Discussion: Reports: Trump Admin Considering Draft Executive Order To Withdraw From NAFTA

[brian512]

Not sure where you think I said Trump using cheap Chinese labor is OK. But I am actually wearing U.S. made products right now – socks, shoes, shirt, and pants.

The death of American manufacturing is vastly overstated. We build a lot of stuff in this country, still, and send some of it overseas too.

What we don’t do so much anymore is to build a lot of the low-end low-margin stuff, and neither do we use a lot of low-skill labor to do it. That stuff comes from China, or Bangladesh, or … (follow the race to the bottom)

In fact, where our manufacturing sector is thriving is generally where we can apply automation, technology, and vastly fewer numbers of significantly more skilled workers.

Manufacturing is alive and well here. Manufacturing jobs, especially the kind you can get if you barely made it out of High School, not so much.

That’s the rub. Even coal mining, which the current incumbent seems to love so much, employs a lot fewer miners per ton produced these days. Those jobs were never coming back, no matter what happens with environmental regulations. What to do with all of the hard-working but not very skilled or educated folks who are displaced in the current economy is a hard and complicated problem.

Oversimplifying doesn’t help.

[leftflank]

Over simplifying or not doesn’t help the very people at the bottom of the rung that are out of work. They are people too but you seem to write them off very quickly.

I don’t appreciate you comparing me to this administration, at all. I only swapped insults with you so that you might see that. Not to find out that you wear Joe Boxers or whatever.

I’m for the trade agreements and that was part of my point, we need them and can’t, literally, afford to cut ourselves off from the world that will eventually overpower us in the world’s economy.

Because you can cite yourself as an example, it doesn’t mean that we are overloaded with American made products. I spent a month searching for and then buying an American made can opener. Its the same with tools that apply not just to my trades but all of construction in general and the supplies.
Some gov’t jobs call out for American made only but give waivers to resubmit if there is no such thing or the cost is prohibitive. Screws are basically all Chinese.

As far as coal goes, those jobs shouldn’t come back. New technology is growing exponentially and that is the future and present really. Unskilled workers can be trained if they so desire. Most jobs are not really that difficult after a little practice. I’m in my 50’s and I learn how to use new equipment and keep expanding my knowledge of construction. Basically being retrained after mastering other things.

This is just life.

[brian512]

You seem to be reading things into what I wrote that I did not intend to say.

1. I write no one off. I am very concerned about the consequences of economic disruption to those on “the bottom of the rung”, as you put it. (See below.)

2. I intended no comparison between you and the current maladministration. The only ones who deserve such a slur are the members of the current maladministration.

3. We are not “trading insults”. Not trying to insult anyone on my part, so it can’t be a trade.

4. Retraining is great, but it is not and cannot be the only answer. Some folks who were doing hard honest work for most of their lives cannot, for one reason or another, magically become skilled in the new tech economy. Even if we do manage to turn all the unemployed coal diggers into perl programmers, how many of them will be able to find jobs with the new skills?

5. As that nameless White House staffer recently put it, some of this shit is hard.