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But don't a lot of people who live in the Rust Belt shop at Walmart and benefit from cheaper prices generally? I haven't seen any "made in America" competitor t
by viscanti 7y ago
But don't a lot of people who live in the Rust Belt shop at Walmart and benefit from cheaper prices generally? I haven't seen any "made in America" competitor to Walmart that's thriving because there's so much demand from customers who are willing to pay more to buy domestic made goods.
Having access to cheap goods might not make up lost jobs, but weren't most of the manufacturing jobs in the Rust Belt automated away rather than being offshored? Since 1990, production of metals in the U.S. has held roughly constant, but the number of people employed in the industry has fallen steadily. So it's not like the steel mill jobs from the Rust Belt were shipped overseas, they were just automated away.
- keiferski 7y agoThe Rust Belt lost most of its jobs prior to 1990, so I’m not sure how that’s relevant data. I find it a bit hard to understand how someone could suggest that having access to garbage cheap Walmart goods would make up for the utter destruction of a region’s economy. A good place to observe this is southwestern Pennsylvania: there are hundreds of former industrial towns which are now almost completely empty. Drug use is also rampant in these areas and indeed it’s easy to make a direct connection between offshoring jobs and the opioid epidemic.
- distances 7y agoForeign trade policy is not defined via consumer preferences. It's the exactly the same as for environmentally sound products: the burden is not on consumers to choose better, but on government to regulate the market.