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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   35831 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 27, 2025

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FTAs do benefit most people. They harm people in industries that are not internationally competitive, but most people don't work in those industries and benefit from e.g. cheaper car prices.

Industries that are not internationally competitive

International competitiveness has only rarely been about a country that can deliver a superior product. In all other cases it has meant corporations can spend less and make more by outsourcing labor. Had, for example, it never been legal for Chinese-made products to be sold in this country, or not without tariffs tailored to make it prohibitive for companies to outsource their labor to China, they would have never been competitive. What was the benefit, Walmart? Some benefit.

If your position is that cheaper goods don't benefit Americans, you should just go ahead and lay your cards on the table.

As it is, I pointed out an industry in which imports were so much better than domestic production that they practically killed the domestic industry (cars) and you're bringing up walmart (who mostly makes money from groceries anyway) as a retort. It's a complete non-sequitur.

Cheaper goods are only a benefit if employment/real wages either remain consistent or rise. Cheaper goods don't do anyone any good if it comes at the cost of income.

Fortunately, real median wages have been going up for the past 28 years.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

Unfortunately:

  • https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1DoKf. Number of weeks of the median US wage to afford a median US house has gone up by, what, 60%, since the 80s.
  • https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1DoL3. Number of weeks of the median US wage to afford the mean cost of ground beef (wish I could find median) was lowest in ~1999 and has since risen by, what, 80%?
  • https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1DoMe. Number of weeks of the median US wage to afford the mean car loan. Indirectly, unfortunately, so take it with a bit of a grain of salt. I couldn't find a raw 'median cost of a car sale'. Still does nicely show the 2008-2009 spike and return to status quo in about 2012 or so, and then COVID weirdness that hasn't come back down to the prior level since.

CPI's approach to dynamic price-weighting means that if a good becomes unaffordable it ends up downweighted. (As one example: from 2011 to 2023 CPI-U's College tuition and fees weighting dropped from 1.695 to 1.275, even as the relevant CPI went up from 692 to 928.)

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