The cofounder of the $4.53 trillion AI chip giant says Americans should return to factory work—for their own prosperity and the country’s. Howard Lutnick claims technician roles can start at $90,000, no college degree required.
Ok but we want the factory jobs from the 50’s that paid one worker an entire family’s living wage. We should go to the 1950’s wealth tax rate of 90% to achieve this. I think what he means is impoverished guilded age slavery though.
We should go to the 1950’s wealth tax rate of 90% to achieve this.
The 90% tax rate wasn’t what made factory pay cover a family of four. Expropriated wealth from the third world, combined with a strong export market for finished goods, allowed Americans to import raw materials at near-zero cost and transform that functionally “free” material into the quality of life improvements they valued.
Also, that high quality of life was reserved largely for the industrial north. Gulf Coast / West Coast states wouldn’t see the jump in prosperity until the oil boom of the 70s and the migration of finance capital into Florida, Texas, and California. And even then, it was a very “Whites Only” kind of prosperity, with labor provided by the racial underclass going to cheap housing and foodstuffs and utilities enjoyed by the American middle class.
By the mid-90s, a lot of the benefits of being a white working class adult had diffused to the racial underclasses. White people no longer felt “rich” because they were competing for homes and jobs and consumables with the historically impoverished PoC. Our cheap consumables were increasingly imported from overseas while our labor force was focused towards the professional (educated) and service (uneducated) sectors. We maintained a policy of low inflation through exporting dollars abroad. We expanded privatization to goose our rate of employment with tons of make-work and bullshit jobs. And we reduced taxes in order to incentivize private capital improvements and consumer spending.
What fucked us in the end wasn’t a lower tax rate, it was a global post-WW2 economic recovery. Once we could no longer spend overpriced American dollars for cheap foreign materials, American buying power declined. Foreign countries began to consume their own quality-of-life products, which boosted American investments abroad but hobbled American consumption at home.
I think what he means is impoverished guilded age slavery though.
He’s asking for Americans to return to the position of the labor underclass at home, in order to prop up a “White” leisure class at the expense of a PoC working class. That doesn’t necessarily mean “slavery” (although you can’t help look sideways at all these new prisons we’re building). It does mean working class Americans continue to lose access to consumption as they fall into competition with their BRICS working class peers.
And it likely means we return to “Whites Only” domestic policies, in order to guarantee a certain fraction of the public access to preferable living conditions at the added expense of PoC.
Ok but we want the factory jobs from the 50’s that paid one worker an entire family’s living wage. We should go to the 1950’s wealth tax rate of 90% to achieve this. I think what he means is impoverished guilded age slavery though.
The 90% tax rate wasn’t what made factory pay cover a family of four. Expropriated wealth from the third world, combined with a strong export market for finished goods, allowed Americans to import raw materials at near-zero cost and transform that functionally “free” material into the quality of life improvements they valued.
Also, that high quality of life was reserved largely for the industrial north. Gulf Coast / West Coast states wouldn’t see the jump in prosperity until the oil boom of the 70s and the migration of finance capital into Florida, Texas, and California. And even then, it was a very “Whites Only” kind of prosperity, with labor provided by the racial underclass going to cheap housing and foodstuffs and utilities enjoyed by the American middle class.
By the mid-90s, a lot of the benefits of being a white working class adult had diffused to the racial underclasses. White people no longer felt “rich” because they were competing for homes and jobs and consumables with the historically impoverished PoC. Our cheap consumables were increasingly imported from overseas while our labor force was focused towards the professional (educated) and service (uneducated) sectors. We maintained a policy of low inflation through exporting dollars abroad. We expanded privatization to goose our rate of employment with tons of make-work and bullshit jobs. And we reduced taxes in order to incentivize private capital improvements and consumer spending.
What fucked us in the end wasn’t a lower tax rate, it was a global post-WW2 economic recovery. Once we could no longer spend overpriced American dollars for cheap foreign materials, American buying power declined. Foreign countries began to consume their own quality-of-life products, which boosted American investments abroad but hobbled American consumption at home.
He’s asking for Americans to return to the position of the labor underclass at home, in order to prop up a “White” leisure class at the expense of a PoC working class. That doesn’t necessarily mean “slavery” (although you can’t help look sideways at all these new prisons we’re building). It does mean working class Americans continue to lose access to consumption as they fall into competition with their BRICS working class peers.
And it likely means we return to “Whites Only” domestic policies, in order to guarantee a certain fraction of the public access to preferable living conditions at the added expense of PoC.