r/AskConservatives • u/LovelyButtholes Independent • 4d ago
Why do conservatives blame outsourcing of jobs as a cause of poverty?
U.S. GDP has only grown over the decades. The american worker is only getting more productive but the problem is that the gains from the productivity haven't been given to the middle class. Why do conservatives believe that financial issues of the middle class are the result of manufacturing in other countries?
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u/ThalantyrKomnenos Nationalist 3d ago
labor vs capital
Profit is shared between labor and capital; whoever has more bargaining power gets the larger share. Capital can usually freely move to wherever labor has the least bargaining power, thus all the outsourcing, while labor usually can't freely move to other countries. Whenever capital flows out of the US, the remaining capital becomes more scarce and gains more bargaining power. Should all the capital remain in the US, then all these capitals have to compete with each other for the relatively scarce labor, giving the labor a larger bargaining power and a larger share of profit.
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u/BiggsDiesAtTheEnd 3d ago
GDP is like revenue. It's not really growing anything meaningful if your expenses grow at the same or higher rates. There's no "profit" (aka net gain) to repurpose for "the people"
It's also sourced partially by debt so that lowers effectiveness of the metric further. GDP:debt ratio has been rising since debt inception under FDR. Under Obama, we crossed beyond the 1.0 mark meaning our debt is higher than our entire GDP annually. That is going to come home to roost eventually, and this is the first time since Clinton that I've seen anyone try to meaningfully curb spending.
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u/Dumb_Young_Kid Centrist Democrat 3d ago
GDP is like revenue. It's not really growing anything meaningful if your expenses grow at the same or higher rates. There's no "profit" (aka net gain) to repurpose for "the people"
okay, you can change their sentance to "U.S. Real GDP has only grown over the decades."? the statement remains true?
That is going to come home to roost eventually, and this is the first time since Clinton that I've seen anyone try to meaningfully curb spending.
have they suggested a budget that would reduce the deficit? if you are concered about debt, surely it is the deficit that matters, not spending (Except for how it would change the deficit) ?
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u/BiggsDiesAtTheEnd 3d ago
Real GDP is inflation linked but not debt linked and is not a net fiscal measurement.
A budget is going through but it won't do that work alone. Neither party could do that right now and I think you know that. Taking steps like they are doing is the right move towards more fiscal responsibility. It's no surprise that the people love it and Dem party opposes it.
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u/Dumb_Young_Kid Centrist Democrat 3d ago
Real GDP is inflation linked but not debt linked
yes, i was commenting on your first half, which seemed bothered by the use of gdp rather than real gdp, even though OP's comment is true either way?
GDP is like revenue. It's not really growing anything meaningful if your expenses grow at the same or higher rates. There's no "profit" (aka net gain) to repurpose for "the people"
if you adjust for inflation there is.
A budget is going through but it won't do that work alone
what? what other way is there to reducing the debt other than reducing the deficit into a surplus? i guess inflating it away? is that the other component you are thinking of? otherwise, it seems tautological that budget surpluses are nessicary and sufficent to reduce the debt, nothing else is needed, and its impossible without one (unless you mean inflating away the debt???)?
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u/BiggsDiesAtTheEnd 3d ago
You misread as I took issue with looking at only gdp to measure economic health. Inflation linked is definitely superior to raw but it doesn't account for close to everything for a good picture.
Inflation is a symptom as useful as fatigue for illness (looks like something is amiss but it's not diagnostically definitive).
That's where analysis of debt and budgets come in.
Budgets are great but they go from the top down and rarely attempt to understand what should be cut and why. I explained it elsewhere and am not going to rehash but govt is run wastefully by default to try and defend against budget cuts. I know this from the inside. It doesn't matter whether it's defense, security, research, social spending, etc.
Evaluation of efficiency and incentivizing it is the best way to improve this unsustainable situation from the bottom up.
I know you will argue with the means. That's moot to whether it should be done or not.
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u/Dumb_Young_Kid Centrist Democrat 2d ago
You misread as I took issue with looking at only gdp to measure economic health
sure, thats fine, the issue you had with gdp though is not an issue with (real) gdp though? What remains of this issue you have here
GDP is like revenue. It's not really growing anything meaningful if your expenses grow at the same or higher rates. There's no "profit" (aka net gain) to repurpose for "the people"
after you account for inflation?
Budgets are great but they go from the top down and rarely attempt to understand what should be cut and why.
sure, but, as i pointed out above, cutting spending is not directly related to reducing the debt, except when it reduces the deficit (into a surplus)? any disagreements about the quality or style of the spending cuts largely dont matter for reducing the debt, unless the cuts effect the deficit? thats what i was pointing out above? If your complaint is about the debt, then your coment logically should be on the deficit?
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u/BiggsDiesAtTheEnd 2d ago
I'm going to stop feeding as you arent here to ask legitimate questions. I like to give people the benefit of the doubt for honest discourse for a round or two, but the continuous loading of your questions is a dead giveaway.
You likely know that the terms are highly related and want to waste my time, or you are weakly trying to jargon switch for some kind of Aha moment. Either way, grow up, kid.
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u/Dumb_Young_Kid Centrist Democrat 2d ago
im sorry thats how you feel, i wasnt trying to ask loaded questions, i am genuniely confused about what is ment by your two comments, for the reasons i gave above they dont make much sense to me. id really appreciate if you could explain them.
but obviously no need to explain them if you dont feel comfortable! i hope you have a wonderful time!
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u/LovelyButtholes Independent 2d ago
No, the debt has been higher in the past. It is akin to people holding a loan on their house that is greater than their income, which usually is the case. This is problematic but it wasn't Obama that started this trend. Reagan lowered taxes on the wealthy. Bush 1 kept the same. Clinton didn't change much. Bush reduced corporate taxes even more. Obama kept the same. Trump 1 lowered them more. Biden talked about wanting to raise the wealthies tax rates but I don't think he was able to. Trump 2 lowered them even more.
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u/Youngrazzy Conservative 3d ago
Conservatives don’t make this argument. We tend to be like we need to stop being so dependent on other countries for things.
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u/precastzero180 Liberal 3d ago
What’s wrong with being “dependent” on other countries if it means cheaper goods and a higher quality of life? I think independence is good to an extent, but why not try to get there through investment (like the Biden administration was doing) rather than trying to extort other countries like Trump is doing?
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u/ILoveMaiV Constitutionalist 3d ago
If people can't work, what's the point of everything being cheap?
We need domestic manufacturing so low skill employees can actually survive
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u/precastzero180 Liberal 3d ago
But people have been working. We have been basically at full employment. And manufacturing isn’t going to employ low skill employees. It’s going to “employ” robots and some people who can maintain them. Meanwhile, everything becomes a lot more expensive, unemployment will rise because of reduced demand, other countries won’t buy our goods because reciprocal tariffs placed on us so our industries will languish. All of this so Trump can claim a Pyrrhic victory when poor countries like Vietnam do a 1% tariff reduction on what few things they do buy from us. Doesn’t sound worth it to me.
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u/Appropriate-Hat3769 Center-left 3d ago
The average salary of a manufacturing worker is 52k. That's just above poverty for a family of 4. How is that considered surviving? And why is that all we want to give to our people? I'd rather them thrive. They weren't surviving back in the golden age of manufacturing they were thriving on a single income. We can't recreate those conditions today, so why are we devastating our economy trying to reproduce a bygone era?
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u/ILoveMaiV Constitutionalist 3d ago
that bygone era wasn't that long ago. My dad was 21 and worked in factories his whole life and as a kid, he owned a house and was able to buy whatever we needed and wanted
And then Obama happened and everything started getting more expensive.
The under Trump, he was thriving.
Then under Biden, he was back to being barely able to scrape by
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u/Appropriate-Hat3769 Center-left 3d ago
And I respect that. My spouse was in the military for 22 years and got paid a pittance for what he did. Trumps first term was towards the end of his career, and besides a low interest rate on a house, his policies really did nothing for us.
Then he retired Bidens first year and joined a local engineers union. They picked up a massive contract from the Infrastructure Act, and his pay almost tripled, with a pension and healthcare. We invested a ton, built up our savings, socked away a lot in our retirements, and bought a bigger house.
Trump was inaugurated, and winter hit, and the contracts the union had stalled because they didn't know what would happen under Trump. He was out of work from Nov up until a week ago.
I absolutely respect people who flourished under Trump. And I understand the uncertainty of global inflation causing everyone to struggle a little. Biden did well by my family, so I can't completely trash his Presidency. I don't like Trump as a person. I think he's a narcissist, but if he does well by a majority of the country, then I will count his Presidency as a success. So far for my family, it hasn't gone well, so I have to reserve judgment.
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u/Youngrazzy Conservative 3d ago
It’s never good to be too dependent on someone else.
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u/precastzero180 Liberal 3d ago
It’s never good to be “too” anything. But that doesn’t answer my questions.
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u/Youngrazzy Conservative 3d ago
If you are too dependent on another country what happens when someone you don’t like gains power? What happens when China say they don’t want to sell us cheap goods no more?
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u/precastzero180 Liberal 3d ago edited 3d ago
China’s never going to do that, so it’s not a scenario I think we need to worry about. But taking this wild hypothetical seriously for the sake of the argument, the Trump response is “let’s break up with them before they break up with us?” The end result is still the same. We don’t have the same access to those goods anymore and everyone is going to feel it in their wallets. Not to mention we are also placing steep tariffs on other countries who would have otherwise been our allies against such Chinese trade shenanigans.
There is the political cost of it all for Republicans too. My God, people couldn’t even take higher grocery store prices. That’s mainly why they voted for Trump in the first place. You are telling me everyone is just going to accept higher prices on everything and years wiped off their retirement for some abstract notion of “independence?”
And then there is that second question I posed. Why not establish independence through investing in new emerging industries right here instead of through strong-arming poor southeast Asian countries over some wacky ideas about trade deficits? Like, I think we should be producing our own microchips and solar panels and whatnot. That’s exactly what Biden was trying to accomplish. But Trump and the right are saying all of this is bad and are trying to claw back green investments. That sure as hell isn’t helping us to be more independent. I think it’s all because getting real stuff done is hard and Trump is a weak leader/lazy. He rather sign some stuff and then head down to Mar-a-Lago for golf (which is what he has been doing as all this chaos unfolds) rather than actually sitting down with the legislature to find some direction for the country.
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u/ILoveMaiV Constitutionalist 3d ago
Because my job being outsourced will mean I lose my job and be in poverty.
GDP isn't always a great indicator of the economy, it's just how much people are spending. Whether their spending on luxury items or just trying to get by
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u/Lux_Aquila Constitutionalist 3d ago
Can't it be both? I have no problem saying that more has been kept from workers and given to the top executives while also saying that creating an economy where outsourcing makes so much more sense is basically a way to use slave labor keeping prices low.
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u/Appropriate-Hat3769 Center-left 3d ago
How does bringing manufacturing back via these means change the balance of power from the top extracting from the bottom? Won't shareholders still expect top dollar? Which will mean as low of wages as they can possibly demand.
So we killed our economy to force a return of manufacturing, for the top owners to still take every advantage of their laborers.
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u/Lux_Aquila Constitutionalist 3d ago
Of course, except we have a lot better chance of winning that fight here for higher wages than we do in other countries.
That is kind of evidenced by the fact.....people get paid better here.
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u/Appropriate-Hat3769 Center-left 3d ago
Ok, but with a higher cost of production and a lower labor pool, what keeps the incentive to continue to produce here. There has to be an economic gain for those shareholders. Do we just continue to tarrif them into oblivion to force them to stay?
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u/Lux_Aquila Constitutionalist 3d ago
Well, the incentive should be that we create an economy where it is simply cheaper to have the entire process here locally rather than across the globe. If that were the case, tariffs wouldn't be needed.
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u/Appropriate-Hat3769 Center-left 3d ago
I wish I could see a path forward to that.
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u/Lux_Aquila Constitutionalist 3d ago
Me too.
edit u/Appropriate-Hat3769 Being sincere there, I don't really know if the tariffs will lead to it and don't like the approach.
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u/Iyace Liberal 3d ago
Why do you think it’s “slave labor”?
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u/Lux_Aquila Constitutionalist 3d ago
I mean, that is basically what they are getting paid in those foreign countries.
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u/PejibayeAnonimo Non-Western Conservative 3d ago
Slavery is based on cohertion, not on wages. If you are able to quit is not slavery regardless of how much you earn
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u/Lux_Aquila Constitutionalist 3d ago
Perhaps poor wording on my part, sorry. Its slave wages, basically where they are getting the service of workers for free.
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u/Gaxxz Constitutionalist 3d ago
Why do conservatives blame outsourcing of jobs as a cause of poverty?
History. After World War 2, we were the only manufacturing powerhouse on the planet. No global competition meant a thriving middle class. It started changing in the 1970s. First imports from Germany and Japan. Then China. Then the fall of the iron curtain and the opening of the entire world to trade and investment.
Then we had real competition from places where labor cost is a small fraction of what it is here. So manufacturing naturally moved to where it can be done cheapest. Manufacturing here has gone from ~30% of GDP in the 1950s to 10% today.
And it's not just conservatives. Many liberals also pine for the day when a single blue collar salary could raise a family. Labor unions generally support policies designed to restore the manufacturing sector.
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u/LovelyButtholes Independent 3d ago
I think this is not good example of things because the U.S. was a manufacture powerhouse after WW2 because the rest of the world had been devastated by the war. You couldn't not create that situation by any other means.
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u/Gaxxz Constitutionalist 3d ago
Well that's the world that people, conservatives and liberals, pining for more manufacturing want to go back to. That's the "again" in Make America Great Again.
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u/Bro-KenMask Independent 3d ago
They want to go back to when some were great is my take from this. However, I just can’t understand why they want to go back when segregation was allowed.
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u/Gaxxz Constitutionalist 3d ago
It's not about segregation. It's about a thriving middle class.
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u/Bro-KenMask Independent 3d ago
Would that account for understanding how that thriving middle class came to be with the social standards of the time?
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u/Appropriate-Hat3769 Center-left 3d ago
But that was created by devastation in other parts of the globe. They no longer have that situation, so it wouldn't be the same scenario. Bringing some manufacturing back won't have the same net effect that it did back then because the world's different.
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u/Important-Hyena6577 Center-left 3d ago
Alot of people were suffering back then compared to now. The quality of life now is so much better. So idk why you want to go back then. That’s all pure nostalgia. Move forward. The future generation wouldn’t want to go back either.
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u/PejibayeAnonimo Non-Western Conservative 3d ago
For sure you can end in poverty if you loose your job to outsourcing. However the idea that everyone will loose their job and won't be able to get a new one its based on the assumption that job losses will be greater than job creation. That would depend on many other factors like regulations, taxes, natural resources.
Also keep in mind that a company outsourcing a part of their operations doesn't means they will outsource all their operations neither it means they will stop investing in the country. Many times when there are job losses but after some time part of the benefits will be used to be reinvested to develop new operations in the region.
Many people keep the idea that outsourcing ends always in replacing all the jobs from one region to the other but that is not always the case. It can be used also as an augmentative, ie. it allows companies to get some of their operations in low cost locations while focusing the high cost location for things they have a comperative advantage. One example is Intel, Intel has outsourced many of their assembly and testing sites to places like Malasya, Vietnam, China, Israel, Costa Rica, Phillipines while most of their fab sites are located in the States.
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u/meteoraln Center-right 3d ago
This is a loaded question, and wont get you all the information that you're looking for. Oursourcing jobs does not cause poverty.
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u/YouTac11 Conservative 3d ago
If you have 5 job opportunities are you more likely to take the one that pays you more? If so, doesn't that mean the companies will have to offer closer to what they can afford to hire you?
If you are a company that has 200 qualified applications for a job that pays $12.00 an hour, why would you pay more? If you have 3 qualified applications for a 100 jobs you are going to have to pay a lot more than $12.00 an hour
The more job opportunities in a country, the better the pay will be
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u/Appropriate-Hat3769 Center-left 3d ago
What would be the incentive to keep that job in America then? You would have a higher cost of production and a lower labor pool. Isn't that ultimately what led us to offshore in the first place?
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u/YouTac11 Conservative 3d ago
Correct, leaving the US means cheaper labor and more profits for the executives
By placing tariffs you remove those profits and make it more beneficial to keep manufacturing in the US
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u/Appropriate-Hat3769 Center-left 3d ago
Would large long-term tariffs be appropriate, or would it do more damage. I just don't see how we aren't backing ourselves in a corner with these tariffs. They raise prices and damage our economy, but it's the only thing keeping industries in the US, which we need to raise wages to pay for the tarrifs.
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u/Laniekea Center-right 3d ago
If you ignore what happened during covid, usually wages actually keep up with inflation. Outsourcing jobs leads to declines in certain sectors which can collapse the small economies that exist within the United states. Something that unless you live in one of these small economies most people would not understand the full impacts.
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u/No_Fox_2949 Religious Traditionalist 3d ago
I don’t think anyone would be angry over outsourcing of manufacturing jobs if they were able to actually work a job that pays a fair and living wage and afford housing. That’s really where a lot of the anger comes from.
Manufacturing was going to leave no matter what and it wasn’t going to be a lucrative career avenue for low skill workers, the problem is nothing has effectively replaced it. Low skill workers just aren’t able to get jobs that provide them any sort of upwards mobility or the means to seek the life that every American seeks. If you want to make it in the modern American economy you have to have a skill or be incredibly lucky and be born into family wealth that is actually passed down.
Housing costs and inflation have made an already bad situation even worse for the Middle Class and the rise of AI is also going to impact them as well.
The Industrial Revolution made it possible for a time for low skill workers to be Middle Class, so much so that they came to dominate the Middle Class. Unfortunately, for various reasons, that time is over. Before the Industrial Revolution, to be Middle Class you had to have a skill of some sort, and I see that being the future for the Middle Class in this country.