that in a cushy developed country? Sure, but so is every job in a developing country, and so is life in a developing country. Many of my extended family worked in Chinese manufacturing. They did so because it’s better than the alternative.
It's not sustainable because it's based on people in some countries having worse living standards so that the people in other countries can consume more. China is already catching up. So manufacturing is moved to some other developing country (which now has to produce cheap goods for the US and China). Until that country is fully deveoloped, too. We can repeat that, but we will eventually run out of developing countries. And then oversea production is as expensive as local production. So we might as well figure out a way now to produce locally.
First of all - that would be fantastic. All the countries in the world having roughly the same worker productivity? I think being glossed away as just a downside, when it would be the greatest step in global equality that has ever occurred in human history. The entire human race with the same per capita gdp is the “what if” situation lol.
Second, even if it did occur, this is on the timeframe of centuries. It’s not like overnight world inequality would be solved. Like I said, if the US ends up being the place where worker productivity is the lowest, and therefore has the comparative advantage for simple manufacturing, manufacturing jobs would come back. Why prepare now for that? It would be a centuries long process.
If this was to happen, then in the future it would no longer be cost ineffective to manufacture in the US to begin with, so you don’t need to burn money doing so in the present.
Cheapness as a primary metric for how consumers make decisions makes sense if you consider that consumers don't necessarily have any way to differentiate products otherwise.
To assume that something more expensive is higher quality is to be a fool, because companies will exploit that thinking. Why sell a cheaper made product for less when you can sell it for more and people will pay more because they think it means it's higher quality?
Beyond that, sometimes there are ways to tell, but many wouldn't be educated on the very specific things to look for that give away the quality of a product. You could be comparing two tools made of metal and say the heavier one is higher quality, and maybe thats true. Maybe it's solid metal and the other is hollow or filled with something else or maybe the tool part is metal but the handle is plastic while the heavier one it's all one solid piece of metal. If you're talking about a hammer, anyone who has used a hammer probably knows some of the pitfalls of cheap hammers that are made from multiple pieces stuck together, you hit something hard enough with enough hits and it comes apart somewhere. But there's also a possibility that one is filled with sand to make it heavier because some manufacturers know that consumers view the heavier tool as higher quality. Then it may also be the case that you aren't using a hammer for anything more than putting nails in the drywall to hang pictures so it doesn't matter how poorly made the hammer is, it probably won't break under those conditions.
There's all kinds of BS that consumers I think have experienced collectively for years where the price of the product could not be trusted to be indicative of the quality of the product, and more and more people just started buying what was cheaper. If you're going to gamble on quality either way, why pay more?
Americans have the most disposable income in the world, even when adjusted for PPP.
According to this self-storage industry article:
There is 40–50x more self-storage available per capita in the US than in Europe. And Europeans have smaller homes. All data points to Americans buying and consuming lots of cheap crap, so much so that self-storage solutions are prolific across the US so that Americans can store that cheap crap once their homes are filled with it.
By global standards the average American isn't facing life or death consumer decisions where buying an American-made scrubber means giving up feeding the kids for the day. It just means eating out less often or buying two pairs of shoes a year instead of four a year.
So much of our narrative dances around the fact that the average American consumes (and pollutes) far more than any other human on earth. We want to have our cake and eat it too.
Without fail, you can predict that if an article is reporting based on a group's findings, those findings always align with the group's mission. This group, which I'd never heard of, exists to "help achieve shared economic prosperity". Guess what? They will never put out a paper stating that economic prosperity has been achieved and their group will disband. I guarantee it.
Anyway, their website states that unemployment is really 24%. That personally doesn't pass the sniff test for me.
I don’t know about 24%, but the official 4% stat is certainly nonsense.
The 4% rate cited is the U3 rate, which is likely accurate given the definition. The U6 rate, which includes underemployed and discouraged workers, is currently 7.8%. More, but not 24%. I’d need to read the full paper to parse it.
Edit:
And there it is. That part is likely to be significantly over sampling, including people who wouldn’t consider themselves un/underemployed or are deliberately doing part time work.
I did not say there aren't people struggling. I did not say that people stating they are struggling are lying. No, I said the numbers in your linked article are wrong and that the group sourced is lying.
To add to what others have said, I don't think this is a great framing.
The reason people want things as cheap as possible is because people have less money to expend.
What we need to work on is wages and distributing wealth better. People won't mind more expensive things when their wages rise alongside them so they can actually afford them.
Also, USD is the reserve currency for international trade. The cast majority of international trade is conducted in USD. USD is the major export of the the US. To get USD, you need to sell something to Americans. So countries have an incentive to export cheap goods to the US so they can get USD to buy the things they need/want from other countries.
This puts US manufacturing at a distinct disadvantage. To buy a US export, you need USD to do the transaction, so you need to sell something to the US first. This outcome was well known and was why economist warned the US against becoming the reserve currency at Bretton-Woods, but the US politicians want the power that comes with being the reserve currency.
Couldn’t we do international trade with foreign currencies?
Everyone wants USD since that is the currency you have to use. Every country maintains a stockpile of USD. It's why Americans can go pretty much anyplace in the world, and the locals will accept USD. Even places in Europe will happily take USD. Everyone else wants USD, and that's the power. Piss of the USA, like N. Korea or Iran and we will embargo you, which means we won't trade with you which means it's difficult to get USD. It's why N Korea has an entire USD counterfeit industry.
Without a reserve currency, international trade become difficult and risky since you are exposed to every countries inflation. It's also why the Fed's main goal is keep USD inflation low.
Destin is such a quality human being.
I appreciated how he just now put words to the concept of the 'knowledge chain' for me. That was a concept that I did not understand or appreciate fully until he used it to describe the knowledge/experience loss he saw.
Incidentally this is why tariffs or other trade restrictions--administered in the public interest--can actually be useful.
Personally, I'm not concerned about jobs, I say bring on the automation and UBI. Abundance should equal freedom from pointless labor at the population level.
I am concerned about the global life support system and social costs. So many of these products are cheap because they lack regulation, environmental, labor, etc. Charging a tax equal to externalized costs makes sense to me (even for domestic production, for that matter).
It's a wicked problem though. To take China as an example their overall quality of life has improved as a result of their manufacturing expansion, at least for now, and maybe at the cost of slave labor, which, if we were a just society, would automatically exclude imports made thusly.
I think it's also a myth that "Manufacturing" writ large has left the US. My understanding is that basic manufacturing is almost gone, but complex, bespoke manufacturing is booming. Sure, ASML and TSMC are non-domestic, but a lot of large scale, special use equipment is made here (like Ag stuff, space stuff, energy stuff, mining stuff, advanced material production stuff).
There’s a brief test on Jeff Geerling’s second channel, which pretty much amounts to “yeah idk seems solid”.
I actually went to buy one myself after watching the original video - mainly for practical reasons, because I’ve also been concerned about my existing brush shedding metal bristles that could get into food - but they’re sold out (unsurprising), and weren’t shipping internationally anyway. Probably a bit ironic that I was trying to buy one outside the US after watching a whole video about the importance of onshore manufacturing, but think it’s fair to support the ethos through the lens of capability being distributed rather than centralised, rather than necessarily local to the customer.
I bought this scrubber when I listened to the podcast about it a couple months ago. It's good. Solid. I paid $50 for it and I feel like that's too much. I probably wouldn't buy another one but I'd buy a knockoff instead. It feels like it'll last a few years.
Someone else said it's $75 now which is definitely too much, and it's sold out anyhow. Destin is doing excellent marketing and it must be exciting for him and his partners to see demand outstrip supply for such an expensive product.
Yeah. $75 seems like more than it’s “worth” for sure. I’d think a rubberized grip on the handle would be nice too.
But, I do think the reason it’s $75 is because the manufacturing costs are so much higher, for all the reasons laid out in the video. I doubt the profit margin on the thing is high…but I also don’t think I can justify spending $75 on one.
Though also, it seems like it should be repairable enough if they sold replacement parts for it. I think the “handle” would probably significantly outlast the “head”.
It's worth noting this product costs $75. The one slimy part of the video is priming the viewer to be ready for a 4x price increase without telling the viewer the price. He did that so you have to go the Buy It Now!!! Page to see the price, which is $75.
Honestly, I think this is indeed the direction the US should head in. We need manufacturing know how for self sufficiency, and I don't see why we can't reduce the wealth gap so that more of the population could afford "buy it for life" stuff like this. That being said, I'm not optimistic, of course. The entire federal government is incompetent and being made less competent by the day. The future will need some serious steering, and I'm not optimistic on that front.
Since I'm rambling I bet we get a Joe v2 boring white guy for the next one who is probably a hardcore neoliberal, and they'll get right to solving immediate problems and deepening long term ones.
Something that I have not seen pointed out yet is that this is a COVID response and not a tariff response. Destin's concern for onshore manufacturing started with COVID, not the tariffs. For John Youngblood (owner of the BBQ company partnered with) the concern is due to cheap knockoffs on Amazon, and Amazon's slow response to take down copyright infringing products. It took several years to get a product designed and source manufacturing in the USA. I would assume that a significant portion of that several year timeline was due to designing and prototyping. So, for an already existing product, it could be made with American production sooner. So I think this product highlights and makes tangible the idea that bringing manufacturing to the states is not some short term goal that can be achieved, but will take time.
The other issue is with manufacturing capacity in the states. For the Smarter Scrubber, they had to source some products from India (which actually ended up being extremely likely to be made in China, and sold via an Indian supplier) because the manufacturers in the states could not produce at the quantities needed.