[branko_d]

This assumes USA was taken advantage of by globalization, which is not actually the case - USA benefitted disproportionally from it. USA's GDP growth is substantially based on the consumers (~70% compared to ~50% in the EU and other comparable countries), and that wouldn't have been possible if they could only consume what was produced in the USA.

But there were losers, mainly in manufacturing, and USA didn't assist them in the right way, allowed unprecedented levels of political corruption, allowed unhealthy levels of wealth inequality, allowed housing crisis, allowed obesity and health crisis etc...

Most of the USA's wounds are self-inflicted, but any good demagogue would not pass the opportunity to blame somebody else for it.

[WillPostForFood]

Globalization for the US was trading industrialization for financialization. Yay for the paper GDP gains, but most citizens got left behind - though they can by cheap imported cloths with their shrinking paychecks.

Can't build chips, can't make ships, can't make furniture, can't make clothes, can't make enough weapons to supply Ukraine, let alone for any real war. Globalization hollowed the capacity of the country.

[branko_d]

> Can't build chips

True, but that's true for every country, even Taiwan. If ASML (Dutch company), Applied Materials, LAM Research, KLA, Synopsys, Cadence (US companies), Tokyo Electron, Shin-Etcu (Japan) and literally hundreds of other companies didn't cooperate, TSMC couldn't function either. BTW, that's why China can never "take over" TSMC - they can just make it defunct when all these other companies stop doing business with it after the invasion.

Basically, the planet is making chips, not any individual country.

> can't make ships,

I suggest you look-up the Jones Act and its unintended consequences.

And then think why American voters never consider this kind of stuff when voting.

> can't make furniture, can't make clothes,

Fair enough, though this is more a matter of what is economically viable vs. what is possible. There are economic losers, sure. But there are big winners too, most notably in the "tech" industry. It's incumbent on the US to smooth-out the transition for their own citizens, instead of allowing special interests and monopolies to run amok and incumbents to Gerrymander themselves into office.

Ultimately, American voters allowed this to happen, and when they saw the results, they fell for a demagogue.

> can't make enough weapons to supply Ukraine, let alone for any real war.

I hope you are not suggesting Russo-Ukrainian war is "not real". This is almost WW2-level stuff. I suggest you take a look at the photographic evidence of vehicle losses, keeping in mind that the actual losses are likely higher:

Attack On Europe: Documenting Russian Equipment Losses During The Russian Invasion Of Ukraine (main battle tanks: 3786, total: 20577) https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2022/02/attack-on-europe-docum...

Attack On Europe: Documenting Ukrainian Equipment Losses During The Russian Invasion Of Ukraine (main battle tanks: 1092, total: 7965) https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2022/02/attack-on-europe-docum...

[WillPostForFood]

And how many of tanks was the US able to send to Ukraine? 31

And are we cranking up our industrial might to make more tanks? No, we aren't making any, not for Ukraine, not for US. Sometime in the 2030s we are supposed to have a modified and improved M1E3.

The success of the tech industry is orthogonal to globalization.

[dragonwriter]

> No, we aren't making any, not for Ukraine, not for US.

GDLS in the US is making new-build M1A2 SEPv3 tanks for Poland and Australia.

[luthus001]

The global reserve currency does that to you. With countries around the world demanding and hoarding dollars for their own trading needs, what domestic industries can compete with the lucrative business of printing pieces of paper in exchange for real, imported goods? That the ultrarich monopolized the spoils of this business, does not make it bad business

[mindslight]

Citizens got left behind because of corrupt government policy that took the gains from cheap imports, centralized them into newly-created money (to make sure inflation still happened), and then dumped most of that new money into cheap loans for the financial industry, driving asset inflation and other financialization. This was the so-called "fiscal responsibility" of the past three+ decades - profligate handouts for the rich.

A sane alternative would have been for the government to spend the surplus on deliberate policy goals such as infrastructure development, preserving the industrial base, scientific research, forward looking renewable energy and less polluting processes, restoring the expectation of full time employment to 40 hours per household, etc. Distorting prices in those sectors in service of deliberate goals would have been much better than making housing unaffordable and calling it progress.

[LPisGood]

The issue with most citizens getting left behind has far less to do with globalization and far more with wealth concentration. The overall wealth in the country greatly increased, but pitiful distribution led to that situation.

[WillPostForFood]

Strongly disagree. If you had a middle class manufacturing job in the US, globalization meant you were competing globally against third world labor. Your job, your industry, left the country. This process contributes to wealth concentration, but wealth concentration isn't creating the problem, globalization is.

[LPisGood]

Globalization created the problem that manufacturing jobs were lost, but the overall wealth of the population still went up.

That means the problem is where the money is.

[no_wizard]

There’s a saying attributed (though may not actually be) to Winston Churchill

Americans will always do the right after they do everything else first

It seems accurate to our national history, in broad strokes at least