Go to Home Depot and you will find all the housewares match. They are not particularly nice or durable, their design is determined by what is cheapest to build, they leave little room for individuality, but they match.
One way to make it in manufacturing housewares is to do custom manufacturing. This is a viable business. But to do it, you need customers who can support it. I can tell you that no household buys my stuff who doesn’t make $200,000+ annually, at least in Massachusetts. That is the level that you need to have any disposable income to spend that will support an American manufacturer.
I wrote a post a long time ago here that detailed how to have a middle-class life you needed a $250,000 income at least. I got a lot of pushback with the usual suspects telling me how you could do this or that cheaper, don’t do this other thing, stay home, turn down the heat, etc. But if your object is to support a middle class of manufacturers (or dog walkers, or drivers or whatever, really) there is no point in doing it cheaper. You need to spend enough to support the workers.
Once they have the money, the next thing they need is the confidence to know what is nice and what is crap. Maybe education can help here. My problem with the left is that it has turned racial equality and anti-poverty into an excuse for terrible taste. Like nice things, neatness, order, beauty, these are tools of the white bourgeoisie to keep the black man down, so crap is good. So even if they come out of college where they were required to take art history or something, they are just confused. Those who are newly rich are terrified of making mistakes, and more terrified of getting called racists. They need to be able to have and protect nice things without getting abused for it.
Finally operating a business is really hard here, and it must be impossible for new businesses because there is little commercial real estate. It never gets improved or developed because in Boston the tax rate is incredibly high for commercial. It’s a progressive angle on taxation to go after those who have (business) to ease up on the poor homeowner. But the result is to have lots of people who can’t afford the housing because their incomes are too low. Their incomes are low because business develops too slowly.
PS Economic development ideas from both parties are pretty weak when it comes to building this area.
Both parties have an establishment that believes in free trade and free movement of labor with minor differences around the edges. Both look to education as a way for those who aspire to the middle class to leave the lower class behind. The Democrats just look to subsidize it. Either way, there is an abandoned lower class who deserve their fate.
If you work out the process, even if it’s presented in good faith, there’s no end to it. The pool of lower cost competition never ends. Build the robots… eventually the robot-building jobs will be outsourced too. Bring in the immigrants… but the supply is effectively endless. The immigrants you purport to lift up today, tomorrow you will be undercutting without mercy. There are very good people in Romania willing to do any white collar job that you can do by wire for $5/hour.
So I don’t believe that free-trade and open borders is actually designed to lift anyone into the middle class. The real aim of this program is to have a master class which will be taxed and then the money spent on the poor. But we have seen that this doesn’t really work. Much of the money dissipates in the general heat loss of government programs. When it does get spent, it goes to generalized programs like college loans, where there is no proof that they will make you any wealthier. Public/private mandates like affordable housing are so gamed by now that 95% of the benefit seems to accrue to developers.
And if you do just hand out the money, it’s much less than you made from working and in addition, all the pride of work is gone.
The Trump response has been to propose tariffs and protections but like his efforts to restrict immigration, they are not followed up and may not be fruitful even if they were. Much of the poor in America benefits from cheap and mediocre products for the lower class to clothe and house themselves.
You mostly had me until here:
You are correct that the establishment in both political parties favors free trade and open borders. But you then attribute the motives to a Democratic position – tax the rich and subsidize the poor. Historically, Republicans have supported free trade more than Democrats, and Democrats have supported open borders more than Republicans.
On a separate note, you also use a Republican fallacy that tax dollars somehow “dissipate” – which implies that it disappears. You even so much as say it by saying “when it does get spent…” – as if the money is being burned in a furnace. That is totally false. It would be a valid criticism to argue that tax dollars don’t reach the intended targets, but the money is not being removed from the economy. Tax-and-spend simply redirects the flow of the money.
I also think that it is worth debating your position of immigrants as some kind of permanent lower class. The issue is far more complex than that. Yes, immigrants have the effect of driving down the cost of labor because they are willing to work for less (since they are used to working for a lot less). However, there is another side to immigrants, which is that they also represent a demand source in the economy. Perhaps not as robust a source as a native-born person because again, immigrants are often used to being frugal since they lived in poor countries. But they still represent an increase in overall demand, probably on average nearly as much as a native-born citizen, and perhaps on average a better deal than a native-born citizen because another country has paid for their birth and childhood education.
I don’t think that the only way to run a viable manufacturing business is to have $250k customers, because it’s all relative. The problem is that you want to make $250k or more in your business. If you were happy making $25k then you could sell your goods at a lower price to more people. Of course, $25k isn’t enough to live. I personally think you’d have a better chance if our economy was more equalized. Fewer people making $250k and above, and more people making $250k and below. You’d have more customers.
I think he’s just trolling us.
I come after the Democrats because Republican-libertarians are basically hopeless.
Your response is logical but poor or even lower middle class people can buy a decent product made overseas, and most will make that choice unless they have some compulsion to buy from me. You can make a decent living installing or mongering stuff made overseas. I think you lose something as a culture if that is your approach however. And I don’t mean something airy. I think you need to make things to get better ideas about developing and designing new things .
Or ….you could share the profits more equitably….
Absolutely.
Of course, that requires changing about a century of law requiring the executives and directors of publicly-traded corporations to maximize shareholder value and so on.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t do it. I’m just saying there’s a LOT of sausage to make.
I’d like to ditch the shareholder model of governance entirely. The owners of a business should be those who actually started it or subsequently buy it with the intent of being hands on managers, not just nameless, faceless investors who just watch their bank accounts grow without working for it.
I agree that ceo’s are not worth the salaries they are getting paid. On forcing them to distribute I don’t think that can happen in a federal system. You would need to set up a totalitarian system or have a civil war on the red states to impose it on them. Not worth it.
We don’t do it here in Mass anyway. Incredibly unequal. how do you expect to enforce it in Texas?
I think you’re mistaken about the options and the consequences.
I think equity can be taken by eminent domain, for example. It solves the problem and doesn’t require particularly draconian action. We’ve had 90% marginal rates on estate taxes and income taxes, and the republic survived.
The laws and regulations under which corporations operate were established by the government and can be changed by the government.