President Donald Trump

Yeah, that's going to happen.

Its so weird seeing the side that championed wage suppression for 60 years suddenly pretend they care about workers rights and working conditions and wages and if that upends our abililty to eat and house ourselves then so be it

None of you believed this 6 months ago

Essentially no white Americans are going to work in the fields. USA will just import more food and pay whatever tariff. USA farmers will go bankrupt. For most of them, that's the leopard eating their face.

100% this.

Since I've been alive, the left has been making the argument for higher min wages (ie, living wages), as that will increase income and profit across all sectors - because it does.

Who has opposed this my entire life? Republican VOTERS... not just politicians, but voters also regurgitated the propaganda.

Now that Trump is trying to make pro labor arguments to justify his asinine tariff policy, suddenly the living wage part of the argument all makes sense to Republican voters. Right.

It's hard to take you guys seriously... we know what this all really about.

I couldn't immediately find anything I wrote about wages, but I did see this one about legal immigration from 2020:

I still don't accept your premise that "none of [us]" cared about the bottom of the totem pole 6 months ago. "THEY TOOK 'ER JERBS" has been a meme forever, and it's always used maliciously against right-wingers. So are we pushing for the abuse of cheap immigrant labor, or complaining about cheap immigrant labor stealing opportunities from Americans? Which is it?

Both! American conservatism is nothing if not ripe with inconsistencies and hypocrisy

Thats how the abusive, extractionary billionaire class and the dirt poor uneducated masses can coexist in the same political spectrum

You probably should have learned this in the last 40 years or so but its never too late

This is not the same thing and it's dishonest to pretend it is. The voters who are against artificially high minimum wage come mostly in two flavors: free market purists and people who vote based on a sense of perceived "fairness."

You can support having no minimum wage and also support people going out and getting as much as they deserve. Government shouldn't be involved in either of those areas, which is why DEI gets so much hate, too.

Illegals who come here and cram 18 people in a 5 bedroom unit and work for peanuts are preventing the market from raising wages to where they should probably be. Artificially raising the minimum wage won't stop people paying illegals under the table, but it will price certain other legitimate business out of their current markets in conjunction with the fact that there aren't any consequences for rule-breakers. It becomes a race to the bottom and American citizens are the ones who suffer, and it's not fair to the law-abiding. It also feels shitty to have worked your way up to a certain wage level and then the government swoops in and informs you that you're now at the new bottom of an arbitrary scale.

Farms who get away with hiring illegal workers to pick fruit for $40 a day should be punished. The market cannot solve that problem if it isn't allowed to do so.

I wouldn't want a union negotiating for me because I'm worth more than the average employee. A union caps my ceiling and I didn't need any help with my floor. I'm not going to hate on anyone who does decide to unionize, because that's an acceptable free-market force as well, but I don't agree with regulations requiring union labor for public projects.

It’s also worth noting that “they took our jeeeeerbs” was 21 years ago

I don't think you're seeing the forest for the trees on this one. Free market mechanics always end up in a continuing consolidation of power into monopolies. There has always had to be intervention to make sure the market actually works for everyone. The minimum wage has been very successful and abandoning its scale has been a huge error.

Labor is simply not rewarded the way it was and we need to either fix that or come up with a new system (for example, while haphazard, Trump's mention of abandoning income tax in favor of other revenues is not an unreasonable idea to explore). Here are a few charts to see the big picture issues before debating specific approaches:

Well mongoloid couldn’t muster up anything even resembling an intelligent viewpoint about tariffs other than ‘idk but you don’t know either, nerd, so let’s see what happens’

But the guy can go on an essay about how Americans is for Americans and Americans only and nobody who comes here is allowed his rights

So ya, pretty transparent to see what’s actually important

welp

What factory jobs?

https://www.yahoo.com/news/treasury-secretary-says-fired-federal-195929643.html

Yahoo News

Treasury Secretary Says Fired Federal Workers Can Work in the Factory

I'm pretty sure he means "causing" not "avoiding"

This idea that I might want to give up my cushy remote DOD contract job that impacts 100s of billions of dollars of contracts and feeds into some of the most protected and advanced technologies on the planet to build factories where robots produce socks is beyond laughable and is frankly insulting

Factories are simply not going to come back in any meaningful way.

Also it’s super weird that Leon and his crew who believe AI needs to be boundless so we can LiVe BeTtEr LiVeS and automate factory work now want people to work in the factory

Yes, one of the weirdest things about all this is the obsession of returning USA back to a manufacturing economy whilst not having anyone who isn't a recent immigrant actually willing to work such a menial job for the shitty pay on offer -- and doing your best to get rid of all the said immigrants.

And the dual thing about tariffs will somehow bring in a load of money from imports, whilst also reducing those imports to a level that allows the return to a manufacturing economy.

It's such asinine, childish thinking.

USA gave up, deliberately and by choice, being a manufacturing economy. They were not robbed of it.

no it's kool, he said literally no one will lose their job because everyone will just manage their own team of robots instead. i believe him yo, idk why but i do

The labor is only part of it. It takes a monumental amount of money and time. And, that's in an environment that is stable and predictable for business. We have the opposite of that now.

Navarro seems astoundingly ridiculous, but it could be worse

The biggest lol is Navarro going on about VAT or sales Tax being a tariff.

'We have tried at the World Trade Organization since the 1970s to get VAT-tax relief, and they’ve told us no every single time,” Navarro said Monday.'

DUUUUUHHHH

Not understanding that, because it applies equally across the same types of goods, it isn't a penalty or disadvantage per se, is grade one Trumpian in its stupidity.

Elon promised them factory assembly line jobs during the day, robots to do their cooking and cleaning at night, and weekend vacation trips to Mars.

Those great unemployed manufacturers employees will have so much jobs workings in the farm fields at 8$ an hour paying almost 0 taxes !
Huge win !
Go trump go .

????
Shouldn’t that be a right wing talking point ?
That is how pure capitalism usually works.
If it can’t make money , it should just shut down and let those resources (workers and capital) be redistributed toward more efficient business ?

Not being saved by subsidies, bail out or w.e else .