[dukeluke]

You also can't build a sustainable economy by importing everything and expecting everyone to be highly educated. Not everyone is capable of earning a degree, and those in the lower class need to have the potential for a comfortable life.

Edit: to those downvoting me, can you please explain?

[DannyBee]

hence, the only real hope being basic income and friends, not sticking head in the sand and pretending world has not changed.

You simply aren't going to be able to provide a lower class a comfortable life by giving them work that doesn't actually need doing. Worse, trying probably ends very badly.

[dukeluke]

Ideally you are right, but instead of arguing about an ideal that will never happen in our two-party political system, I think we should try to think of a solution that will at least somewhat work in this country. At very least, it will work as an economic band-aid until we can change our political system.

[DannyBee]

But it won't work, and will make things worse.

As for "until the system changes": How do you think the system changes if you try to band aid it? Who is then fighting to change it?

Systems change not generally in smooth realization that things are not going to go well 50 years from now, but instead when things hit the breaking point and the lower class revolts.

See,e.g., the history of the world elsewhere.

Sad, but true.

[jacquesm]

> At very least, it will work as an economic band-aid until we can change our political system.

But that's the problem right there: It will not work, and in fact it will make things (possibly much) worse.

[yokisan]

> the only real hope being basic income and friends

This may the the only real hope. But what about these people until then?

Rather than doling out welfare, it looks like Trump is shifting wealth around by increasing the incentive to hire Americans at the cost of more expensive goods and slightly smaller margins.

It's unorthodox, but is it foolish?