No. of Recommendations: 14
So now what is the price Americans pay to keep the US Dollar attractive to foreigners as a reserve currency? Well one price is that employment in the US no longer includes reasonably high paying jobs that the bulk of Americans can get and use as the basis of a middle class way of life. We traded a bunch of manufacturing jobs for "Do you want fries with that?" jobs.This isn't true though. Since the US started running a trade deficit in 1980 until now, real income has increased for every decile. Middle income people (which is what you are talking about) have seen their incomes
increase by about 20%, which is a non-trivial boost in standard of living.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/growth-in-real-wa...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_...To be sure, these gains haven't been shared equally. But that is a matter of public policy, not trade policy.
Similar to agricultural jobs, manufacturing jobs as a percentage of the workforce isn't very big and has been declining for a long time. That's true even in manufacturing powerhouses like Germany. Even if tariffs were 100% successful, the total number of jobs that could potentially be reshored in very small.
Labor statisticians track the number of people who leave their jobs voluntarily. Turns out, coal mining and manufacturing are the industries where the most people tend to leave even though they don't have to. The reason is coal mines and assembly lines aren't good places to work, and there are better jobs with equal or better pay to be had.
So as a matter of public policy, why are we trying to create those types of jobs, instead of service and tech jobs that people actually want?
