>Picking a current tangential issue and globbing it on to a needed global trade correction which has been in the making for the last 20 years is opportunistic

>Picking a current tangential issue and globbing it on to a needed global trade correction which has been in the making for the last 20 years is opportunistic What you call opportunistic to make it less relevant I call illustrative of what a 15% rise in costs or prices means in reality. Can you show me a place where such a large class of items went up in price that was not catastrophic? Yet you think it will be some golden return to rose colored yesteryear. >US labor & regulation (where I am) is medium. Not stupidly high certainly not lowest. I'm in the US also. US wages are among the highest few countries out of around 200 countries over the world. They're among the highest in the OECD. I'd hardly call that medium. Those countries with a higher average or median wage are barely above the US, so I'd think it's safe to say US wages are just about the highest in the world. Why does an unskilled worker here make more than around 90% of the world population? Because he so amazing? Or because we have extraordinarily high labor costs? That unskilled work wage is not going to last, no matter how you slice it. Blaming China has pretty much zero to do with it - most low end jobs lost went to automation, and trying to make goods cost 15% more will only add pressure to automate more.