Tariffs don’t make sense unless they’re willing to invest hundreds of billions of dollars into making these industries competitive, but they’re not doing that, on the contrary, they’re dumping hundreds of billions into what?

The police state, to quell the inevitable uprisings that will happen once the economy crashess

This is really not inevitable, and policy is a huge part of it. I do believe Biden is a poor example here, because that approach to rebuilding manufacturing was to actually invest in it. Especially investing in forward looking technologies. Especially trying to establish longer term consistent policies, especially trying to connect with reality and science

Trying to force a return to “the good old days”, starting trade wars with every one, terrorizing large segments of workers, flip flopping policies for personal gain, isolationism, trying to protect old technologies/manufacturers from competition will never work. This is hugely more self-destructive than hands off

The decline in manufacturing, however, is less a story about policy blunders than one about the long progress of the US economy, which has to a large extent graduated out of producing stuff like phones and cars and into the delivery of services, like finance and healthcare – a process similar to that followed by other countries that moved up the ladder of success.

I think this way of thinking is massively flawed. I really hate this idea that economic “progress” must necessarily mean making and building fewer things, and instead “delivering services.”

One, “delivering services” often means charging rents, meaning you’re moving from an economy that creates real value to an economy that extracts rents. A rents and service fee economy isn’t really an economy, it’s just a machine that creates inflation.

Two, no matter how far your economy moves up the “ladder of success,” people are always going to need material goods. Houses can’t be built of financial services and food can’t be grown on spreadsheets. We need real stuff to have a real economy. So what this means is that the “graduated” economies must become net importers of real, physical stuff, and/or net importers of poor people to do the work here that can’t be as easily moved to another country. We must therefore become dependent on other nations to make the stuff we need. How can a nation maintain its independence if it is completely dependent on other nations for all of its vital products? That’s not an independent nation, that’s a vassal state.

Three, all of this assumes that there will always be countries in the world who never “graduate” to our economic level, otherwise who would make everything? But isn’t the idea for every country to strive to reach our level of “success?” If so, who will make all the stuff when most of the world’s population is rich, working white collar jobs? Martians? And doesn’t this create an incentive for us to try and keep at least some countries poor so they can supply us with the cheap goods and migrant labor we need?

Real economies make things and create real value, they don’t just move money around and charge rents. People don’t just stop needing material goods once they get rich enough, and someone has to make and build that stuff, it might as well be us. Otherwise, if we come to rely on other people to make our stuff, we lose our independence and our ability to be self sufficient. That’s not the road to “economic success,” that’s the road to economic ruin.

You can do both.

It’s going to take hardhat jobs to rebuild the electric grid, put up renewables like wind and solar farms, and make high speed rail a reality.

The decline in manufacturing, however, is less a story about policy blunders than one about the long progress of the US economy, which has to a large extent graduated out of producing stuff like phones and cars and into the delivery of services, like finance and healthcare – a process similar to that followed by other countries that moved up the ladder of success.

Oh, ffs! You’d think that a British journalist focused on economics and politics would get this right, but apparently not.

The Republicans look back at America’s manufacturing boom of the 1950’s with nostalgia, and they completely ignore the reasons for the boom - namely, the devastation from WWII. South America, Africa and the Southern Pacific countries didn’t have big manufacturing economies. A significant number of other countries (Russia, Japan, most of Europe, etc) were physically devastated by the war and needed to rebuild from scratch.

With China focused inward and India focused on independence (and both countries recovering from the war), there simply wasn’t another large, heavily populated country to compete - New Zealand, Australia, Canada, etc, simply didn’t have the population to build and staff factories to the extent that the States could. That’s where the US post-war manufacturing boom came from: the war itself.

And the boom died out because other countries recovered from the war and built their own manufacturing bases. That boom was never going to last, and it’s unlikely to ever be repeated, and I just wish that people would realize that and move on from that dream.

Wdym it makes no sense? It’s a thin veil to keep his base happy. It makes perfect sense. It’s not different from the no tax in overtime or tips bullshit. Lies to keep his cult disillusioned.