And that isn't going to last, take advantage of it while you can, America.
You can build domestic industry and jobs without this dumb shit. It's just going to reduce the purchasing power.
this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2024
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chapotraphouse
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It would be very funny to see Americans mald over rising treat prices, except...
This shit never seems to catch the biggest fish. They just send everything to a big warehouse in some exempted country (Indonesia, Korea, Canada, wherever) and have people put stickers on the widgets as part of the "final assembly process", then insist that's the country of origin.
People will pay $1500 for a "next gen" iPhone that has a slightly nicer camera and a chromium finish. The tariffs don't seem to meaningfully impact our import rate.
Insourcing production to the US (assuming this is ever actually going to happen) is technically good for the American economy. Trump's methods are ham-fisted and ill-conceived, but re-capitalization of the American economy would be an unmitigated good and would strengthen this cursed white supremacist state.
The whipped dog of the American proletariat only ever knows how to lash out at weaker and more vulnerable people around them. They continue to lack any revolutionary character that might actually harm the foundation of the bourgeois dictatorship.
re-capitalization may seem alluring to American nationalists but its actually dumb as hell. Capitalism is a world system lubricated by USD, which americans send abroad to pay for imports. Its not a competition of discrete national economies, capitalism is global and totalizing. Everyone else in the world does the actual work, Americans just need to do their part: consume to provide high-end demand. Trying to go to protectionism now is like trying to make the oil pump in the opposite direction, your gonna break the motor and probably set something on fire.
China and India are recapitalizing to good effect. Russia is recapitalizing, and that's why the country hasn't collapsed under the weight of their stupid war. Germany is capitalized, and that's why it can bully everyone else in the EU except France.
Meanwhile, the UK is just six banks in a trench coat and their economy is disintegrating underneath them. Saudi Arabia is trying to build out capital in excess of its oil drilling and desalination systems, but all MBS knows how to do is build Monaco over and over again in a big line. Hong Kong has fucked itself, because all the business assets are in Shenzhen and western nations no longer need a UK-backed financial bridge into China. Japan is increasingly just Tokyo plus Alabama, as all the capital wealth concentrates in a handful of metropoles.
So much of what gets "consumed" from abroad is waste. Wasted textiles. Wasted foodstuffs. Disposable packaging and one-use commodities. Wasted energy from A/C cooling empty buildings and cars lined up in five mile long traffic queues. Technology that's run at high capacity solely to put up fake shit on the internet. Technology that's designed not to last longer than the next marketing cycle. It isn't even stuff Americans get to enjoy. It's Instant Trash that just molds in a factory somewhere. Grain during the potato famine. The Grapes of Wrath.
Americans have a bunch of jobs that desperately need doing - education, health care, infrastructure maintenance, logistics, waste management - that they don't want to pay anyone to do. Consequently, everyone runs off and gets jobs in finance and advertising, because that's the only shit that pays. So we have more and more of Graeber's Bullshit Jobs putting up numbers on the domestic economy while fewer and fewer people know how anything in the country actually works.
But to say Americans aren't "doing work" is absurd. Americans are chronically overworked. They're perpetually exhausted. They're a miserable, wrung out, and depressed. They're not idle. They're wasted. Americans are working overtime to produce excess waste.
You don’t have to be Viktor Frankl to know that life becomes unbearable when a person can’t derive some kind of meaning from it. I thought things were getting bad in the ‘90s, but America keeps telling me to hold its beer.