this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2025
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All i can say is, good luck with that. They're gonna have a real tough time pulling that one off when at the same time you have
happening.
Reindustrialization takes rebuilding the human capital base, it takes investing into education, infrastructure, healthcare, housing...none of which are getting any better, in fact they're only getting worse.
There is a fundamental contradiction here between the idea of bringing back industry while at the same time not wanting to do absolutely anything about the social and material conditions or the hyper-financialization of nearly every aspect of the economy that led to industry going away.
And the obsession of their base with ethnic nationalism and anti-immigration is only going to exacerbate the problem even further, as i think even Musk and the other oligarchs recognize who have spoken out against the MAGA base's opposition to things like the H1B visa. They've built up this dumb anti-immigrant narrative and now they themselves have become trapped by it.
That's not the style of investing Trump is probably thinking about. He's all business so it will be business investments in terms of subsidies, tax incentives and government contracts.
"Human capital" == "handouts" in Trumpland.
I think Trump is similar to other austerity conservative economists hence the cutting of the "fat" : Radio Free Something, VOA, USAID etc etc (even military spending). The idea is to cut a lot of services which will reduce government spending, then juice the industrialists with tax breaks and subsidies. The supposed resulting growth will then help pay the debt off.
Rich people pay for their own stuff. They don't use government education and healthcare. And they don't consume VOA. Hence someone like Trump can basically ditch it easily when looking to cut costs. Even if he was told it's for propaganda, he wouldn't give a fuck about cutting it. It's not important to him. Same with President Musk.
Yes to all of that. I think that is exactly what they plan, and that is exactly why reindustrialization won't happen. You can't reindustrialize with a pauperized, indebted, poorly educated population, particularly not while you also enact racist policies that cause reverse brain drain and shortages of skilled labor. The only question i have is whether they are really so dumb that they believe giving tax breaks to oligarchs and applying some tariffs is sufficient to bring industry back, or if the whole thing was conceived from the start as just another cynical scam.
Investment goes where money is so it has some attraction. Probably industry will come back but to a limited degree because the supply chains have not been built AND you have to train workers up. These typically take years to establish especially for stuff like cars and chips.
In the meantime the pain of inflation is going to bite even harder for regular people.
This is probably the only opportunity for regular Americans to organise and get those jobs/wages and make sure to rip off some capitalists who are high on Trump juice. The domestic market is protected by tariffs. Get the bag. Take as much share of profits from the capitalists as possible. Get the employee healthcare and max it out etc.
When those industries go belly up in a few years, those opportunities will be gone.