We Can Do Better than a Trade War
Trump’s promising to put the genie back into the lamp and bring back jobs by making foreign labor artificially expensive with tariffs and his trade war. That’s dubious, inflationary, disruptive, and dangerous. Trade wars can turn into shooting wars.
Globalization made a world-wide labor market. The US is so affluent, we couldn’t possibly compete.
Capitalism worked it’s magic, gave us a cornucopia of inexpensive manufactured goods, and made the captains of industry obscenely rich.
Unfortunately, our government stopped protecting the working class from the rich and powerful and now half the people have a tiny fraction of the nation’s wealth. The American Dream is all but dead.
We shouldn’t deal with foreign labor at all (until we need their help, invite them in, and they have to fit into our system.) We should use US labor to build stuff that doesn’t use inexpensive foreign labor and stays in the US: We should make infrastructure.
We’re phenomenally rich. There’s a whole lot that we need and we can afford to build it..
For instance, a 5% (progressive, net) wealth tax on the top 10% would
- Raise $5.3 trillion
- Be enough to convert all fossil fuel home heating to electric ($3.9 trillion)
- Immediately make many more jobs than the trade war could without requiring any additional infrastructure
- Grow the GDP and world trade
- Significantly help the fight against climate change
- And have enough left over for other important projects