US Administration announces 34% tariffs on China, 20% on EU

Devils advocate point, and one nobody wants to talk about: what if everyone can't be a high-skill employee?

Imagine if the highest earning jobs required immense physical endurance and strength. Nobody would argue that everyone can do that. It would be obvious that only a subset of people are capable of doing those jobs. For some reason, with intellectual labor, we are able to pretend that there is no threshold and everyone can do it. It's an idea that makes people feel good but what if it's just not true? Can everyone be made above average in something with enough education?

If we're creating an economy where decent jobs only exist for people in the top ~20% of the ability curve, how do we handle that? How do we maintain a democracy? Sometimes people float the idea of UBI, but that could turn out extremely dystopian with a huge underclass of UBI-collecting people in a state of hopelessness and boredom. That doesn't work much better for democracy than a huge underclass of under-employed and unemployed people.

To make matters worse: the fact that our past strategy works so well for increasing GDP means it it tends to inflate assets, including things like housing prices. The end result is a country that looks, to more than half its inhabitants, like a vacation town where outside capital inflates the cost of everything way above what local wages can support. It might not be a coincidence that San Francisco, New York, and other capitals of high margin high skill industries have real estate prices that lock ordinary people out of even "starter homes."

I absolutely do not support Trump's execution here -- it's ham-fisted, reckless, and badly thought out. If we are exiting this neoliberal model, Trump's exit from it is a little bit like Biden's exit from Afghanistan. Still it is obvious to me that the current system is not working for more than half of Americans. It's fantastic for the top ~20% or so and leaves everyone else behind.

We can't keep doing that if we want a democracy. If we exclude 50-80% of the population from anything meaningful or any economic stability, we will get one of two things. Either we'll get the kind of totalitarian state that is required to maintain that kind of inequality in perpetuity, or we will get a string of revolutions or a failed state. People will not just sit around in hopelessness forever. Eventually they will be recruited by demagogues. Ironically Trump has been one of the most effective at this. I'm sure more will eventually show up though. There's a big market for them.

JD Vance had an interview somewhere (I think in the NYTimes?) where he claimed that national prosperity is downstream of military might which is downstream of industrial base. It made me stop and think, because that does line up with what I was taught about how the Allies won WW2, and the US beat the Soviets in the Cold War: we outproduced them. I'm not sure if this is "fighting the last war", though, since I imagine a lot of warfare going forward is going to be technological and with things like drones, etc.

It's just so easy to deal with our economic abstraction, of dollars flying around, and computer work, and services and so on, that I sometimes do wonder about your point here about the actual physical, production of goods, and how important that is. Can you have a long term, stable, healthy, successful country that doesn't (and can't) produce anything physical?

We clearly can still make some stuff. I have a great squat rack and barbell set from Rogue Fitness, which makes stuff here in the USA (captured in this beautiful advertisement video[0]), and it's awesome. But I also have a made-in-the-USA wood pellet smoker which is garbage, and which I kind of wish I had just bought from China.

All to say, yeah, I think there's the potential for there to be something along the lines of what you're saying. That said, the implementation is maybe not great. Even taking the Tesla Texas Gigafactory, which was built in warp speed (construction to first cars in about 1.5 years), that's only leaving 2 years before a potential next administration could roll back the tariffs if they wanted.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aCMGqA6_XY

And how do you propose we do that? By giving schools even more money at taxpayer's expense?

> raising taxes at the high end

40.1% of US taxpayers on the low end of income distribution pay no income tax, 16.5% pay neither income nor payroll taxes. Top 1% pays 40.4% of all income tax (while holding about 30.8% of net worth, 13.8% of the total is held by top 0.1%). Top 1% (with the possible exception of a few billionaires) already pays through their nose.