I found this to be an interesting (but unsourced or uncited) claim in the article...
And, of course, that’s how America became the richest country in the world, and the loss of tariffs is a major part of why our standard of living has slipped so badly over these past 44 years of our neoliberal Reaganism experiment.
I'd like to see a study or, better, multiple studies which investigate this claim. I can certainly see that one could make the claim that the costs of certain goods have may have risen at a rate higher than median wage increases over that time, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the standard of living has fallen. It would be interesting to see some evidence that weighs the difficulty of meeting a basic standard of living from 1980 to now against the advances in the products we consume now and the associated advances in standard of living due to those product advances.
Which claim? That the standard of living has fallen, or that tariffs caused whatever happened over those 44 years? On the first:
A Comparison of Living Standards across the United States of America [the standard of living in all states increased from 1999 to 2015]
On the second, there have been hundreds of studies. Whether tariffs were actually vital to the success of the U.S. in the post Civil War period (highly doubtful, in my view -- immigration was the source of wealth), they do not promote economic success in today's world.
This is how our stupid EC and Senate system completely warps our society. We don't actually need more "manufacturing jobs" in the US. There's nothing special about a manufacturing job. If we elected the presidency by popular vote, and had a unicameral legislature, nobody would give a fuck about "manufacturing jobs." The issue becomes a focus of attention because a bunch of blue collar workers in swing states want to return to a mythologized halcyon past. So we get all this bullshit about restoring manufacturing jobs, from both parties, really.
It used to be the American dream for an immigrant (or immigrant family) to come to America, work in a factory, and try to set up kids or grandkids to escape that life and find white-collar employment. That's what upward mobility has always meant. Now, in large parts of the country, the American dream is apparently to work in the same dead-end factory job from age 18 onward. Note that if you ever speak to the people who work in factories, they don't much like their jobs, their companies or the work. But we wouldn't want anything to change!
My grandfather grew up in the Seattle area. He saved up some money during the war. Then he and a business partner bought two garbage trucks to serve a rapidly growing area called "Everett," and also a few more outlying communities. They were garbage men. And with some wisdom and savings, they were able to sell their business and retire in their 50s. My grandma invested in the stock market and by the 1980s, they had turned the garbage business into a sizeable nest egg. With that money, they paid for college for all their kids. They seeded my aunt and uncle's electronics manufacturing business (my uncle is an electrical engineer), but then they had some differences in philosophy. My aunt took the business. My uncle, using some of his parents' money, got an advanced degree and started working for a small startup in Idaho called . . . Micron.
[Note: My father managed to blow much of the money that went to my mom, trying to be an options trader. By his account, he lost about $500K doing options trading over a decade; my mom puts the losses at just over a million. Looking over his trading records, I estimated more like $1.5M though that was going by trades and not account values. Probably my mom 's estimate is best ]
That's what the American dream used to be. I guess, to MAGA, not so much. Dead end factory jobs forever, I guess.
en.wikipedia.org
