Economic Nationalism will unite Americans of all races...

[_The CCC]

What Trump policy would that be?

Whatever puts more money in his pocket.

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

Well, I was attempting to make a point about globalization on the other thread, but I might as well make it here. It's an open secret that 'middle class' incomes have basically flatlined since, probably the late 70's or early 80's.

If you take inflation-adjusted, pre-tax pay and compare it to the median pay of around that time period it pretty much matches up. HOWEVER, the purchasing power of dollars have changed radically, and when you take into account population pressures that drive up demand for rent, mortgages, consumibles, and then add in taxes the real value of the dollar is probably around half of what it was.

Basically, adjusting for inflation, you'd have to be earning ~$105,000 - $120,000 depending on the mid-major market, to compete with a late 60's or early 70's income of ~$48,000-$55,000, again, depending on the market.

And we're not even scratching the surface of labor traded for that income, either. That's a whole 'nother ball of wax.

So, what's going on?

Well, one, if you flood the market with workers you're going to devalue their labor. It's akin to printing money. Aren't most households dual-income these days (not necessarily dual full-time)? So a huge sea change in our culture has basically introduce tens of millions of women into the market as laborers. I'm cool with that, by the way. I gots my kids into the market. But that's a fact. Nationalism isn't going to address that.

What else?

Democrat and Republican immigration policies have resulted in an influx of what? 20, 30, 40 million illegal immigrants who work in various sectors? You just flooded the marketplace with tens of millions of people who can be easily exploited by their employers and drive down wages because, you know, business is business. Nationalism isn't going to fix that because who controls how business is conducted? Got news for you. That wall ain't getting built. And Republicans are straight up owned by corporations. Also, Democrats know immigrants and their progeny generally vote blue. The sheer idea of economic nationalism is just... It's impossible.

You can't tariff your way into a 50% hike of lifestyle and purchasing power. You. Are. “F” ED.

You want to know why the vast majority of homeless people are men? Because they can't compete. They literally don't have the mental wherewithal to, I dunno, become a techie and they're squeezed between the reality that what's available to them just doesn't cut it and opting out. They're opting out because escapism is more attractive and because our American society doesn't give a crap about them. No one is going to rescue them from themselves.

Economic nationalism isn't going to cut it unless you become a cultural nationalist, and then you might as well just become a National Socialist because you're going to have to have a central government exploiting its people for national aims and a national purpose.

- Doc

[_canpakes]

Ajax, could you explain a little more the connection you see between legal or illegal immigrants working in this country, and the promotion of economic nationalism? I get the sense that you are treating the two as completely incompatible for some unstated reason.

I can't believe you're seriously asking that. Economic nationalism promotes the interests of citizens of the US, not citizens of the world. It's a smart political stance given that illegal immigrants shouldn't be voting. But voter fraud is real.

OK, I'm not getting an answer out of that, so, I'll toss in some specific examples.

Please tell me how the following folks do or do not promote 'economic nationalism':

1. The illegal or work-permitted person serving as a short-order cook at your favorite Denny's,
2. The illegal or work-permitted person who busses tables and washes dishes at your corner diner,
3. The illegal or work-permitted person who works construction at the new home site down the road,
4. The illegal or work-permitted person that cleans rooms at the motel.

Or, for that matter, most any member of the DACA rolls.

Please be specific as opposed to vague constructs like, 'promoting the interests of citizens'. I'm not yet going to claim that you don't have a concrete understanding of what that means, but I'm also not yet convinced that you have that foundation without seeing something more from you.

[_subgenius]

Please tell me how the following folks do or do not promote 'economic nationalism':

1. The illegal or work-permitted person serving as a short-order cook at your favorite Denny's,
2. The illegal or work-permitted person who busses tables and washes dishes at your corner diner,
3. The illegal or work-permitted person who works construction at the new home site down the road,
4. The illegal or work-permitted person that cleans rooms at the motel.

.

quit arguing exceptions and focus on the rule:
economic nationalism emphasizes domestic control of money, labor, capital formation, etc....someone consistently transferring the majority of their money over the border (eg back home). Many of the workers you describe above are outside of the net gains realized by domestic investment (401k, etc) - ergo bad for economic nationalism.

[_beastie]

You are being conned by Trump.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/pl ... eaba244126

If America produces the best craftsmanship, why, then, does Ivanka Trump’s company manufacture no items in the United States? As The Post reported just last week, her company relies “exclusively on foreign factories,” including in Bangladesh, Indonesia, Vietnam and China, to manufacture the shoes, handbags, blouses, dresses, jeans and shirts for the first daughter’s line of clothing.

Similarly, many items in Trump’s own clothing and home accessories are produced overseas in countries including China, Bangladesh and Mexico. When he excoriates American companies for moving manufacturing jobs overseas, then, he is including himself in his own criticism — but of course would never admit that. Instead, when questioned about why he manufactures items overseas, his answer was, essentially, everyone else does it.

While campaigning for president, Trump dismissed criticism of his foreign-made goods, claiming (incorrectly, according to FactCheck.org) that he had little choice because apparel just isn’t manufactured in the United States anymore. What Trump doesn’t want to say is that it would cost him more to make his products here in the United States and pay a decent wage to those American workers that he supposedly is dedicated to defending.

Trump doesn’t even bother to pay more for American-made goods for those in his customer base who could pay more for items: guests at his luxury hotels. While staying in an $850-per-night room at Trump’s Washington, D.C., hotel last year, The Post’s Dana Milbank revealed that the posh “Trump Hotels” bathrobe and slippers were made in China, and the guest rooms are replete with foreign-made goods. Among the items made overseas, Milbank found towels made in India, china made in Japan, Malaysian-made telephones, and a coffee machine and several lamps, among other things, all made in China.

While Trump has promised steel workers in Rust Belt states that he will restore lost jobs to their economically battered communities, he has built at least two hotels with steel and aluminum from China — the persistent bogeyman of Trump’s campaign speeches in which he decried the decline of American manufacturing. When faced with the evidence of his Chinese steel purchases, though, Trump just plowed ahead, continuing the charade that he is an unemployed steelworker’s best friend.

etc ad nauseum

Bumping up so majax can close his eyes and plug his ears again.

[Guest]

Please tell me how the following folks do or do not promote 'economic nationalism':

1. The illegal or work-permitted person serving as a short-order cook at your favorite Denny's,
2. The illegal or work-permitted person who busses tables and washes dishes at your corner diner,
3. The illegal or work-permitted person who works construction at the new home site down the road,
4. The illegal or work-permitted person that cleans rooms at the motel.

quit arguing exceptions and focus on the rule:
economic nationalism emphasizes domestic control of money, labor, capital formation, etc....someone consistently transferring the majority of their money over the border (eg back home). Many of the workers you describe above are outside of the net gains realized by domestic investment (401k, etc) - ergo bad for economic nationalism.

Oh, I'm sorry for not concentrating on the majority of illegals - you know, the hordes working as doctors, lawyers, architects and other professionals. Right?

Anyhow, if you are going to talk about 401k participation ... less than half of all Americans participate in one, and of those, less than a third save enough to meet recommended retirement standards. So, you'd better widen your net of disdain outside of just poor illegals - who aren't exactly making a boatload to invest in the first place - if 401k participation is your beef.

If you're going to bitch about remittances, then you've lost that argument before you even get your first sentence out:

The economics of remittances surprise a lot people, even those who aren't sympathetic to Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric. People intuitively assume keeping that money in the United States is a good thing for the American economy, but many macroeconomists disagree.

Why?

One reason is that remittances mean cheaper stuff for Americans. The millions of Mexican immigrants working in the United States provide goods and services for American consumers, and in exchange they earn dollars. About 11.7 million Mexican immigrants live in the United States, and last year Mexico received about $24 billion back in remittances. When immigrants send their earnings overseas, America loses dollars, but no actual goods or services. Figuratively, we trade pieces of paper with green ink for real stuff. If families in Mexico use those dollars to buy things made in Mexico or elsewhere, then America has essentially gotten immigrants' services without paying anything tangible in return. If, on the other hand, families in Mexico use their remittances to buy things made in the United States, then American exports increase. Either way, the American economy wins.

Nice of you to jump in and waffle on without saying anything much, though. It proves the point I'm making just that much more.

[Tator]

Thomas Picketty's book "Capital" is controversial because of his suggested policy solutions (world wide global tax to reduce income inequality*). But aside from that issue, he makes a strong argument to explain why we have stagnant lower and middle incomes, with the wealth of the top increasing.

This summary explains it better than I could:

https://www.economist.com/blogs/economi ... t-explains

It is the economics book that took the world by storm. Capital in the Twenty-First Century, written by the French economist Thomas Piketty, was published in French in 2013 and in English in March 2014. The English version quickly became an unlikely bestseller, and it prompted a broad and energetic debate on the book’s subject: the outlook for global inequality. Some reckon it heralds or may itself cause a pronounced shift in the focus of economic policy, toward distributional questions. The Economist hailed Professor Piketty as "the modern Marx" (Karl, that is). But what is his book all about?

Capital draws on more than a decade of research by Piketty and a handful of other economists, detailing historical changes in the concentration of income and wealth. This pile of data allows Piketty to sketch out the evolution of inequality since the beginning of the industrial revolution. In the 18th and 19th centuries western European society was highly unequal. Private wealth dwarfed national income and was concentrated in the hands of the rich families who sat atop a relatively rigid class structure. This system persisted even as industrialisation slowly contributed to rising wages for workers. Only the chaos of the first and second world wars and the Depression disrupted this pattern. High taxes, inflation, bankruptcies and the growth of sprawling welfare states caused wealth to shrink dramatically, and ushered in a period in which both income and wealth were distributed in relatively egalitarian fashion. But the shocks of the early 20th century have faded and wealth is now reasserting itself. On many measures, Piketty reckons, the importance of wealth in modern economies is approaching levels last seen before the first world war.

From this history, Piketty derives a grand theory of capital and inequality. As a general rule wealth grows faster than economic output, he explains, a concept he captures in the expression r > g (where r is the rate of return to wealth and g is the economic growth rate). Other things being equal, faster economic growth will diminish the importance of wealth in a society, whereas slower growth will increase it (and demographic change that slows global growth will make capital more dominant). But there are no natural forces pushing against the steady concentration of wealth. Only a burst of rapid growth (from technological progress or rising population) or government intervention can be counted on to keep economies from returning to the “patrimonial capitalism” that worried Karl Marx. Piketty closes the book by recommending that governments step in now, by adopting a global tax on wealth, to prevent soaring inequality contributing to economic or political instability down the road.

The book has unsurprisingly attracted plenty of criticism. Some wonder whether Piketty is right to think that the future will look like the past. Theory argues that it should become ever harder to earn a good return on wealth the more there is of it. And today’s super-rich (think of Bill Gates, or Mark Zuckerberg) mostly come by their wealth through work, rather than via inheritance. Others argue that Piketty’s policy recommendations are more ideologically than economically driven and could do more harm than good. But many of the sceptics nonetheless have kind words for the book’s contributions, in terms of data and analysis. Whether or not Professor Piketty succeeds in changing policy, he will have influenced the way thousands of readers and plenty of economists think about these issues.

Long story short: invested capital of the wealthy will inevitably overwhelm the capital of labor, with the exception of unusual circumstances like two world wars.

By drawing on decades of data, he draws the conclusion that growth at about 1- 1.5% is respectable and about what we can hope for, and that will never catch up to invested wealth.

Automation and the increase of "super manager super salaries" have contributed to the problem.

Income inequality and the inevitable loss of jobs to automation are serious problems and here to stay. Some people have been convinced to blame a scapegoat (usually immigrants), but that doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

Picketty argues that if the wealthy know what's good for them, they will take this problem seriously and work to address it.

But when have human beings ever proven to be that far-sighted?

Of course most posters on this thread know that no amount of information is going to change majax's mind.

* edit - I originally said "equalize incomes", but that's not correct. He just thinks our goal should be to reduce the radical and growing income inequality

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

This is interesting, Beastie. I think what you posted might more closely align with the Nordic model of economics?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_model

Granted it's too complicated to hold anyone's attention for long, much less Majax's, but it's worth a wikipedia & Google rabbit hole if anyone is game.

On many measures, Piketty reckons, the importance of wealth in modern economies is approaching levels last seen before the first world war.

This kind of plays along the lines of what I posted when talking about the relative wealth of US males in 2017 vs. , say, 1970. It's an inevitable consequence of the Matrix that history repeats itself, and wealth is secured by the 1%, managed by the 4% and the rest of us suck balls fighting over the rest. I think post-WWII realities were a historical anomaly and things are returning to their natural order unless governments act upon it.

Piketty's wiki entry:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Piketty

As an aside I was reading some interesting things about Lewis Black the comedian today, and he talked about capping wealthy people's worth at around $200 million. I know there's a natural revulsion toward confiscating wealth, but the bottom line is how many golden yachts does a person need when we have insane people filling up public spaces because services have been cut to the bone?

Is that the kind of society we want? Make rich people richer and “F” over the poor?

- Doc

[_Brackite]

US Supreme Court just decided Texas Republican racism is perfectly OK. Tell me again how Gorsuch isn't a Reactionary creep.

SEE https://thinkprogress.org/on-a-party-li ... c3257f13e/

Remember that all five GOP LDS Senators voted to confirm Judge Gorsuch to the Supreme Court.

[_canpakes]

Is that the kind of society we want? Make rich people richer and “F” over the poor?

I think that's the society that we'll inevitably get, as long as we push the three absolutes that we're so fond of repeating in some political circles:

1. "You can be just as rich as the richest American!"

2. "You're poor because you're lazy!"

3. "Everyone else is trying to take your stuff!"