Tariffs were never the problem. Potential profits for investors drove heavy manufacturing in America to low-wage countries, mostly China. The oligarchs who've run our country for the last half-century or so, fell in love with high tech at low costs. Interestingly, with a little patience they could have done that in the US, as robots did the heavy lifting for industry. Tesla made Elon Musk a billionaire before his manufacturing plants ever left the country.
Lower cost labor didn't make a pair of Nike running shoes any cheaper for the buyer, just hugely profitable for Nike.
Cheaper was a race to the bottom for American workers, but Made in Asia turned millionaires into billionaires. The Golden Goose was hatched, and all it cost was the American middle class.
Ain't she sweet (those profits), see her comin' down the street. Now, I ask you very confidentially, ain't she sweet? Ain't she nice, look her over once or twice. Now, I ask you very confidentially, ain't she nice? Just take a look in her direction. Oh me oh my, ain't that perfection?
The song written and published in 1927, Ain't She Sweet became the theme of financial inequity a half-century later. The prez told America tariffs would heal the sickness, and voters believed him.
But because he's not informed, and because he never asks anyone who can give advice, the writer of The Art of the Deal remains ignorant of things like tariffs. When the world tries to explain the economics, he calls it 'fake news' and doubles down.
The oligarchs love it. It takes the heat off of them, and they get to play insider trader on the stock market, adding a trillion or so to their piggy banks.
It's not really 'inside information' to watch an ignorant man play with something he misunderstands, but if you have the cash to cash in, it sure is a financial dream come true.
The winners and losers, of course, are spread throughout the world.
Business, whether it's in the United States or elsewhere, demands consistency. It can (and has) weathered the storms of good economic times and bad, so long as changes don't come like bolts out of the blue. Our current administration, in its first six months, has produced a major lightning storm.
To the extent it was possible, the United States became a low-wage country.
And that decline pre-dated the current prez by fifty years, so the man was not so much the cause, as the result. We know who the guilty parties are. They're the oligarchs, and the minions they spawned, mostly by buying off our two political parties and the government they controlled. A half-century of destroying the single wage-earner family leaves a lot of anger behind.
The Trump political boat floats on that anger, and the wind at its back is widely misunderstood.
Every home-grown dictator needs targets to blame. For Hitler, it was the Jews. For the current prez it's the federal civil service (deep state), immigrants & “sanctuary” jurisdictions, elite universities & DEI, drug-lords, Democratic leaders, prosecutors & investigators, the press & broader media, Judges and the legal system handling his cases, as well as all foreign countries who've been stealing our wealth for decades.
"I'm the only guy who can change all that," he blusters. Which is simply a more personal statement about the change all presidents claim.
Do you ever wonder how it is that nothing much changes as we drift back and forth between Republican and Democratic administrations? The answer is quite simple. The super-wealthy own them both.
Slowly, stealthily, and with great subterfuge, the tools of capitalism were removed from the tool boxes that assured both its health and fairness. Banking laws were changed, unions busted, unregulated mergers encouraged, environmental controls removed, worker benefits reduced, and monopolies allowed. Technological advances exploded without either regulation or constraints.
Like an undisciplined child, capitalism ran wild without restraints, causing inequality, market failures, damage to the environment, short-termism, excess materialism and boom and bust economic cycles.
As the toolboxes regulating capitalism emptied, recessions occurred in America about once every six or seven years on average. Recessions flush the social toilet. Banks and businesses (the top 10%) are bailed out by government (you and me), while wages stagnate, and unions are kept in line (you and me again).
What was once heralded as the finest economic system ever to be created, the capitalism we abused, has now been reborn with a different face in communist China.
It has been said that dictatorship, in the hands of a benign dictator, is the most efficient form of government in the world. China is proving what was once merely a theory.
Which is another story.
For another time.
But from here on, manufacturing mostly happens elsewhere.
Not quite that dire, but close...
You nailed it. And now, they will replace even the "skilled" workers with AI, save the money they would have spent on wasteful stuff like salaries and health insurance, and continue to raise prices of products. They won't stop until they have enslaved ... well, pretty much anyone who doesn't have enough capital to be considered their peers. And then the ones at the top will start to devour whoever's on the new bottom rung. Workers need to seize the means of production right now, as in, "What are you doing tomorrow after lunch?"