JD Vance talking nonsense while drinking the Trump cult Kool Aid

Former Marine Corporal and now vice-president candidate J.D. Vance can’t go back in time — and neither can the rest of us- echo opinion published in the Washington Post (Democracy Dies in Darkness), by Megan McArdie.

JD Vance drinking the MAGA Kool Aid

The days of America’s manufacturing boom are gone for good.

For one of the youngest vice-presidential candidates ever nominated, (former Marine Corporal) J.D. Vance sounds a little crotchety. 

His dull and retro-age convention speech last week pined for an America that the 39-year-old himself never knew — a land before drugs and deindustrialization ravaged the Rust Belt, when housing was cheap and families were intact, and proud American craftsmen made the world’s best products with their own hands.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong in wishing for things you don’t remember (or even have no experience with) — if they were really good, as many things were during the United States’ manufacturing boom: There were job opportunities, families formed easily and people felt support from society. I have sympathy for Vance’s desire to “put people to work making real products for American families.”

The problem is that Donald Trump cannot bring those days back. And I suspect Vance is too smart to truly believe the former president could.

It’s not just that economies have become too complicated to take apart and reassemble in some simpler, more desirable form. It’s also that American voters would never stand for it. To see what I mean, consider a talk that Vance gave last February in which he suggested that “economics is fake” — based on his experience owning a 40-year-old refrigerator.

“The refrigerator we had,” he told the audience, “you would put lettuce in the icebox and it would be good a month later. … You cannot at any price point buy a refrigerator today that can do that.”

During Vance’s more recent convention speech, the Lettuce Fountain of Youth surfaced on social media to much giggling — because it sums up both the hazy appeal and the implausibility of “Make America Great Again.” 

Yet, there is some truth in Vance’s remark, which is more than a lament for the country’s lost manufacturing might. It’s also a complaint about the way society has become monomaniacally focused on consumer prices, to the detriment of many other things that make our lives better.

This complaint comes not only from MAGA America but also from left-leaning thinkers such as Lina Khan, the chair of the Federal Trade Commission. It resonates on both the right and left because the government and corporations do pay more attention to prices than to other things that are harder to measure, but no less important. People also care about quality, about having things that last. And they care about their identity as producers, as well as consumers.

Forcing manufacturing workers to compete with lower-wage counterparts elsewhere not only reduced their earning power, but also destabilized their communities, a process that began in the 1960s, and ’70s, but accelerated with the “China Shock” of the past 20 years. Many have had to choose between moving for work, sacrificing essential networks of friends and relatives, or staying put and contending with community decline. This has been a real loss.

What’s more, some of the goods they could buy — including, yes, home appliances — did get worse in significant ways. Dishwasher cycles have lengthened into eons, which helps them reduce noise and save water, but wastes our time. Refrigerators come with internet connections but break more frequently (it’s not your imagination). And when an appliance stops working, repairs are so expensive, people often just give up and buy a new one.

It’s not crazy to want to return to the old ways, or at least try to create options for people who want more expensive but more durable goods, made by Americans living in prosperous manufacturing towns. It’s just impossible. Not just practically, but also politically.

Voters might care about the quality of the goods they buy, but they still care a lot about prices, as our recent bout of inflation has demonstrated. Indeed, this is the reason that Vance looks might have an outside chance to become vice president in January.

And prices would have to rise a lot to bring back the fridge economy of yesteryear. The 10-percent, across-the-board tariffs Trump is proposing would be only a down payment.

In 1966, Sears sold customers a 21-cubic-foot capacity, self-defrosting, side-by-side refrigerator for as little as $545. Today, the store’s cheapest equivalent model is more than $1,000. The bigger difference is that, in 1966, the U.S. median family income was $7,500, while in 2022 it was $97,750. 

Truth❗ If the price of fridges had held constant as a percentage of family income, that new one would cost more than $7,000.

Now, one can argue that higher relative prices were a good trade-off for supporting a stable manufacturing sector that provided high-paying jobs to men with no education beyond high school. Those workers had the satisfaction of making tangible products and also the wherewithal to create stable families, buy homes and grab a piece of the American Dream. 

J.D. Vance thinks he is a smart guy, so maybe, I’m not sure, I could win that debate with him.

But I don’t think Vance is smart enough to win his argument with a voter who just walked into Sears and discovered that new appliances suddenly cost seven times what they used to. 

Maine Writer- IOW, consumers are much better off than what J.D. Vance wants voters to believe and, guess what else?  My lettuce stays fresh for over a week in my Lowe's refrigerator. And wait, there's more❗ My home fridge also makes ice cubes and gives me cold water to drink at the push of a button.  Cost? $1,000 and still working like new.  

Immigration based on "need" in America must focus on supporting those who will work in the economy

Echo published in The Daily Independent in Ashland Kentucky

(MaineWriter - the birth rate in Maine would be zero if the state's Franco-Americans had stopped having children. The birthrate for Irish women in Maine is statistically zero. Maine is per capital the oldest state in the nation.  Unless the state improves the birthrate, there will not be enough care givers to help the aging population.)

People are the primary asset of any society. 

By Megan McArdle, a columnist with The Washington Post

In my summary of the McArdle opinion, the fact is, our US birthrate is getting too low to support an aging population. Therefore, what America needs is more immigrants who are willing to work in jobs that support the economy.  The proposal by selfish Republicans to establish criteria for "educated immigrants only', will not contribute to reinforcing our population needs.)

That's true in the lofty spiritual sense and in the crass financial one: Other people produce both the economic goods and the tax revenue that sustain the nation.

Like any other asset, this one needs to be replenished by continual reinvestment. A society that stops replacing itself is like a trust-fund kid dipping into the capital. The accounts empty at an accelerating pace, and a bill eventually comes due that cannot be paid.

Virtually the entire rich world is now in varying stages of that cycle. In 2000, only three rich-world countries -- the United States, New Zealand and Iceland -- averaged two or more children per woman. Today, only New Zealand is still replacing itself. The average for American women has dropped to 1.76 children, according to a new report from the National Vital Statistics System.

"Good!" a certain type of environmentalist might say. 

But other people may notice that the country's whole political economy assumes population growth. Whether retirements are funded through government or private accounts, the United States still needs enough productive workers to support retirees without impoverishing themselves; no matter how the health-care system is structured, it still must be funded and staffed by the able-bodied.

With a shrinking population, even seemingly unrelated areas, such as debt finance, will need rethinking. Debt implicitly assumes growing incomes, growing gross domestic product. But GDP growth is a direct function of the labor force's size. Without that growth, debts bite harder with every passing year.

Societies preparing for an aging population ought to be running surpluses to pay down debt and planning for much longer working lives. But almost no one seems ready to do that. Instead, three alternatives are generally proposed: raising birthrates through family subsidies; boosting innovation to offset workforce decline with higher productivity; and replenishing the population through immigration.
Unfortunately, there's little evidence that "family policy" has more than a marginal impact on total lifetime fertility. Sociologist Brad Wilcox, who oversees the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, notes that even "krybbe"-to-"grav" Nordic welfare states have failed to keep birthrates above replacement. And while technological innovation can certainly make the most of existing workers, it's unlikely to fully offset workforce decline. After a certain point, aging populations tend to innovate less, because older people are generally more risk-averse and less creative than younger ones.

That leaves immigration. Even the hardiest of immigration hard-liners might reconsider their position if the alternative were working to age 90. But the exigencies of an aging population are likely to force immigration advocates to do some rethinking, too. The idea that Social Security and Medicare can be saved by importing younger workers turns out to have some complications.

First-generation migrants typically cost the government somewhat more than they pay in taxes. That doesn't mean that migration is a bad deal for the United States, despite what restrictionists claim. 

By providing low-skill, labor-intensive services, migrants let native-born Americans spend more time on more productive work, boosting everyone's incomes.

But when native-born, higher-skill workers become scarcer, the equation changes. To put it another way: You can't save Social Security's finances by replacing an engineer who makes $100,000 a year with someone who had to drop out of school in eighth grade and is struggling to learn English. 

The way that system is structured, the math doesn't work. This limits our ability to close budget gaps through immigration.

An immigration solution to the United States' demographic challenge would probably mean a very different immigration policy, something like the points system used by countries such as Canada and Australia, which selects for migrants reasonably fluent in English and likely to be net tax contributors. Family reunification, which reinforces the United States' historical bias in favor of low-skill migration, might well have to be curtailed.

That change would be politically fraught, to say the least. And given that the United States, unlike Canada and Australia, has a long border with a significantly poorer country, it may not even be possible. Moreover, most of the countries that send migrants to the rest of the world themselves have declining birthrates. Scouring countries in demographic decline clean of their working-age populations to feed rich-world economies seems both unethical and impractical.

The good news is that demographic crises move at a glacial pace; we have years to weigh these unpalatable options. But, like glaciers, demographic crises are nearly impossible to stop once they really get going. So unless births bounce back soon, we'll probably have to choose.