Opinion | When MAGA Fantasy Meets Rust Belt Reality - The New York Times - 0 views
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Make America Great Again was a brilliant political slogan. Why? Because it could mean different things to different people
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For many supporters of Donald Trump, MAGA was basically a promise to return to the good old days of raw racism and sexism. And Trump is delivering on that promise.
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But for at least some Trump voters, it was a promise to restore the kind of economy we had 40 or 50 years ago — an economy that still offered lots of manly jobs in manufacturing and mining. Unfortunately for those who trusted Mr. Art of the Deal, Trump never had any idea how to deliver on that promise
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First, he believes that trade deficits are the reason we’ve shifted away from manufacturing. But they aren’t.
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If we could eliminate our current trade imbalance, we’d probably have around 20 percent more workers in the manufacturing sector than we actually do. But that would reverse only a small part of manufacturing’s relative decline, from more than a quarter of the work force in 1970 to less than 10 percent now.
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even countries that run huge trade surpluses, like Germany, have seen big declines in manufacturing as a share of employment
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to put it differently, running America isn’t like running a family business. It has to be done by setting broad policies and sticking to them, not by browbeating a few people whenever you see a bad headline.
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if you want to know what “services” means: Of the four occupations the Department of Labor expects to add the most jobs over the next decade, three are some kind of nursing (food workers are the fourth)
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That brings us to his second fallacy: No, trade deficits aren’t caused by unfair foreign trade practices.
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The truth is that while tariffs and so on can affect trade in particular industries, the overall trade balance mainly reflects exchange rates, which in turn are mainly driven by capital flows: The dollar is strong because foreigners want to buy U.S. assets
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his third big policy misunderstanding: He believes that you can run the economy by yelling at people.
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More important, our economy is too big to make policy by singling out individual companies and ranting. How big is it? Around 1.7 million U.S. workers are fired or laid off every month
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What’s happening instead is that as overall spending grows, an increasing share goes to services, not goods. Consumption of manufactured goods keeps rising, but technological progress lets us produce those goods with ever fewer workers; so the economy shifts toward services
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My guess is that he genuinely believed that he could bring manufacturing, coal mining and so on roaring back, that others had failed to do so only because they weren’t tough enough
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You might wonder where his confidence came from, given how little he obviously knows about economics. The answer, probably, is the Dunning-Kruger effect: inept people are often confident in their abilities, because they’re too inept to know how badly they’re doing