General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: The Rise of Donald Trump is a big flashing neon sign that something is very wrong in this country [View all]Egnever
(21,506 posts)The money is still coming in. Yes the products are shifting but the production is still there. What is not happening is the workers getting the same cut of the profits they used to.
World trade is unavoidable and our focus should not being on discouraging world trade but working on raising standards in other countries. Oddly enough this is something the TPP is attempting to do yet it is widely criticized on this board as the work of the Devil.
It also is not black and white. Just because someone makes the equivalent to a 1.00 per hour in another country does not mean they are working for low wages. If you are working for 1.00 per hour but your housing only costs 10k instead of 100k are you really making less money or is your currency just valued differently when compared to the dollar.
We could effectively eliminate any trade advantage other countries have with us when it comes to labor by devaluing the dollar. Something we could easily do (and something China is doing). If we did that however it would have the effect of increasing prices for damn near everything, no longer would we be able to run to wall mart and pick up a 60 inch flat screen for $600.
It is not by any means a black and white situation where you can say if we just stopped importing american workers would make more money. Each time the dollar strengthens it makes labor here more expensive regardless of any actual wage changes. This is not something you can fix by simply limiting imports it is much much more complicated than that.
That said the fact that corporations are sharing less of their ever increasing profits than ever before could be changed and should be changed. Just returning the tax rate on profits to past levels would go along way to curbing the profit chasing that is currently completely dismantling our way of life. When corporations have a choice of investing the profits back into the company or giving them to the government in the form of taxes they usually choose to put that cash back into the company instead. When we started letting them keep more and more of the profits is when we started to see the mad dash to increase those profits at all costs IMHO.