[ankimal]

Democracy won. Middle America made their choice based on a hope that Trump will bring back jobs to America, especially manufacturing to the Middle American Industrial heartland. What they failed to see was that the dream is, just that, a dream! One that can almost never (never say never?) come true.

This is so much easier to explain than to convince people that globalization is a reality and that the only option in many of these cases is to retrain for a high skilled economy that the US always was, and must continue be in order to be an economic superpower. No matter which party won, this section of people would be anti-establishment and unhappy with the present because nobody can break this bad news to them.

A software engineering analogy is to convince leadership that you have to refactor your stack in order for it to scale, during which new products would suffer. BUT, its easier to convince them to hire 10 more engineers who can build new product on an aging stack, which may not solve the problem, but is relatively easier to sell.

In 5-10 years, who will explain to the millions of automobile drivers (taxis/trucks/uber/lyft/..) that their jobs are dying as well? Nobody. Wait for another anti-establishment election!

[drzaiusapelord]

Its certainly doable. The monthly Vietnamese wage in manufacturing is $145 a month. Middle America would have to learn to live on $145 a month to compete against them. Oh, did they think factory work with big six figure salaries was possible here? Gee, I wonder who could have possibly misled them about this?

[ankimal]

That will not even meet min. wage requirements.

[soulashell]

We'll just get rid of that regulation.

[kevlar1818]

Thanks for this. I've been looking for something that sums up how I'm feeling, and this pretty much hits the nail on the head.

I'm sick of both the "Liberal Smugness" and the "Uneducated Peasants" talk. Never blame the people; blame the system.