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>Cheap foreign factories and illegal immigration drags down wages and weakens unions But you can't outlaw foreign competitors from being cheaper than you, any
by hash872 3y ago
>Cheap foreign factories and illegal immigration drags down wages and weakens unions
But you can't outlaw foreign competitors from being cheaper than you, any more than you can pass a law against the tide coming in tomorrow
- unethical_ban 3y agoYou can demand domestic companies and importers document and attest to domestic standards of living and welfare (health plans, etc). You can tariff items which are made by slave/subpoverty labor. You can subsidize critical industries. Or, if the concerns are less about "how bad things are there" and more "what about jobs here", we could be spinning up more government jobs programs, more free college, more welfare here so that it doesn't matter if we lose textiles or manufacturing.
- hash872 3y ago>You can tariff items which are made by slave/subpoverty labor What are 'normal', middle-class wages in developing countries are 'extremely cheap' by US standards. You can't really solve that problem unless you tariff literally everything. Subsidizing critical industries- sure, I guess. What's the definition of that? Does it include cars? Clothing and shoes? Appliances? Vacuum cleaners? I don't think anyone's disputing that like military goods need to manufactured domestically, but kind of by definition 95% of goods are not 'critical'
- chihuahua 3y agoAren't import tariffs a means to raising prices of foreign competitors?
- Cthulhu_ 3y agoSure you can, that's a matter of foreign policy change or, as someone else pointed out, import tax hikes and export bans (on e.g. chip technology, but also up until a few decades ago, encryption technology)