If You Can Keep It

My father was of the opinion that redistributing wealth wouldn't, for the most part, work. The problem, as he saw it wasn't that most people didn't have money, it's they didn't know how to keep it. And I think that I agree with him on that. Not in the sense that Americans spend to much on random crap, or that they're too easily manipulated into poor financial decisions, but in the sense that many people fail to understand how the broader economy works, and the (admittedly minor) impacts of their choices on it.

A lot has been made of the Trump Administration cutting federal programs that places rely on, but that's also starting to lay bare just how often states and localities have shifted their costs to the federal government, in order to keep their own taxes low. Promising people high-quality services and low tax rates only works for a time, and if the Trump Administration manages to make all of the cuts in funding to things that it wants to, that time is likely up.

At some point, one has to bite the bullet and align what one wants with what one is willing to pay for; and really understand how much things cost. The Trump Administration has been taking heat from commentators who cannot believe that the Administration honestly thinks that a) large-scale manufacturing can be re-shored in anything under a decade or two and b) Americans would be willing to pay what domestic citizen labor would cost, but the Trump Administration doesn't have to believe any of it. The Republican voter base appears to think that it's true, and that is what drives statements from the political class. As long as there are young men out their with high-school diplomas who think that if Apple would give them a job assembling iPhones that they'd be set for life, Commerce Secretary Lutnick can proclaim that, "Our high school educated Americans- the core to our workforce, is going to have the greatest resurgence of jobs in the history of America to work on these high-tech factories, which are all coming to America," without actually needing to believe a word of it.

If people really wanted to pay more for things, simply because they were made in the United States, they would. But they don't. Because in the end, it's inefficient. To be sure, sometimes, efficiency isn't the best thing, but it can be hard to get people to see the value of resiliency, when it can be a waste until something bad actually happens. And now, one can make the case that something bad is happening.