• vordalack@lemm.ee
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    12 days ago

    Lol, groceries are about to go up. Trump wants to continue a pointless tariff war with China. It’s not going to work.

    The CPC is more than willing to plunge their own citizens into poverty to outlast the US. Americans complain over a 20 cent increase in gas. How do you think they’ll react when most of their goods suddenly increase by 30% or more?

    Chinese labor made the American middle class.

    • solstice@lemmy.world
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      12 days ago

      Mass deportation of our cheap labor supply will do way more to increase cost of groceries than Chinese tariffs ever will. The cold hard truth of it all is that our entire way of life depends on exploiting cheap migrant labor. Democrats don’t like to admit it because we don’t like that kind of exploitation, and republicans don’t like to admit it because they don’t like immigrants. But we depend on them as much as we do the laborers in chinese factories, the somewhat educated cheap labor in India, the children in sweatshops in Vietnam, and so on. Our entire economy is based on exploiting someone, somewhere, artifically reducing the cost of living for us.

    • kerrigan778@lemmy.world
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      12 days ago

      Uhm… Gonna have to wildly disagree with you there, wartime and postwar industrialization and strong unions created the American middle class, globalism breaking the unions is what has destroyed the middle class.

    • Jiggle_Physics@lemmy.world
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      12 days ago

      It killed the US middle class, or better, was one of the bigger factors in doing so. The American middle class was strongest post war until the late 70s. That was when our economic policies shifted to off-shoring as much labor as possible, and when the Chinese special economic zone polices were started, in cooperation with the US. The loss of manufacturing jobs in the following decades gutted the US middle class.

      • vordalack@lemm.ee
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        12 days ago

        No one has found it odd that this happened around the time when a single person could no longer pay for a family for muh trad lifestyle.

      • Saleh@feddit.org
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        12 days ago

        Yeah, how can people not see this? The “American Dream” and times of middle class prosperity were very obviously before China opened its economy and became the new industrial hub of the world. And when off-shoring started, so did real wage stagnation/decline.

        Selling the declining American middle class plastic toys did not “make” that class. What made it were stable well paying manufacturing jobs. Trump won’t bring those back with a trade war with China, but the claim that Chinese labor “made” the American middle class is just delusional.

      • vga@sopuli.xyz
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        12 days ago

        The US middle class is diminished somewhat over a long period of time, not “killed”. 1971 was 61%, 2021 50%. And the movement from middle class has been upwards and downwards.

      • LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        12 days ago

        “Avocados from Mexico” is the only commercial I remember hearing on tv recently. I assume those 100% tariffs he wants on Mexico would raise the price of avocados right out of most buyers budget. I only buy them when they are in season around .60 cents. Over a dollar isn’t worth it to me. I’ve seen them as high as $2.50 sometimes here.

        I’m hoping he was just spewing junk to rile up his base and doesn’t actually put tariffs on anything but cars (preferably nothing)

    • Queen HawlSera@lemm.ee
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      12 days ago

      I think it’s funny how Tankies pretend China is a paradise. China will absolutely starve every man, woman, and child over the pettiest of shit, there’s no telling what they’d do to win a tariff war.