Report Card for Donald Trump

[Warren Dew]

(01-09-2017, 11:48 AM)SomeGuy Wrote:

Quote:There's certainly potential for the labor force to expand.  The fact that they're out of the market, though, suggests they're not desperate for $10/hour jobs, let alone $10/day jobs.

I really don't think there's much of a market for $200 dress shirts produced in US sweat shops, which is around where today's $40 dress shirts would be if sewn in the US.  And that has upstream repercussions for those nice automated cotton mills, if people don't buy cotton shirts any more.

Now you're just being ridiculous.  Pressure to move production of goods consumed in the US back to the US is already occurring, and != setting up the exact same arrangements they presently have in Bangladesh except in rural Kentucky.  Automation (real automation, not the sort of IRobot stuff people here are fantasying about) is your friend here.  A modest initial rise in prices would not be the end of the world, particularly if it coincided with an expansion of spendable income on the bottom segment of the socioeconomic spectrum.

Assembly type jobs are not easily automated; that's why they're still done by people.  That's the kind of thing that's borderline "IRobot stuff".

I can remember when the situation I describe was the basic situation for certain categories of goods.  Protectionism against silk imports, for example, did not result in lots of silkworm farms being established in the US; it resulted in silk being virtually unavailable for those on ordinary incomes.

The "already occurring" pressure is market based and not dependent on protectionism.  I've already agreed that's a good thing.  Do you agree that protectionism can have bad effects?