I’m not an expert, but every expert I’m seeing is saying that Trump’s tariffs will likely cause a massive recession/depression. However, conservatives claim that these tariffs will incentivize Americans to buy American-made products. And that these tariffs will help rebuild American manufacturing and industrial jobs. From what I’ve been reading, the loss of these jobs are a big part of what’s destroying the American middle class.
Since the 1980s, many American manufacturing and industrial jobs have been outsourced to countries with cheaper labor, especially after NAFTA and China joining the WTO. Companies like General Motors and U.S. Steel provided stable, high-paying jobs with good benefits, but offshoring and automation has led to massive job losses. These were replaced by lower-paying service jobs in places like Walmart and Amazon, with fewer benefits and little job security. As unions declined and wages stagnated, many working-class families struggled to stay in the middle class. The Rust Belt has been decimated, a shell of what it once was. What’s the point of having lower unemployment if those employed are barely surviving paycheck-to-paycheck?
Now, I want to make it very clear, I am not saying that I think tariffs are the solution. But I’m seeing a lot of Trump supporters say they’ll be more than happy to deal with temporary price hikes if it means bringing back manufacturing and industrial jobs. Maybe I’m not paying close enough attention, but as someone who lives in the Rust Belt, I haven’t seen too many Democrats talk about bringing these jobs back and I think this has disheartened and upset the people who live here. But is there even a way to bring those jobs back, realistically? I say this as a 20 year old, so I apologize if I come across as ignorant, I’m asking this in good faith. It just seems like we’re in too deep now, the damage has been done. Almost everything is seems to be made overseas and American products are much more costly to produce.
Are there any pragmatic solutions here? While consumers have benefited from the lower prices brought on by outsourcing, many great American jobs have been destroyed. Is making the consumers pay more really better in the long run? Even if it causes a recession? It seems like impossible situation because how can we charge the consumers more after gutting the middle class for the last few decades? At the same time, how can we get these jobs back without charging the consumers more? Anyone financially struggling is going to buy the cheaper product, even if it’s made in China. I don’t know, I’m not that old and I’m not that educated. Which is why I’m asking you folks.
ETA: I see the “tax the rich” statement thrown around like it’s a complete solution. And while I definitely think it could help, I also would be worried about the ultra-wealthy retaliating. Wouldn’t they raise prices and layoff workers? I’m not saying they would for sure do that, but that’s the common counterargument I hear. The rich don’t like losing money, even if they have more than they’ll ever need. You don’t become a billionaire by being a philanthrope. Not to mention, both parties are filled with the rich, only a handful of politicians are even on-board with increasing taxes on the wealthy. Billionaires seem to be able to buy their way in our government. As long as the rich don’t want to pay more, they won’t. Not unless a bunch of elected politicians can get their shit together.
EDIT 2: I’m reading the comments as they come, I really appreciate those taking the time to explain and educate.
Comments
The following is a copy of the original post to record the post as it was originally written.
I’m not an expert, but every expert I’m seeing is saying that Trump’s tariffs will likely cause a massive recession/depression. However, conservatives claim that these tariffs will incentivize Americans to buy American-made products. And that these tariffs will help rebuild American manufacturing and industrial jobs. From what I’ve been reading, the loss of these jobs are a big part of what’s destroying the American middle class.
Since the 1980s, many American manufacturing and industrial jobs have been outsourced to countries with cheaper labor, especially after NAFTA and China joining the WTO. Companies like General Motors and U.S. Steel provided stable, high-paying jobs with good benefits, but offshoring and automation has led to massive job losses. These were replaced by lower-paying service jobs in places like Walmart and Amazon, with fewer benefits and little job security. As unions declined and wages stagnated, many working-class families struggled to stay in the middle class. The Rust Belt has been decimated, a shell of what it once was. What’s the point of having lower unemployment if those employed are barely surviving paycheck-to-paycheck?
Now, I want to make it very clear, I am not saying that I think tariffs are the solution. But I’m seeing a lot of Trump supporters say they’ll be more than happy to deal with temporary price hikes if it means bringing back manufacturing and industrial jobs. Maybe I’m not paying close enough attention, but as someone who lives in the Rust Belt, I haven’t seen too many Democrats talk about bringing these jobs back and I think this has disheartened and upset the people who live here. But is there even a way to bring those jobs back, realistically? I say this as a 20 year old, so I apologize if I come across as ignorant, I’m asking this in good faith. It just seems like we’re in too deep now, the damage has been done. Almost everything is seems to be made overseas and American products are much more costly to produce.
Are there any pragmatic solutions here? While consumers have benefited from the lower prices brought on by outsourcing, many great American jobs have been destroyed. Is making the consumers pay more really better in the long run? Even if it causes a recession? It seems like impossible situation because how can we charge the consumers more after gutting the middle class for the last few decades? At the same time, how can we get these jobs back without charging the consumers more? Anyone financially struggling is going to buy the cheaper product, even if it’s made in China. I don’t know, I’m not that old and I’m not that educated. Which is why I’m asking you folks.
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As always, yall libs aren’t going to like this, but capitalism got us into this mess, and it ain’t gunna get us out.
>Is there a pragmatic way to bring back the middle class?
Yes!
There are other things we can do, but those would probably be enough.
EDIT: I read and responded to much of your post, but several of my responses amounted to ‘listen to experts not politicians’. If you want to skip over those, skip to this one and go down from there.
Tax the rich.
We don’t have an unemployment problem so bringing back jobs that can’t be filled will do nothing.
MAGA morons FA and they are about FO
Unions. Unions created the middle class and can do so again.
TAX THE RICH
Fund public services that the middle class of our parents era enjoyed.
I have no faith whatsoever that “bringing back manufacturing jobs” – even if possible – would do anything. There’s a reason those jobs went overseas in the first place, the labor required for that kind of job does not command a high wage. Period. That’s still going to be true if those jobs were over here.
This attempt to turn back the clock is futile, unimaginative, regressive bullshit that is not going to let us re-live the plot to the Jeffersons. I’m sorry but that time is over.
“Poverty exists not because we cannot feed the poor, but because we cannot satisfy the rich.”
Billionaires, excessive greed and short term shareholder profits are the problem. The wolves are in charge of the hen house and they are not interested in investing in an educated, sustainable populous. They want cheap, dumb, powerless workers who can be exploited.
We need to invest in labor unions, regulation and taxing the fuck out of the oligarchs.
There’s nothing wrong with also investing in American manufacturing and infrastructure (this is what Biden was trying to do) but blanket tariffs where we don’t have the materials / industry to provide a domestic alternative is just suicidal.
Stop making us pay for billionaires
We act like this hasn’t been done before and it blows my mind. The blueprint is still there and it’s not even that old. The problem isn’t having a way to figure this out the problem is shifting the paradigm from seeing someone like Bernie Sanders as a pie in the sky radical lefty to the center/center-left figure he is on the unskewed by corporate American media political spectrum.
Taxing the already well off to invest in the people of this country is not radical. It’s not even true socialism. It’s quite literally how we operated during the time everyone seems to want to go back to.
> However, conservatives claim that these tariffs will incentivize Americans to buy American-made products. And that these tariffs will help rebuild American manufacturing and industrial jobs.
Conservatives are just plain old lying about that. Like they do nearly everything else.
> Since the 1980s, many American manufacturing and industrial jobs have been outsourced to countries with cheaper labor, especially after NAFTA and China joining the WTO.
We produced more manufactured goods in 2024 than we ever did before NAFTA was signed.
> These were replaced by lower-paying service jobs in places like Walmart and Amazon, with fewer benefits and little job security.
No, they were replaced with high paying service jobs, mainly. Sure, there also exist low paying service jobs, but those aren’t what replaced manufacturing as the core of the US economy.
> But I’m seeing a lot of Trump supporters say they’ll be more than happy to deal with temporary price hikes if it means bringing back manufacturing and industrial jobs.
That’s called being a sucker. Those jobs aren’t coming back, even with the tariffs.
> I haven’t seen too many Democrats talk about bringing these jobs back
Because there isn’t a way to bring them back.
They weren’t ever coming back. There wasn’t some conscious decision to move them from one place to another, which you could then reverse. The jobs evaporated due to a combination of heavy automation and outsourcing, but even once the production moved back to the US after NAFTA (and quite a lot of it did), modern factories simply don’t need nearly as many people as they did back in the ‘80s. They’re never going to employ anything like the numbers they did back then.
Even if they build a plant here today, it needs like 10% of the workforce to meet the same output it did back then.
The jobs aren’t coming back. There isn’t a way to bring them back. They don’t exist any more, and can’t. All Trump’s policies are doing here is destroying the service economy too.
> Almost everything is seems to be made overseas and American products are much more costly to produce.
Until Trump 2.0, the US produced more goods than it ever had before. We manufacture a ton of stuff. What we don’t do is final assembly of consumer goods. So when you go to the store and buy a consumer product, it is very often assembled overseas… from a combination of parts sourced from all over the world, including the US. It’s pretty common for goods sold in the US to be assembled in China… after the US-made parts have crossed the Pacific a couple of times already by the time it gets back to a US store shelf.
> While consumers have benefited from the lower prices brought on by outsourcing
US manufacturing also greatly benefited from the cheap imports. It made the cost of materials a lot lower for US manufacturing, allowing it to still be competitive despite higher labor costs. These tariffs out an end to that, and will decrease the amount of manufacturing done in the US.
A lot of US factory workers are going to lose their jobs due to these tariffs, if they stay in place.
Stop subsidizing the billionaires and oligarchs.
We created the middle class through a 91% top tax rate, and 51% corporate rate. When you’re paying that much in taxes after making a certain large amount of money, the fight to make more is greatly reduced. Then you figure in the deductions that are far more beneficial when there is a large corporate tax rate. Reinvestment in the company and workers pays off more that running the company into the ground while you extract every last cent. With these tariffs, we are paying the tax, exports fall, companies sell less, they can raise their prices to match the imported goods so prices won’t fall, people lose their jobs, nobody has money to buy any goods, it’s a shit show.
Over the last few decades we’ve brought down the cost of consumer goods like tvs, computers, cell, phones, clothing while simultaneously enacting policies that made the things one actually really needs to live a middle class life like housing, health insurance, & childcare much more expensive. We absolutely can bring the middle class back.
The middle class never disappeared. There’s a persistent myth that it has eroded since the decline of American manufacturing, but in reality, manufacturing declined because the country became incredibly wealthy. As a result, “cheap labor” is no longer our comparative advantage in global trade. If the goal is to bring back large-scale manufacturing, it would require making the country significantly poorer—one way or another.
The golden past that people yearn for is one where everybody was much poorer. If you were lucky, you lived in a small shitty house and the family had one shitty car and almost nobody went to college. Women were paid so little, and household tasks were so labor intensive, it usually didn’t even make sense for them to have a job. In contrast, the middle class in Biden’s America were some of the richest people in all of human history. Basically the only people doing better than middle class Americans were rich Americans.
That said, the middle class does face a real affordability crisis when it comes to certain specific goods, particularly housing and healthcare. We should build on the improvements Obama made to the healthcare system, likely by increasing taxes across the board, as European countries do. For housing, we should deregulate construction to allow for more development, driving prices down and making housing more affordable.
To give you an actual answer that isn’t just tired rhetoric:
>but every expert I’m seeing is saying that Trump’s tariffs will likely cause a massive recession/depression.
They’re correct.
>However, conservatives claim that these tariffs will incentivize Americans to buy American-made products.
They will not.
>And that these tariffs will help rebuild American manufacturing and industrial jobs.
They will not. It’ll actually crater it, if anything.
>From what I’ve been reading, the loss of these jobs are a big part of what’s destroying the American middle class.
Partially. But a lot of it is because the electorate decided that homes should be investment vehicles instead of a necessary good, the lack of more generous welfare for people, and the destruction of walkable, bikeable, mass transit oriented cities.
>Since the 1980s, many American manufacturing and industrial jobs have been outsourced to countries with cheaper labor, especially after NAFTA and China joining the WTO. Companies like General Motors and U.S. Steel provided stable, high-paying jobs with good benefits, but offshoring and automation has led to massive job losses.
Which was inevitable. People don’t give a singular damn about buying products made purely in America. People want high quality and low costs.
>These were replaced by lower-paying service jobs in places like Walmart and Amazon, with fewer benefits and little job security.
Which didn’t have to be that way. This is why unionization is important.
>As unions declined and wages stagnated, many working-class families struggled to stay in the middle class.
Mostly self-inflicted. Again, destruction of cities where you could live without a car + restricting housing supply in order to boost wealth accumulation.
>The Rust Belt has been decimated, a shell of what it once was. What’s the point of having lower unemployment if those employed are barely surviving paycheck-to-paycheck?
I live in a Rust Belt city. Most of our problems come from not jumping ship when the writing was on the wall. Also, again, destruction of people friendly city + making housing an investment over a necessity.
>But I’m seeing a lot of Trump supporters say they’ll be more than happy to deal with temporary price hikes if it means bringing back manufacturing and industrial jobs.
They’re lying. Biden kept tariffs around and even added some more, and they still flipped their shit over inflation.
>But is there even a way to bring those jobs back, realistically?
No. People don’t care about a product being made in America. What we need to do is lower cost of living and have a higher minimum wage so that a full time job can more easily support a person.
>Is making the consumers pay more really better in the long run?
No.
>At the same time, how can we get these jobs back without charging the consumers more?
You can’t. You either pay the price or you don’t. Wages and benefits are much higher here than in China. You need to pay the price of American labor if you want American made products.
Now, HOW can we help and grow the middle class again?:
Liberalized zoning ordinance + by right development. No more democracy regarding who can build what. No more meetings about if a building should be built. If it follows the established regulations, let it be built. If people don’t like it, they can leave.
Expand welfare benefits so it helps more people.
Get rid of space for cars so that we can have comprehensive mass transit. If people don’t like it, they can leave.
Raise minimum wages on a metropolitan/micropolitan basis.
Make higher education free at point of use.
Expand childcare/family support services.
Do all of those things, and you bring upon another Golden Age for America and it’s middle class.
And FYI, this will require high taxes on everyone. Anybody screeching about how we should just tax the rich to fund everything, has no idea what they’re talking about. You cannot just “tax the rich” in order to fund everything we want. YOU, yes, YOU, will need to pay higher taxes in order to fund it. There’s a reason why the richest, happiest places on Earth, have the highest taxes on everyone.
Solidarity among the working class, and subsequent abandoning of the “low/middle/high class” paradigm.
Yeah, you tax the rich to support robust social programs like education, tax credits and public work projects.
You then support national labor right laws and the creation of unions.
Basically you have to reverse about 70 years of Republican actions that have lead to this.
>From what I’ve been reading, the loss of these jobs are a big part of what’s destroying the American middle class.
We have a shortage of manufacturing workers, not a surplus. When there are more jobs to fill, the shortage will be worse.
Over the entire U.S., you need about $56,600 to be in the middle class, as of 2024 (link below). As of 2023, US GDP per capita was $82,769(link below). This means that we have enough money and produce enough goods and services to create a huge middle class. The issue is distribution.
You said that the common argument against taxing the rich is that the rich will retaliate, or additionally, they will leave. While I’m not in a position right now to find the sources, as I recall, capital flight hasn’t really been observed on a massive scale, and countries that tax the rich and use the proceeds well (such as providing a comprehensive social safety net), manage to help build the middle class.
So, I think well designed welfare policies, such as a negative income tax, along with universal public services, could help to build up the middle class.
Increasing union density can also help, because it puts workers in a better position to fight for higher wages and protect their jobs. Making it easier for unions to form, repealing laws that restrict unions, preventing retaliation by corporations, and informing workers about unions could all help improve union density.
Helping to create and support worker cooperatives, such as by providing funding, tax incentives for investors, or other favorable laws, could help. Worker cooperatives are more productive, survive longer (at least in the short and medium terms), and reduce inequality.
Improving education is also helpful, and is worthwhile in and of itself, but can also help to reduce inequality and strengthen the middle class, as well as promote general economic development.
Links:
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/09/16/are-you-in-the-american-middle-class/
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?locations=US
Tax the hyper rich (not the middle class, inflation-indexed, like most “rich” taxes like AMT actually do.)
Provide universal health care.
Fix education so the next generation won’t be as dumb as the current one.
Reverse the hyper corruption due to Citizens United.
Okay. So there are different definitions of the middle class. Usually it’s like 67% of the median HH or Family Income to double the family income. In the US as a whole you are middle class if you make 56,000-169,000 of course this should be based on the area you live in as costs are different in different localities.
So then you have other markers like home ownership, or retirement savings, ability to afford some vacations etc.
There is no perfect definition.
One thing that is certain is that over time the middle class has shrunk. The thing that people don’t grasp though is that more of the middle class has gone into the category that is over 200% of the median than people have gone below the 67% threshold.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/04/20/how-the-american-middle-class-has-changed-in-the-past-five-decades/
The most up to date data I can find puts the peak of the US middle class at 1971. I. That year 61% of Americans were middle class. 25% were below middle class and 14% were above. Then in 2021 only 50% of people were middle class, an 11% drop. 29% were below middle class, a four percent increase. 21% were above middle class, which was a 7 percent increase. This means more Americans are becoming richer than Americans are becoming poorer.
If Homeownership is the marker that one wants to look at then you have an actual increase in home ownership now compared to when the middle class was at its highest point.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N
This is not to say homes are not prohibitively expensive/unaffordable right now at this very moment, they are. However homeownership has remained relatively constant. It hit its peak right before the housing crash when all those sub-prime mortgages were going out.
Per person we are also working less.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AVHWPEUSA065NRUG
People in the US also have more purchasing power than in the past.
https://home.treasury.gov/news/featured-stories/the-purchasing-power-of-american-households
So in conclusion. Really this isn’t as big as a problem as it is made out to be. Big concerns are the affordability of homes and rental prices which could clearly cause long term issues if they remain unaffordable compared to wages. America’s economy is and has been for decades “great” for the most part compared to the vast majority of places.
People who look to the past and want to return to some unspecified time in the past when they thought things were better are mostly mistaken and looking at things with rose colored glasses or nostalgia.
It’s best to not do something like impose massive tariffs on the entire world in an attempt to bring manufacturing back to the US, as this is always going to fail and it ignores America’s strengths strong economy.
Sure there is always room for improvement. We don’t need to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
If I were to implement policy changes to assist the middle class. I would implement policies that make it easier to build housing and I would institute policies to help families with childcare expenses and to get more guaranteed paid time off. I would also pair this with a more streamlined legal immigration process and reforms to the K-12 system to get more people into in-demand fields. I would also support entrepreneurial endeavors through a federal loan system and strengthen temporary social safety net programs. This would likely require slightly more taxes at the federal level at the top end. I also think costs could be cut in some areas but that is trivial mostly the country needs to get younger so there are more working people paying taxes.
> I’m not an expert, but every expert I’m seeing is saying that Trump’s tariffs will likely cause a massive recession/depression.
I don’t know that experts are saying exactly this – the announcement is new and there hasn’t been much time to digest it, or evaluate how other countries will respond. I’m not aware at least if there’s a strong consensus that a recession is imminent. Regardless, prices will definitely increase. Economic activity will definitely slow.
> However, conservatives claim that these tariffs will incentivize Americans to buy American-made products.
Sure, to some degree. You’re erecting trade barriers that will make foreign-made goods more expensive compared to domestic goods.
But reality is complicated. In many cases, US manufacturing plants use parts that were manufactured elsewhere. Now their cost of goods have increased. It’s not clear that they’ll really pull out ahead even with a leg up from foreign competition in domestic markets.
Domestic manufacturers often raise their prices in response to tariffs, as they can charge more and still come out ahead of foreign competition. Now the other US firms that use their products will pay more, slowing their own growth.
In addition, foreign countries will likely retaliate with tariffs of their own against American goods, and domestic producers who sold products internationally will now also have slower growth.
> And that these tariffs will help rebuild American manufacturing and industrial jobs.
Unclear on both. Foreign goods maybe got more expensive, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s now more profitable to manufacture a product in the US. If it’s still more profitable to manufacture elsewhere, the net effect is simply that the product is more expensive to American consumers and businesses. American workers remain fairly expensive compared to the rest of the world.
In addition, any domestic shift in manufacturing will likely come with a larger focus on automation. We might get some manufacturing jobs but automation will severely temper the actual number. We produce far more goods than we did in the 1970s with a far smaller manufacturing workforce. We’re not going back to 1970s manufacturing employment without destroying our own productivity by getting rid of a bunch of technology and making goods wildly more expensive.
> From what I’ve been reading, the loss of these jobs are a big part of what’s destroying the American middle class.
I’ve heard this said as well, but I don’t know how true it is.
Also, has the middle class really been destroyed?
According to Pew, in 1971 the US was
Now in 2024, the US was:
Sure, the middle income group shrank by ~10%. But the lower income group only grew by ~3%, while the upper income group grew by ~8%. The middle class might be smaller, but it seems that for every 1 person who became less fortunate, >2 people become more fortunate. This doesn’t seem like a bad thing to me, personally I think that’s a good trend.
We need to make it illegal for corporations to buy up all the land and housing as if it were stock shares.
Get rid of the billionaire class.
There’s only so many resources, and thus money, to go around.
Tax profits and capital gains beyond just 15%
>Wouldn’t they raise prices and layoff workers?
They do that anyway! Might as well get some taxes out of them!
Post the depression, FDR taxed the fuck out of the rich and used it to give jobs to the poor and build infrastrucutre, and it worked so damn well he was elected 4 fuck’in times.
The other kick ass time in America was post WW2, again we were taxing the rich and subsidizing the fuck out of the poor. Trickle down is BS. Trickled UP is fucking fantastic.
Fuck shouldas and couldas, we have history. Real and very pragmatic history.
Tax. The. Fucking. Rich.
Raise wages.
The reason that “bringing back manufacturing and industrial jobs” gets thrown around as a palliative is that we think of those jobs as being relatively well-paying, with relatively low barriers to entry. If there are lots of jobs like that available, then other employers have to compete in the labor market by raising wages or lowering barriers to entry.
However, the reason why those jobs (at least historically) were well-paying and had a low barrier to entry was because of a high rate of unionization within those industries. Those unions effectively set a price floor for labor in those industries, and with the combination of a low barrier to entry and a large presence in the overall economy, this had a spill over effect of raising the price of labor in other industries as well.
We don’t really need manufacturing jobs and industrial jobs per se, if the goal is to increase the share of households bringing in income sufficient to qualify as “middle class”. And in fact, if we did bring those jobs back, but failed to ensure they were unionized, the pay for those jobs would be comparable to what the labor market pays for other low barrier to entry jobs.
What we need is the broad price floor that significant union power can bring.
Or, the broad price floor that the minimum wage can bring.
There are other “big” factors that have made being middle class harder to achieve, primarily things like the cost of housing, education, healthcare, and childcare, that could be addressed as well – but the big thing really is as simple as paying people more.